Almost half of the ads on the leading search engines are focused on B2B clients, so why aren't you there? Here's a guide to rethinking your SEM strategy.
Manufacturing, wholesaler and industry orgs were late adopters of search advertising, but they are onboard now, and they don't want to buy into scaled-up consumer campaigns. Fact is, B2B, or verticalized, search is now the fastest-growing segment of the paid search world.
Search marketing for business-to-business clients uses the same back-end technologies that make online marketing measurable and performance based. However, pitches to B2B targets are where front-end, non-tech interfaces earn their keep.
Manufacturers, industry associations, wholesalers and engineering businesses succeeded offline with insider networking skills: They shepherded successful contract proposals and RFPs and standardized procurement and supplier sourcing. Like many knowledge- and product-intensive operations that don't work direct-to-consumer, they often shorted marketing. A McKinsey study on how American companies market online found that up to 60 percent, as late as 2006, cited a lack of in-house skills to manage online advertising.
Currently, over two-thirds of all users go to search engines first for business information, and of the $7.4 billion spent on marketing in 2005, $1.2 billion tracked back to B2B targets. B2B search marketing budgets are projected to grow over 15 percent a year. Of the ads that appear on the two leading search engines, Google and Yahoo, 38 to 50 percent are focused on B2B clients.
Some tips from the trenches for approaching this tier of search marketing:
1. Put industry experience on the SEM team
One challenge for wholesale clients is using search marketing to draw prospects to landing pages that can overwhelm with knowledge, density and content. Manufacturer and engineering sites carry a high technical or scientific threshold simply to navigate directories. Wholesaler sites that match resellers and retailers with manufacturers and suppliers have to silo their content and streamline on-site search functions, because they offer thousands of products, in hundreds of categories, accessed by thousands of keywords.
Only search marketers experienced in a B2B client's industry can translate those high-knowledge content challenges into relevant search ads, targeted keywords, high click-through rates and sites optimized for specialized searchers.
One example is the scientific client site built from product/topic pages that present dynamically generated content, a format that virtually blinds search engine spiders. Search marketers with deep knowledge of the client's industry can build site maps, linking strategies and paid inclusion feeds that will get indexed.
Then there is the matter of relevant results. Consumer-focused general search engines use algorithms and semantic programs to match searcher demands to indexed databases. Still, they fail B2B searchers on relevance over 30 percent of the time, according to Jupiter Research and Outsell, Inc.
A search ad network built with vertical expertise uses proprietary algorithms, too. But knowledgeable industry pros fix that general search blind spot by pre-filtering the index, eliminating matches to keywords that have multiple or ambiguous meanings and redirecting them to specialized industry categories. The statistics whiz term for this is "parametric search."
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