B2B Search Marketing Best Practices
As a marketer who’s agency works with relatively small technology companies, I found some inspiration in the BtoB Search Marketing Best Practices panel this afternoon. It seems the big guys share the same challenges as the little ones, with the additional test of very large-scale programs, and organizational complexities to manage. Of course, they have the advantage of tremendous resources, and established brand recognition, but my impression is that the playing field is pretty even all things considered.
John Tapping, Director of the BtoB Technology Vertical at Google moderated a panel for this session that included Crispin Sheridan, Director of Online Marketing at SAP, Martin Laetsch, Manager of Worldwide Search at Intel, and Dema Zlotin, President of SEM agency Silicon Space.
A few of the issues highlighted by the panel included:
- internal organization
- measurement and metrics
- channel conflict
- day to day management of campaigns
- expansion into global markets
- integration with offline marketing efforts
- the balance of paid and natural search
Crispin Sheridan related SAP’s experience in adding search to their mix of traditional media. At first “we tired to treat this [search media] like traditional media with each individual business unit managing their own program”. But, before long they discovered they were competing with themselves in many areas. Three years ago, they consolidated their search marketing and now use a single agency to help with implementation and execution.
Intel is unusual because their search campaign is completely focused on brand awareness rather than direct response said Laetsh. Currently they spend between 3 and 4 percent of their total media budget on search, with about 10 percent of the total online. They also learned the same lesson on centralizing their search buy through a single responsible party in the organization. “We found there were 9 different groups bidding on the term pentium”. Now he says “all sponsored search goes through me”. Interesting. And they let this guy fly? was my first thought. My second thought was that it must be nice to be in a business that generates so much cash that it can spend it promoting Maria Carey commercials in the hopes it will ultimately result in a sale at Dell.
None of the panelists had strongly endorsed third party verticals as a source of quality traffic. Zlotin’s group had found a large disparity between the traffic reported by the smaller verticals, and the numbers reported by their own analytics tools. This fits with our own experience as well. Almost any traffic source will see some drop off, but a sudden change in the portion tracked by your in-house tools is a should be shared with your partner, and may be cause for a refund.
Several sites the panel did highlight as positive traffic sources were Industry Brains, Business.com, Vibrant Media, and IT.com. Other than these (and I assume a few others) they stick to the majors.
