2. Leverage relationship marketing
Any organizational development guru -- especially one tasked with changing corporate culture or re-organizing a business for new goals -- will tell you, "Never change everything at once." The new paradigm (yes, I hate that cliché too) is always built on the old.
Manufacturing, wholesale and professional clients have deep histories with trade shows, short-list procurement chains, trade journal print advertising and industry partnerships, plus reliance on product/supplier guides, many of which are outdated as soon as they leave the press.
Searchable online supplier databases have changed all that. However, these old school networking channels are still part of trusted B2B networks. Digital marketers need to connect the SEM dots to pre-existing trade relationships:
- Propose event-based search advertising, tied to exhibits, presentations or sponsorship of industry trade shows. Then use web analytics to prove lead generation, rather than counting up business cards collected on the convention floor.
- Test display ads in an industry supplier directory, online and print. Code or tag ads to demonstrate the trackability of both on and offline channels in generating leads or prospects.
- Better, dig out trusted trade publishers who not only moved product guides and legacy knowledge online, but went beyond directory e-publishing to fully searchable database sites. Thomas Publishing, for example, moved its legacy product guides online over a dozen years ago, offering instant access to more than 65,000 product categories through ThomasNet.
Customer relationship marketing may sound like last year's buzz, but sales and customer support to manufacturing, wholesale and professional clients is critical. In the B2B and wholesale world, it costs ten times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, because of longer decision-making timelines and conversion steps compared to consumer buying patterns. Also, lifetime-value metrics weigh more heavily in the smaller universe of B2B marketers than in the world of consumer retail. But our profession's bias for technology solutions -- multi-channel customer service, live-chat, cyber-support tools -- is not a selling point on the B2B playing field. So provide dedicated SEM staff pros to provide customized assistance to B2B clients, help to refine search ad messaging, develop keywords that place well on organic search rankings and get in front of pre-qualified leads.
3. Branding B2B clients
Search marketing developed in step with technologies as a direct marketing tool, geared to capture online sales, from click to shopping cart landing page. Over 80 percent of all online ad dollars are estimated to come from direct response marketers.
Yet B2B marketers' branding needs are wired into their decision-maker conversion paths, where immediate online purchase is rarely the goal and business decisions travel through more than two or three degrees of separation. Branding a specific wholesaler of off-price designer apparel to resale buyers, or establishing the brand of an electronic components manufacturer for to-spec, on-time deliverables can be worth more than a million impressions or clicks. In fact, search branding is now trendy.
Among companies with more than 500 employees who deploy search marketing, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization found that 77 percent of those surveyed increased their search ad spending to enhance brand awareness, while 70 percent used SEM to generate leads, but less than half set SEM goals to sell products, services or content.
Develop search marketing branding campaigns for B2B clients. Hawk quality and brand impact of sites selected for (and excluded from) search and context ad networks by monitoring the publisher/affiliate sites that will fight your B2B client's ads. And use brand lift metrics, bundled into most web analytics packages, to test your results.
4. Long-neck conversion funnels
Some of the biggest points of departure between consumer-retail and business-to-business SEM are the conversion path, ROAS (return on ad spend) and even how you define conversions.
Let's shift gears to email marketing, where a carefully crafted and retargeted campaign for a B2B client seldom goes to the decision-maker or purchase authority. So a reasonable conversion goal for B2B emailings could be the number of referrals or "recommend-this-pages" your email technology sniffed out from the first recipient to another address with the same domain name.