PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

One of the fine folks from Avenue A/Razorfish dropped this bon mot in a recent presentation to a client we share, and it got me thinking that a disconnect still exists between many BtoB companies and how much they should be devoting to search. As a client put it to her own eMarketing team, “We still get people saying they want to do a Web project or a microsite and that they have a $100,000 budget. Well, they don’t have a $100,000 budget, because I know they haven’t thought for a second about the ratio of what it will cost versus what it will cost to promote. I’m sorry, but ‘If you build it, they will click’ does not work as a promotional strategy.”She is so right, and has turned the headset of an entire department around in short order. Marketing Profs has a very good piece this week on just this topic. The highlights:

* In BtoB, it’s not about immediate sales, but about consideration and getting to the final consideration set. Many influencers need many types of content, so it should be generated and tagged in a way that search engines can find it. In fact, a client of ours mentioned this week that in a recent sale to a pharma, they encountered nearly 100 influencers in a dozen departments, a formidable number of those with veto power.

* Don’t just post great content, use Web analytics to evaluate levels of stickiness (length and depth of visit, time on specific pages, change in volume of return visitors, etc.).

* Every word on a BtoB site has to sing, and be compelling and relevant to the audience. Sounds like a pat recommendation, but go visit any ten BtoB sites, and nine of them bear copy that reads like it was written by a program called the FeatureBenefiterator: bland platitudes that bear no resemblance to the fact that BtoB environments are complex, anxiety-ridden places where nothing is seamless or revolutionary.

* Consider the search terms that a prospect will use at each bend in the research and qualification road. A white paper used to help predict implementation challenges should be tagged differently than one used for a high-level overview of the technology for a business decision-maker, even if they are describing exactly the same solution. The same rule goes for content aimed at different department or different roles in the process: technical decision-maker, economic buyer, broker or analyst, and so on.

* Google is still king/queen, but be aware of and optimize for vertical search engines your audience may use frequently when Google is too wide a net.

Thanks to the author of the Marketing Profs piece for clarifying some of these issues. Our everyday experience bears it out in spades.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Interactive, Search, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.