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With a long his­tory in B2B mar­ket­ing, we’ve devel­oped a thor­ough under­stand­ing of how to approach this sec­tor in most mar­ket­ing dis­ci­plines. And paid search is no dif­fer­ent. A cou­ple of weeks back we flew over to Oslo to share some of our insights at the largest search mar­ket­ing con­fer­ence in the Nordics. Below are the slides from our pre­sen­ta­tion. Enjoy.

Search Mar­ket­ing for Busi­ness to Business

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard of or even tried out Google’s lat­est search inno­va­tion — Google Instant. The new fea­ture lever­ages Google’s deep search insights and data crunch­ing abil­i­ties to try pre­dict what users are search­ing for and serve results even before they’ve fin­ished writ­ing. As users are typ­ing their query Google is con­stantly refresh­ing the web­site with pre­dicted results.

While it has just been rolled out in the UK and US to users logged into Google this week, and so empir­i­cal data is scarce, there are at least two early indi­ca­tions to how this will impact search mar­ket­ing:

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It’s speak­ing sea­son at the Ban­ner search team, and over the next cou­ple of months we’ll be speak­ing at con­fer­ences in Lon­don, Stock­holm and Oslo.

First out is SEM Kon­fer­ansen in Oslo (14–16 Sep­tem­ber). Here we’ll run a cou­ple of ses­sions with a main one-hour event ded­i­cated to share our insights on B2B search marketing.

Fol­low­ing this we’ll con­tinue our Nordic jour­ney and ven­ture across the bor­der to Stock­holm and the world-renowned SMX (28–29 Sep­tem­ber). With no-less than three speak­ing ses­sions penned in it’ll be a busy cou­ple of days.  We’ll be dig­ging into the Google qual­ity score and how to inte­grate search and dis­play adver­tis­ing.

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Google has announced that it is chang­ing its ad poli­cies to allow adver­tis­ers to use third party trade­marks in their ad copies, even with­out approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­po­nent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­ni­cate the brands they sell or support.

The pol­icy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­se­quence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­i­tive trade­mark key­word bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

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Search is some­times referred to as the “data­base of intent”. The rea­son is sim­ple – never before have prospects so clearly told adver­tis­ers what they want before they arrive at the site. The trick is to max­imise this opportunity.

The con­cept of deep-linking isn’t spe­cific to search. It applies to all online mar­ket­ing activ­ity, such as dis­play, email and social. The dif­fer­ence how­ever, is that the search phrase is an addi­tional data point that should be used to seg­ment and effec­tively fun­nel the user towards desired action.

Con­sider the site struc­ture below for a moment:

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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.

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With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.

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