More and more B2B companies are using search engine marketing.
Search engine marketing, once exclusive to online retailers, plays an important and growing role in today's B2B marketing landscape.
All types of search engine marketing (pay-per-click and organic search) continue to increase their share of total marketing spend. Public pay-per-click costs more than $5 billion per year.
Yes, the decision cycle is longer and more players are involved in a B2B buying decision. But these decisions are ultimately a ranking process that can seriously impact search marketing.
A study by eye-tracking specialist Enquiro found that 93.2 percent of B2B buyers begin purchasing decisions with online research. Just over ninety-five percent of studies indicate that search engines will be used to develop shortlists of suppliers and ultimately get invited to compete for business
As purchasing budgets increase, respondents are turning their starting point to manufacturer websites and industry portals. Despite this, 86.9 percent of respondents said they would add search engine research. Typically, search engine research occurs at least 1 to 2 months before a purchasing decision.
Step 1: Search for basic knowledge
In a Web 2.0 world, marketers must plan for and solve complex challenges. But all company listings start with the same question: Will your company and its products or services be found quickly and easily by potential customers on a major search engine?
Search marketing covers everything you publish on your website (coding, presentation and structure), as well as the many on-page and off-site factors that impact on-page search results.
For those new to search, here's a quote: Marketing affects visitor traffic through two search marketing methods - natural/organic search results and pay-per-click advertising.
Research confirms that organic search results attract more clicks and give more credibility. As web users, we assign the importance of a web page to an organic search result in much the same way that we have the credibility of a web page to be one of the times a story in a newspaper.
However, the same research also shows that the best results may come from the combined benefits of organic and pay-per-click. Why? Because we have enough training because consumers collect brand displays.
Solid, reliable organic search results provide the basis for strategic decisions on all on-page optimization, which landing pages to build, and when applying for pay-per-click. Organic results require more time and ongoing investment. In return, you will gain a position on Google and other major engines that will support every aspect of your brand and its online and offline marketing. Consider these statistics:
Organic results attract more than seventy percent of all clicks.
Position is now key, with over sixty percent of users clicking on the first three links.
Most users decide which items to click on after a few seconds of scanning the web page.
Less than half of users search to the second page, and almost no one turns to the third page.
Elliance believes that organic search results are important enough to post live on our search results pages so that our clients can monitor the performance of their keywords instantly.
Research shows that combining the top five organic search results with targeted pay-per-click placement yields a powerful combination of credibility and brand influence.
Step 2: Optimize
First, analyze to what extent the current website is search engine optimized, at the level of planning, content and links. The first step may be to redesign one or more of these levels, this can be done as part of a total redesign and reboot, or done under the hood without changing the architecture and design of the site. Another option is to create a separate ad campaign or product specific micropage that is associated with a specific page.
Here’s a must-do to improve organic search results:
Make your site 'spiderable' so it can be indexed by search engines.
Buy more relevant and engaging content.
Make sure the CMS system you use is search engine friendly.
Create more keyword-rich links from within your website.
Use deep strategic hooks to link search engine results straight through to relevant web content.
Keep in mind that organic results take several months to appear. SEO campaigns are planned and implemented for a period of 3 to 6 months and must be maintained monthly. Set your horizons so well in advance of the launch of new technologies, services or products in the future.
Step Three: Search Marketing Objectives
All search engine marketing evaluation and decision situations. For new product launches, or inventory overstock, targeted PPC offers timeliness and precision that can't be matched. Likewise, if you're trying to fend off new competitors and maintain brand advantage, pairing organic search results with pay-per-click might make the most sense.
It sounds simple, but know what you want to accomplish.
Black Box: An Elliance Case Study.
Elliance worked closely with Black Box, the world's largest supplier of electronic components, to solve a fundamental search marketing challenge. Black Box customers rely on years of phone contact and sales support. Growing revenue and profits hinge on moving up the customer base in part from telephone to online sales.
Black Box turned to Elliance, knowing it couldn't achieve its business goal of ranking No. 1 without first improving its rankings in the major search engines.
solution
Elliance Information Architects did a thorough analysis and redesign of the website. Our SEO team optimized every aspect of Black Box's e-commerce functionality, paying special attention to the company's 3,000-page online directory. The SEO team went a step further and optimized the 100-keyword SEO campaign, which greatly improved Black Box’s ranking.
result
Online sales doubled in a year.
Average order size increased by 33%.
92% of product catalogs are found on the first page of search engines.
Step 4: Follow-up
As we said earlier, search engine marketing reflects complex trends in the Web 2.0 world. Websites are becoming smarter, more focused on specific user needs and preferences, and increasingly permissioned.
Marketing in B2C drives push and pull users through permission levels, with targeted exposure to products, services and relevant knowledge in the B2B environment, and how to best drive high quality lead sales.
Whether it's an organic search or a pay-per-click campaign, it's important to consider all the next steps for a post.
Click to send targeted landing page optimized keyword and/or PPC ads.
Explicitly and implicitly collect prospect data to analyze and score leads, bringing your hottest prospects to your sales force more quickly.
Monitors that lead to building relationships over a period of time will gain sales.
By tracking leads through your revenue pipeline so you can measure the impact of revenue per click, optimized keywords and PPC campaigns.
Step 5: Arrive at the web page
A great way to outperform your competitors is to combine organic searches with pay-per-click ads that link to very specific landing pages. In fact, doing less is more likely to be counterproductive. If there is one common complaint that web users experience, it would be that pay-per-click advertising fails to deliver, dumping visitors to a web page or worse, some irrelevant virtual outpost.
A good landing page improves PPC ROI in multiple ways. Search engines factor in the relevancy of a landing page, which means high-quality landing pages get higher rankings (and more clicks). Secondly, relevant and optimized landing pages increase conversion rates and generate more actionable leads.
According to Forrester Research, only a quarter of B2B search ads provide visitors with keyword-specific landing pages. Why so few? Simply, it takes effort to create and maintain different landing pages and run on metrics to achieve optimal results.
Step Six: Credibility
Think of each optimized page as another potential "entry" into your website. A strong and optimized knowledge base (white papers, shared best practices, awards and press releases) attracts prospects and proposes working relationships and ultimately sales.
Elliance, for example, encourages its advanced manufacturing clients to optimize web pages, call for industry or employee recognition, and easily build credibility.
Step Seven: Social Media
Now more than ever, credibility rises or falls with good word of mouth. More forward-thinking companies have embraced the idea of social media press rooms, full-featured company information portals that leverage the latest social news media content. Various social media news templates have begun to emerge to help you collect all of the dynamic, bi-directional information and rhetoric about your business into one centralized location. This method incorporates the features of popular social networking sites, and RSS, for easy management and huge online presence.
RSS feeds, tagged website pages and contact details are all “word of mouth” and influential search results. Need a low-investment way to get started? Asking for a link in the resources section of a relevant industry website is a great way to get targeted traffic.
Step 8: Geolocation
Another way to increase ROI in any search engine marketing effort is to look at geo-targeting your own company, products, services and stories. In other words, think beyond who is searching to get to the question, what they are searching for, and how that might impact persuasion.
At first glance, you might identify your target market in narrow geographic terms. These targets and work, for example, with a geo-targeted pay-per-click campaign on Google that will only deliver your metal refinishing ads to potential customers within a certain radius. But what if you purchase new technology or machinery? Suddenly, you have the opportunity to think about how best to optimize your web pages to discuss new capabilities to a national or even international audience.
Step 9: Conversion Analysis Search engine marketing also requires better integration between switching marketing and sales. Analytics can help you cull the hottest prospects, the 25% of conversions that are sales-ready. Simple data can provide information, including guidance on what sources create.
Demographic and behavioral data pose a bigger challenge: Each response form reduces conversion rates. Equally important, you may not know whether the person should hold any decision-making authority. The science and art of permission marketing involves knowing how much to ask, and when in the relationship. Page path research information can also yield decisions based on the path that will take users along to land on a specific page.
Step 10: Guidance and cultivation
Any search engine marketing effort will generate a lot of qualified, but no leads. Again, this is a situation where mutual coordination between sales and marketing is key. Sales forces often respond to short-term incentives. This requires a patient and disciplined approach to marketing, feed and lead roles as they progress through their purchase process. In a Web 2.0 world, professionals in all markets, including B2B, are learning how to understand their customers' needs and leverage communications to build the company's position as a true strategic partner.
The ROI that comes with this kind of patience is not only improved sales, but market adjustments and higher success rates. Research shows that levels of marketing that lead customers to ultimately buy more, require fewer discounts, and demonstrate shorter sales cycles.