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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 coördin­a­tion 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 coördin­a­tion 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.