It’s great to get customers, but it’s even better to get business customers. Mike McDonald of WebProNews took in a morning SES 2005 session on Business To Business Tactics.

Those business customers out there offer a lot of benefit for a site: higher value orders, more frequent orders, and if treated well, a source of referrals for your business. The Business To Business Tactics session in San Jose attempted to address that market.

Paul Slack, CEO of WebDex, discussed the sales cycle. He lists five steps for that:

1. Uncover need -- Always on the client's side.
2. Then they look for possible solutions (check trade publications, do queries, etc.)
3. Create a short list of vendors
4. Go to bid
5. Make a decision

The target, Slack says, should be the potential customer who is between steps two and three. Search engine marketing needs to focus on them.

Slack sees two types of players in a business that use search engines, and use them differently. The influencer starts working early in the process. "Influencers are the ideal opportunity for you to generate a sales opportunity," says Slack.

Influencers search problematically. They will use longer keyphrases, which helps you with organic listings since it’s easier to get ranked well for them.

Focus on how you make their job easier. They aren't the decision makers; give them things to take to their boss.

Those decision makers become the second player in the process. While the influencer seeks information, the decision maker seeks validation. They don’t want to make a decision that hurts them long-term.

To that end, establish what keywords and landing pages will emphasize your credibility. Purchase terms in PPC that will result in SERPS with other well-known competitors - especially if you aren’t a top result among the major players or big names.

"Websites dont exist for their own sake, but to fulfil a specific purpose and to satisfy a specific consumer need,” Slack said.

Karen Breen Vogel, CEO of ClearGauge, said: "The important thing to do is focus on the entire buying cycle. The Internet is a buyer medium, not a seller medium."

The goal is to build a relationship, and not be heavily focused on the immediate sale. In targeting those relationships through major search engines and vertical search portals, you should be measuring the degree to which the relationship has been established.

Keyword buys should then focus on the business buying cycle and on roles, like the previously mentioned influencer and decision maker. Build messages and offers tailored to those roles.

Landing pages should offer options; don’t make assumptions about the visitor or limit their options when they arrive. Give them chances to perform tasks like registering for information or downloads, both measurable activities. Track every step in the sales cycle and be sure to show ROI for those steps.

Vogel emphasizes that ad buyers should utilize negative keywords, to keep ads from being displayed when searches including certain words have been performed and would normally display the ad.

In your site, offer problem pages as well as solution pages. Sometimes, B2B users search for a problem instead of a solution when searching online. Too much of a solution focus with SEM could miss those customers.

B2B customers are educating themselves on trends, identifying solutions, and locating providers. SEM can help a site show it is part of a trend toward helping a given group of B2B customers.

Paul, this is a great post. It is amazing that the B2B space has not gotten as much attention with respect to tuning search engines for B2B [re]search and for cultivating the relationships with the influencers. Right now a lot of PPC done by B2B companies seems to be branding centric than lead or revenue generation centric.

We (the Spotster crew - Spotster [www.spotster.net] is a business and industry search engine) believe that the basic element lacking is delivering a search engine that is catered to a particular industry that a B2B professional is dedicated to. Traditional search engines do a lousy job and one has to cull through hundred of search results to get to what you really need.

Once you delivery a focused search engine for a particular industry, the B2B professional is productive and focused and sticks to it for all his/her research. Thats what is really need in a platform for making it viable for B2B lead/revenue generation.

If this can be achieved (and we are on this mission here at Spotster), then there is a multi-billion dollar B2B advertising industry that can benefit while serving the business users with exactly what he needs.

Vaibhav Domkundwar
Chief Spotster
www.spotster.net