SmartSearch Marketing Finds an Edge in the B2B Market

May 21, 2006
By Elizabeth Dill, For the Camera

Company searches for an edge

SmartSearch heightens work in business market

Myriad companies are trying to capitalize on the booming search-engine marketing industry with companies that sell consumer-oriented products.

SmartSearch has been doing precisely that for seven years.

Now the Boulder-based company is expanding its reach, adding a component focused on search-engine marketing for businesses that sell to other businesses, also known as the business-to-business market.

The sales potential overall is high. According to Juniper Research, Americans spent an average of 10 hours per week on the Internet last year and an equal amount of time watching television. Advertisers spent $12.5 billion for online advertising in 2005, according to the Advertising Revenue Report, a number only expected to increase in upcoming years due to consumer buying trends.

The majority of search-engine marketing firms go after the same customers, which tend to be large online retailers, travel sites and financial sites.

Even though online sales split almost evenly between the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets, the majority of search-engine marketing firms focus their efforts on the consumer side of the game, according to Chris Sherman, executive editor of SearchEngineWatch.com.

"There is a huge opportunity out there for search marketing firms to capitalize on the business-to-business market and once it takes off, it's going to be gigantic," Sherman says. "SmartSearch is establishing itself as a first mover and gaining even more credibility and respect in the industry."

SmartSearch, founded in 1999 by University of Colorado graduate Patricia Hursh, is a profitable company, according to Dale Hursh, Patricia's husband, who also is the company's vice president of sales and business development.

Sales at the 10-employee firm grew from $1.35 million in 2004 to $3.2 million last year, an increase of 138 percent, he says.

SmartSearch works with consumer-oriented clients, helping their Web sites get discovered, gain traffic, and ultimately, convert that traffic into sales. Customers include some Time Warner-related companies, American Financing and Arvada-based BabyBeat.

"It's more of a classic advertising model," Hursh says of SmartSearch.

But according to Hursh, clients specializing in business-to-business sales have generally been ignored by the search-engine marketing industry. Business-to-business clients have different online marketing needs, including complex products and longer sales cycles, than business-to-consumer clients.

"In this booming market, some companies just execute and don't strategize," he says. "Our first priority is to build our business-to-business clientele if for no other reason that it clearly distinguishes us in the marketplace. We have developed a focus to our business and intend to stand out."

In November, SmartSearch launched its "B2B" campaign, which is a search-engine marketing service designed to generate online leads for firms depending on business-to-business sales. The company's goal is to maximize brand visibility and increase Web traffic, leads and sales for clients.

SmartSearch first analyzes clients' current search-engine visibility and works with them to improve their natural search-engine rankings through keyword development, a process known as search-engine optimization. "Natural ranking" is the order in which sites appear on search engine sites due to relevancy.

Next, SmartSearch works with clients to develop extensive, cost-effective pay-per-click campaigns tailored to client needs.

"The business-to-business sale is a higher consideration sale, meaning, among other things, that the sales-cycle is longer, the price tag is higher and several people are usually involved in the buying decision," Hursh says. "Most often we are generating leads online that then need to be converted into a sale via an offline sales process, compared to taking an order online in the business-to-consumer world."

Some of SmartSearch's current "B2B" clients include Advanced Systems Group, SunStone Circuits and Alpha Software.

The competition is notable, including Boulder-based companies Ravenwood Marketing and Booyah Networks. On a national scale, other players targeting both the business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets include Boston-based iProspect, Chicago-based Performics and Illinois-based Think Partnership.

"With a ton of small firms in the industry it is often difficult for clients to know who they can trust," says SearchEngineWatch.com's Sherman. "Since SmartSearch has been around, basically since the beginning of the search-engine market industry, they have a very solid reputation."

Posted on May 21, 2006 09:23 AM

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