Karen Breen Vogel from B2BWorks was first up, but I was 10 minutes late.
Paul Slack from WebDex was next up to discuss how to target business to business traffic. When developing an internet marketing strategy you need to define goals and objectives, target audience, conversion activities, budget and resources. It is also important to measure goals, cost per lead, and cost per acquisition. And then refine to make changes for improvement and create new objectives. How will you measure success? Performance improvement goals; increase in site traffic, increase visitors, reduce site abandonment, and increase conversion rates. And also Comparative Analysis. When they sit down with a customer they figure out cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and then did a break-even analysis. CPC X (Lead Sale Radio) = CPA. Then Online marketing budget / CPA. B2B Sales Cycle: (1) Uncover the need (2) Research possible solution for business problem (3) short list of vendors (4) go to bid and (5) make a decision. SEM comes into play with numbers 2 and 3 above. Influencers and Decisions Makers both use search engines. Influencers are early in the cycle, they search specific searches, and they are more likely to respond to a call to action. You need to think about how you can make the influencers job easier. Decision Makers are a little different, they do more high level, less specific searches. They are less likely to respond to call to actions. They want to go to your site to validate your for real. He then showed a case study on a wholesale apparel company. Most apparel buying in the wholesale market are done through sales reps, but by tapping into the Web they were able to bring in new customers at a lower commission rate.
Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro explained that he had a 22 minute presentation and had to cut that in half. They did a big study with Marketing Sherpa, the results of the study can be found on a white paper at enquiro.com/research.asp. They looked at usage patterns by analyzing the data. On the eye scan they divided the page into four sections. Top Ad space in A, the froogle feeds in B the organic in C and the right side AdWords in D. 62% C, 20% B, A 14%, D 4%. They noticed that the correlation between eye scan and link clicked on were very highly related. They looked at rank, page position, keywords in title, and a ton of other factors. They noticed a disjoint between what people say and actually do when it comes to clicking on a search result link. High confidence searches VS. Low confidence searches. High confidence searches; getting top rankings is vital, pop the relevant words in a title if possible, top is better than side in sponsored, the right landing pages are critical, little qualification done on the SERP, generally capturing higher in the buying funnel. Low confidence searches; ranks are a little less important, more qualification done on the SERP, relevant titles become more important, well written descriptions become more important, generally capturing the lower buying cycle.
Jeff Ramminger from KnowledgeStrom focuses only on the tech industry and they only want to develop leads, not clicks. Industry Example - IT; wide variety of industry segments (consumer vs business, SMB vs. Enterprise, SW, HW, & Services); Variety of "Searchers" (influencers, decision makers, it vs business); complex, multi part buy cycle, vision plan, evaluate, and select. The Knowledge Storm Model: (1) IT Directory; aggregate content from thousands of vendors, structured format easy access and comparison, product and service listing as well as white papers, demos and seminars. (2) Vertical Search (3) User Registration, higher conversions and leads not clicks (3) Campaign and Advertising Programs.
Todd Sims from Business.com which is a search engine that focuses only on businesses. For example, if you do a search on RAM, business.com will only return business related results for the same search. They use a CPC model. They have a directory approach to their business, with a 100,000 categories across 26 main verticals. Then behind that is their keyword library, advertisers buys a keyword category and not keywords. They power the search on many other business oriented sites like forbes.com.
Dan Savage CEO from ThomasB2B.com, they are connected Thomas Publishing and half owned by FindWhat.com. They are an advertising network, they are not the Google of the business world. They built a highly automated ad system that lowers the cost of advertising in the B2B world. They use standard categories, with about 11,000 categories in english, it was designed to be multilingual from the start. They are going the opposite way from local search, they believe most businesses are looking to go outside local.
Martin Laestch from Intel is telling you can use search marketing to bring in new business leads. He is running campaigns in more then 22 languages, and getting tons and tons of traffic. He said it is working for us, Intel, and it is working very very well. They are going to increase their multimillion dollar budget significantly.
