SmartSearch Advises B2B Marketers to Think Beyond the Click

Many aspects of a business’s operations need to be focused on its customers, and much of SES San Jose has been focused on that basic fact.

Not all businesses have the same clients, though, so one session concentrated exclusively on business-to-business tactics.

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can't be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

Karen Breen Vogel, the president and CEO of ClearGauge (“a specialized online marketing services and analytics consultancy”), led the way. In her case for prioritizing SEO in B2B, she listed some of the “pros” as higher click-thru rates on organic, credibility and branding from organic, and a cost that is mostly upfront and not ongoing.

“Cons” were limited to the immediacy of results and competition, and so Breen Vogel recommended going vertical; unconverted clicks on broad engines are more likely to be from the wrong people, while unconverted clicks on vertical engines are at least more likely to be from the right people.

Paul Slack, a co-founder and CEO of Webdex (an Internet marketing consulting firm), later suggested that business target specific or high-level searches.

The former may be as many as four words long, and searchers should respond to a call to action; the latter are likely closer to two or three words. Either way, Slack urged listeners to remember that their sites exist for the customer.

The session ended soon after Patricia Hursh advised people to “think beyond the click.” Hursh, who serves as the president of SmartSearch Marketing, also suggested that businesses constantly test and improve their landing pages.

Posted on August 23, 2007 10:31 AM

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