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Even if search has matured incred­i­bly over the last few years, both from a tech­ni­cal point of view and as a chan­nel that gains board room level atten­tion, a lot of the basic issues remain the same. I’m not talk­ing about cross-channel click attri­bu­tion and life­time value, but cam­paign coor­di­na­tion and achiev­ing the appro­pri­ate buy-in at all lev­els of the organisation.

Ear­lier this year Ban­ner organ­ised a Search Hud­dle. This was an inti­mate ses­sion for B2B mar­keters with speak­ers from Autodesk, Avaya, and Microsoft.

While the event was rounded off by Cedric Cham­baz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Microsoft and myself, by look­ing at the lat­est devel­op­ments of search and what lies ahead, what gen­er­ated the most debate was how to get the fun­da­men­tals right; what can you do today, to make a tan­gi­ble dif­fer­ence to achieve your objectives?

Dominic Jukes, web mar­ket­ing man­ager at Autodesk shared his expe­ri­ence of man­ag­ing inter­na­tional paid search cam­paigns, and high­lighted recent cor­po­rate struc­tural changes that had helped facil­i­tate increased own­er­ship and sub­se­quent coor­di­na­tion of their search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Avaya, rep­re­sented by editor-in-chief Jerome Toulorge, used paid search in a dif­fer­ent inno­v­a­tive fash­ion. With the objec­tive of gen­er­at­ing sales through their chan­nel part­ners, together we had cre­ated a paid search reseller pro­gram that was rolled-out with selected part­ners across Europe. The chal­lenges faced where not so much about tech­nol­ogy as it was about com­mu­ni­ca­tion and education.

The event clearly high­lighted that although search can many times be per­ceived as a highly tech­nol­ogy focused mar­ket­ing chan­nel; the biggest fac­tor to suc­cess is still the peo­ple dri­ving it.

Related posts:

1. The double-edged sword of PPC click-through
2. RE: How to sell new technology
3. A more human search