For B2B search, this is going to have a specific impact on your programs, and getting ready for the coming changes will require a bit of forethought into how you maximize the results of your campaigns.

In a realm like B2B, there is always the dual challenge of a diffuse customer base with ever changing needs and a limited pool of resources and time to comprehensively capture and engage this diverse host of potential customers.

While there may be some who contend the new enhanced campaigns are going to limit targeting potential, for B2Bs, there is a chance to jump the curve if they focus on the following platform changes that will benefit their marketplace.

The Impact Of Geo & Device

Among other implications, two key shifts in both focus and control for Enhanced Campaigns come down to the destinations and devices. With Enhanced Campaigns, Google will be enabling its platform to reach mobile users (sans tablet, which is bundled with desktop) in a more comprehensive manner.

In the past, Search Marketers would create duplicate campaigns for targeting and reporting on specific geos or mobile. Now, this can be accomplished within the same campaign, which could be considered a lifesaver for those with robust accounts where geo and device dimensions are a challenge. Although the number of campaigns will decrease for those wanting to target mobile users or specific geos, it is key to understand the new bidding structure.

Under the traditional way of targeting mobile users and geos (pre-EC), bids can be explicitly set, meaning a keyword in a desktop campaign can be set at a bid $5.26, and the same term can be set at $4.10 in the mobile campaign, and changes to one would not affect the other. With EC, bids will be based on multipliers and controlled within one campaign.

This presents challenges for advertisers that need to make frequent bid changes for a large number of keywords because bid changes will then impact both mobile and desktop or multiple geos that are selected based on their bid multiply settings.

How does this impact the B2B advertiser? Maybe the KPIs for mobile are different than those of desktops/tablets, or strategy and audience vary by geo.

The previous woes of managing duplicate campaigns for geos or multiple devices comes at the cost of speaking differently/directly to audiences to KPIs or interest in different locations.

Before jumping into Enhanced Campaigns, it is key to consider how best to control the message you deliver to your potential customers because moving toward general messaging for a large audience across multiple match types and geos may not be worth the newly saved manpower hours of managing duplicate campaigns.

The Google Display Network & Increased Bidding Options

You will, however, now have more bidding options with your GDN campaigns. Currently, there is a bidding hierarchy, and you can’t use multiple bids at one time in display.

Bid adjustments for display will be able to layer/stack across multiple targeting criteria types. If you set adjustments across placements, interests, and topics, and all three match for an impression, all of three adjustments can be used to determine the max CPC/CPM that can be used for this impression.

In essence, there will be three bid types to leverage in your display network:

• The Standard Default Bid – the dollar amount bids will work the same way as they do today. This bid type will be the system default when you don’t have a more specific (custom) bid set.
• Custom Bid – this bid type will allow more control in your choices in GDN. Essentially, it is a  dollar amount bid for individual placements, keywords, etc. Choosing this will help you manage more of your investment in GDN and allows more oversight than the default bids.
• Bid Adjustments – you can also control bids through bid adjustments (-90% to +900%) for individual Placements, Topics, Interests & Remarketing, Gender and Age. This allows for more granularity and control in your targets; which, for B2B, becomes very attractive to isolate and target only relevant customers.

One other interesting feature in the Google Enhanced Campaigns for GDN is the ability to target operating systems. This will allow a new dimension of targeting based on the technological profiles of both the system and the demographics associated with those operating systems.

More Capability With Call Extensions

For any B2B marketer who relies on inbound calls to generate leads and sales, there are going to be some improvements that will benefit your efforts through the call extensions in EC. Call tracking will become free on all devices within the countries where the campaign is launched. This will be a boon for desktops and tablets where there is currently a minimum $1 fee associated with the feature.

The Call Extension number will be displayed on all devices without requiring use of call tracking by advertiser, which might prove useful to help B2B campaigns where tracking has proved to be a challenging measure.

A few ways and means of leveraging Call Extensions include:

• Leveraging calls as a conversion measure: one key attribute for advertisers in B2B search will be the ability to track conversions for click- to-calls. Beyond simply being able to measure the appetite for talking to your company directly, you will also be able to specify the call length to qualify for what you deem a conversion. This added metric will be a new category of value to further optimize your overarching B2B search program. The call conversions will be reported in a new column in Campaign and Ad Group tabs, which can be monitored alongside other KPI’s.

• In addition, the call extensions aspect will now support scheduling in the campaign, using the same mechanism as other extensions. For example, if an advertiser’s call center is only open 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., they can use scheduling to only show their phone number in the ad at those times of the day. For any client where IVR or other call center efficiency programs are in place, this ability to control scheduling will enable companies to measure the impact and potentially decrease costs associated with driving calls. One idea would be to compare the click-to-call in search juxtapositioned with DTV or Direct Mail to assess efficiency. This opens up an entirely new business case budget opportunity.

• One added component to note is that call bid will be deprecated. Since Call Metrics are becoming free, even on desktops, call bid is no longer relevant and will be deprecated. Ad rank for ads with call extension will be based solely on the click bid (Max CPC).

No matter your opinion on Google Enhanced Campaigns, the fact remains they are a coming reality and represent an evolution in the AdWords platform. The changes will be rolled out in the coming months and every search marketer should take note and begin testing.

In search, the most effective approaches always include a healthy degree of testing, and this new AdWords platform is no different. As change is the only constant, being ready for the new AdWords Enhanced Campaigns is how you can jump the curve and capitalize in your B2B search program.

We could ask teachers or friends, and as you might imagine, this was a local and inefficient means to securing an exhaustive answer. We were not entirely without our systems, which in their time proved quite useful. One such system was the Dewey decimal system known well as the information retrieval of our public libraries. When it came to speed, accuracy and efficiency, this system was not without its limits.

Enter search engines. Never before have we had such rapid means to answer our questions as with a search engine. Walt Disney said once that “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” Search enables us to fulfill our curiosity and helps us to navigate to our answers.

Why Should Your Customer Find You?

So why is this important for your B2B search marketing? Its importance points to an often overlooked dimension in the way we think of search. Search means so much more to all of us than we tend to think of in our everyday marketing lives.

To be truly successful and positioned for the future, we need to think about where search fits into the human journey, both in what people want to find and what you have a right to deliver.

I find it useful at times to take a step back and question even the approach of what we are trying to do as marketers. One element in B2B marketing is that we are always pressed to find the appropriate blend of tactics to most effectively meet our objectives.

But ask yourself, how often do we stop and think about why customers should be selecting your business in their lives?

The answer is certainly a varied one, but really getting into the roots of this core foundation can lead to key discoveries which will help you make the connections with your consumers. While it’s often too difficult to simply stop what we are currently executing, one way to invest this time appropriately is when there is an emerging trend and an opportunity converges with future demand.

Viewing Market Trends To Inform Search Strategy

I am often pleasantly surprised when a growth trend can help inform search strategy for my clients. As an example, let’s look at the realm of B2B e-commerce, the often overlooked cousin of retail e-commerce.

According to a recent Oracle Whitepaper (2012 B2B E-Commerce Survey: Results and Trends, Feb 2012), business to business revenue transacted online is approximately US$300 billion.

A separate study conducted by Forrester conservatively estimates that B2B e-commerce will be a $559 billion market in the US in 2013 (Key Trends In B2B eCommerce For 2013). I think it is safe to say the B2B e-commerce is poised for a major growth spurt, and this fact alone inspires us to think about how to prepare for this in our search campaigns.

What we can safely draw from this is the reality that something is moving B2B customers into a different behavior from offline to online. It could be the link between the speed of access and ability to transact more efficiently at scale that you find online. But no matter the reason, as a B2B search marketer, the question then becomes how you prepare for this potential in your business.

One of the key trends that the Forrester report goes on to identify is that “B2C e-commerce experiences drive the B2B e-commerce experience.”

In essence, B2B buyers want to have similar experiences to what they have seen in their lives as retail purchasers. While the decision to build the B2B e-commerce experience might be out of your control in search, we can begin to examine what has worked in B2C and how we can apply this to lay the foundation in our campaigns.

For example, a program that is already ahead of this curve can be seen below. As you can see, the client is enabling a retail-like experience, but also provides three means with which to connect to the audience, including chat, click-to-call, and email.  This enables not only the query fulfillment of the end user, but also creates an internal business optimization opportunity. The client is able to identify the most effective communication channel through customer selection. This will help determine when a sale can be automated or when some human intervention is required.

Through this approach, a B2B sales organization can create a foundation to inform managing every transaction collaboratively with the customer.

If we then take this data, and build it into our search campaigns, we can extend this experience in the search journey through click-to-call ad copy or other extensions. When we do, we are assuring that our customers have a choice in how they find and engage with us.

Are You Available When & How Your Customer Wants To Find You?

In the end, the foundation is always about your Findability. Woody Allen once said that 80% of success is just showing up.

Do you feel that in your B2B search campaign, across your customer personas, you are available at least 80% of the time? One area to examine closely is in mobile, another key trend that Forrester calls out as important to B2B e-commerce success. The same Forrester study goes on to cite that products distributor W.W. Grainger reported recently that nearly 50% of its mobile customers said they “feel comfortable enough to start placing orders” on a mobile device.

Furthermore, 55% of information workers use multiple devices for work, while 58% of those information workers who work remotely at least once a month use a smartphone regularly for work. We have all witnessed the explosion in mobile, and now any search campaign that is not building mobile as a separate campaign dimension is missing tremendous opportunity to be found.

Ask yourself how easily can your customers find and engage with you, and why should they? If you have any doubts, or a plethora of explanations come to mind, then perhaps your search program should explore what your end customers need you as the search ambassador to do for them.

The reason this is so important is that whether you plan for it or not, your customers are curious and looking for answers, even at this moment. By virtue of our human curiosity, search is and will remain a highly valuable method for marketing results since it’s in and of itself a human behavior. If they seek to find, and you provide them the answer they need, the results to your B2B search program will reflect your success.

It is an amazing time to be in search marketing as our ability to leverage the channel continues to advance, and our opportunities expand to become better marketers to the modern customer.

Fine Tuning The Optics Of Search

As search marketers, shifting dimensions of complexity are a reality we are all too familiar with in the form of long sales cycles and diffuse buyer journeys. While we are acclimated to this complexity, changes in human behavior are only growing more complex, especially when we try to view it through the lens of traditional marketing frameworks.

One interesting exploration of the evolving buyer mindscape was covered by Jim Lecinski on the subject of ZMOT. In a nutshell, ZMOT is the moment when a person first begins to ruminate on a topic that will inevitably lead to a purchase.

At this moment the buyer tends to go to the Internet, predominantly a search engine, to begin to understand research the variables of the topic. It’s for this reason that being Findable, Relevant and Trustworthy at all times is so vital to your success as a marketer.

The ZMOT construct illuminates for us as marketers is that the moment of initial topical discovery is of paramount importance in informing a buying decision. This is especially true in the realm of B2B where there may be multiple ZMOT moments that will inform a B2B purchase.

The question then becomes how can your search marketing program be ready to capture at this stage of the buying journey?

Three Ways To Leverage ZMOT

Since identifying those exact moments can be a challenge given our diffuse buying population, there are a few ways that we might be able to leverage this evolution in our search lives to our advantage.

The first is to clearly understand the current paradigm and where we might want to fine tune it to better serve our interests in the current marketing ecology.

In most current search marketing programs, the approach is to map the current business needs to various marketing strategies and tactics to support the interests of the business.  This is rational, and historically has always served as the backdrop of everything that we do in our marketing.

As we consider ZMOT in our thinking, one quick way that we can spotlight opportunities is to invert this thinking from the buying journey to inform our methodology in our practice.

The principle idea is to invert the cycle and think through those initial pains and aspirations to identify the well source topics. From here, you can target your research and tests around identifying the categorical imperatives that inform a query chain.

In this pursuit, no channel will prove as valuable as search, and the keyword proxies that prove valuable will help us to isolate the ZMOT moments in our campaigns. We could stop there, and this might serve our needs near term, but what about long term improvements?

In order to keep up, we will need to create ever more advanced optics to understand the quantum movements and shifts in buyer behavior. One idea is to shift the marketing imperative and adjust your efforts to reflect the needs of your customers and demands of the marketplace.

The first way we could do this is to use our unprecedented access to data insights and create a feedback loop to engineer this to be the first phase of any marketing formulation.

This would include identifying your customer interests, intentions, and ZMOT to inform a more ubiquitous acquisition strategy based on meeting their needs at these early research periods.

This in turn will help us improve the specificity on how we tie back to the overall business and marketing performance. As we become more and more measurable, this is certainly a step in the right direction to improving marketing performance.

If we want to think of the opportunity most aggressively, we could invert the entire cycle to create a purely demand driven marketing architecture that focuses on real time performance to enable the business to flex and scale as demand changes. This type of structure would enable business to operate in a state of constant product and service development.

In a world where demands and interests are in constant flux, using a data marketing architecture like this will enable a business to keep pace with the ever evolving buying cycles since it’s the end user who is informing the product offering.

As we continue through our marketing evolution, it is becoming increasingly clear that we have only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible in our digital marketing practices. We have reached a new paradigm where the traditional sales funnels and marketing cycles are changing shape as buyers across the board have access to information and insights like never before.

For those marketers who are still thinking along the lines of the old paradigm, you could think of this as your own Zero Moment of Truth. The future will belong to those individuals and groups who are able to service the modern customer and be findable, relevant and trustworthy no matter the time or place your customers are in need.

In your search campaign, it can be challenging to keep up on all of the latest tactics and strategies. Additionally, depending on the particular area of B2B you focus on, the suggestions might be different.

With this in mind, here are three steps to taking a step back and evaluating the current engagement approaches in your B2B search campaign.

Identifying The Quick Wins

We all have an appreciation of quick wins in our programs, especially as we consider making impactful changes in the near term. While there are many possibilities of where there could be low hanging fruit for your effort specifically, there are some categories that are available to nearly every search program which require a minimal amount of time but can produce a tremendous amount of return.

In order to identify the quick wins in your B2B search program, it’s helpful to think of the when, the where and the how in your current search program.

Step 1:  Understand When They Are Looking

Navigating the construct of ‘when’ is a helpful exercise that crosses a few dimensions of consideration; the first of these being the category of when your ads are showing in a given 24 hour period. As you look at your campaigns, think about the time of day and the type of search that is taking place during those times.

If we categorize search as informational, directional and transactional, as outlined in this very useful article on user intent, one approach to consider is assuring that your content and creative messaging is targeted not only at well-defined keyword categories, but also taking into account time of day activities.

As an example, the chart below illustrates device traffic on how information is consumed by time of day. This helps us think about ways to test informational creative messaging in our search program based on time of day.

Another dimension beyond the time of day is to consider the seasonality of your buyer ecosystem. If there is a heavy fourth quarter conversion cycle in your buyer marketplace then your focus on search can be targeted to capture this demand.

In B2B, we all know how the buyer journey is often anchored to budget cycles and as such your search can be refined to capture or nurture accordingly. From an SEO perspective, aligning your content schedule to accommodate these aspects can help to not only capture prospective buyers when they are in the buying cycle, but will improve the paid efforts through improved brand presence and quality score gains.

Step 2:  Develop Approaches For Where They Are Looking

Once you have your campaign focused on improving the dimensions of time in search, you can turn your attention to an increasingly important attribute, namely where are they looking?

According to a recent Forrester study (Forrester Tech Marketing Navigator, Q1 2012) 38% of US enterprise C-suite executives already access vendor websites through a smartphone, while 30% use a tablet.

As we become increasingly mobile, the context of where we are searching becomes a critical component of how we engage potential customers and nurture them through the B2B buying cycle.

With the emergence of tablets, and the improved experience this provides, there is key opportunity to consider the experience that a B2B buyer could have on their mobile devices with your brand.

Once again, looking at the device targeting and testing messaging and overall engagement will provide not only gains in your current effort, but set the foundation for future campaigns.

Step 3:  Learn How Your Customers Engage

Now that we have evaluated search as an activity taking place across different dimensions of time, and that different people search on different devices in different places, we can now apply this to our advantage in B2B search. This will translate into immediate quick wins through cost efficiency.

Targeting ads on different devices is a way to maximize impact while being more efficient on media spend. In this recent Marin study posted by Marketing Land, not only are click through rates higher for smartphones and tablets, but the costs associated with targeting devices is far more efficient.

Equally as important in my experience is the knowledge you will acquire in your customers taste and preference on device and daypart. This is a fantastic ground for testing, and would be a good example of a top category to focus on as outlined in my post dedicated to testing.

One thing is certain in our lives as B2B search marketers. As mobile traffic continues to increase, and as you develop your learnings on what your B2B customers prefer in format and time, your ability to target and engage prospects and will improve and your ability to meet your customers’ needs will set up the future success of your search marketing campaigns.

If you are not on track, you might be asking yourself, what more can I do to gain the results I need in my search program? If your efforts have focused on what has historically worked and you have reached a plateau, it is likely due to missing the opportunity to test your way to new results.

To position your campaign ahead of the competition, the one area you cannot afford to neglect is your innovation. In our lives as marketers, all too often we can get caught up in a pattern of simply endeavoring to execute ‘best practices’.

While best practices are indeed a key pillar to your program, it will merely suffice to keep you at pace with your market.

Because of this reality, and the ever evolving nature of the digital ecosystem, creating a program of innovation is a key step to ensure growth and competitive success.

Defining Innovation: A Habit Of Creating New Ways To Produce Results

So in order to make sure that we are being efficient in our approach to innovation, a definition is warranted.  If we look in the dictionaries to define innovation we usually find a definition like this one from Merriam Webster:  ”the introduction of something new.”

That’s all well and good, but that happens in some manner every day and does not easily help us to succeed in our efforts. Innovation must be accomplished consistently and systematically and produce results, and for this reason we can simply define Innovation as a habit of creating new ways to produce results.

So what does this look like in your B2B marketing efforts?  Here are three steps you can take to set up your program to foster a habit of creating new results.

Engage Challenges & Foster Systemic Curiosity

Along the way, we have all likely executed something we can safely call innovative. But what truly sets Innovative organizations apart is consistency in continually identifying new ways of thinking about untapped opportunities.

At the core of this mindset is a continual pursuit of understanding the challenges and fulfilling our curiosities. In order to achieve a paradigm of innovation, we have to remember to document and reflect on the challenges we are facing.  The most amazing ideas can be sitting right in front of your screen, but they mostly arrive when you are trying to solve a problem.

As you think through the most pressing challenges facing your efforts, begin to create a matrix of what these challenges are and where they fit in your ecosystem.

Once you have the clear idea of your issues, you can begin to explore solutions. To help create an environment of curiosity, the key premise to succeed is to remember to ask the why and how of any challenges you are facing.

As an example, if you have reached a stage where the Quality Score of your ad campaigns just doesn’t seem to improve despite your best efforts, think about the reasons beyond the usual host of levers and buttons you can push in your program.

If there were no limits, what would you like to see happen? What does it take to get there?

This does not simply mean asking tactical questions that we all want answers to, such as what is the ROI and how are the KPI’s in our efforts.  Rather look for ideas and inspiration everywhere.

In a similar way, document your questions and ideas as you think through solutions. If you can begin to create the habit of graphing out your needs, you are well on your way to identifying new ways of approach your efforts.

Dare To Fail: Test. Test? Test!

Now that you have your challenges and questions, every good digital marketer knows what to do next:  Test your thinking.

In digital marketing, we can all count ourselves fortunate to be in an industry where measurability is at our finger tips 24/7.  At no other time in marketing history can we actually see such a comprehensive footprint of the audiences we are seeking to engage, and have access to so many types of data to help us gain accurate insight into what works, and what doesn’t.

With such power in data, we are now at liberty to explore new ways of engaging with customers and prospects, and the only thing holding us back is the will to test.

Too often, I am consulting with clients who are so focused on simply producing immediate results that they can miss huge opportunities to grow.  To use an analogy, they are simply concerned with where they are getting their dinner today vs. where they will get their dinner tomorrow.

The way to avoid this constant short term scramble is to implement a sacrosanct testing philosophy in your program.

To create an effective test program, you must dedicate a percentage of your time and budget to the sustained, ongoing exercise of testing. I am not simply referring to simple ad rotation tests or creative copy testing. Rather, to really looking for uniquely new ways of improving the entire marketing program.

As a start, a good idea is to look for a 90/10 split in core activities to testing activities. The tests you conduct can be as diverse as your imagination can take you, but the core mission should always be to solve the challenges you are facing and to discover new ways to produce results.

Don’t be despondent if a test fails. If you haven’t failed in your efforts, you are not trying hard enough.

Mapping Your Tests To The B2B Buyer Journey

Within the B2B marketing ecosystem we have the added complexity of long sales cycles and complex buyer journeys. Because of this, there are going to be many areas within which to test.

Depending on the immediate needs of your program, whether that is leads sales or awareness, one fruitful exercise is to map out a B2B customer journey and they create tests based on what you want to learn from each segment.

One example would be to take your current lead funnel, in this instance broken out by four different customer stages, and then frame tests to help identify where your key market segments .

While the immediate low hanging fruit is that the conversion stages, if you can identify where along the entire buyer journey your future clients are missing your campaign efforts you will be able to spotlight new ways and means of improving the conversion rate of your entire lead funnel.

Extrapolate, Learn, Share

Lastly, the best way to yield optimal results from your testing is to share, and share with everyone. Once you are able to identify and leverage some of your tests and experiments, you can extrapolate what drove the success (or failure) and learn from the effort.

We live in challenging economic times, and especially in B2B where resources are always scarce, applying the wisdom of the crowd is the most fruitful thing you can do to succeed. When you share your innovations, it gives everyone a chance to learn from what you achieved and where there are limited results.

This will benefit your efforts not only in providing a healthy feedback loop from your teams and stakeholders that will improve your cannel performance, but it also gets your constituents engaged in your efforts.

When people can see the way you have approached success, they too begin to think about how they can improve their efforts. The mindset becomes engrained in your stakeholder DNA, and soon you can find new ways of working together to improve your overall B2B Marketing Innovation.

In a recent Forrester study on the topic of social media in B2B, their research highlighted some of the dimensions that B2B tech buyers consider when determining a purchase plan.

When we consider the impact of the social engagement, we naturally want to have our services and products positioned across this decision cycle. But the question is, how do engage in this environment with scale?  How do we make sure we are ‘found’ when there is purchase decision being made across this ecosystem?

Leverage Social Assets To Rank In Search & Be Found

This is where the domain of Social SEO has a big part to play in making sure we are findable through leveraging social media. This will be especially valuable considering the indications from Google and Bing that these signals will be instrumental to the search algorithms moving forward.

When you consider the continuing evolution of personalized search, every B2B social campaign must be factoring in SEO strategies to not only engage your customers, but to rank in the circles and networks in order to gain the visibility of your community.

With this in mind, here are five key steps to getting your SEO aligned to your social marketing efforts.

Step 1: Understand Your Social Media Footprint

In order to truly appreciate the potential of how Social SEO can help your B2B marketing efforts, you must first know where you have social presence and where you do not.  With this in mind, conducting a social media audit is the first step to consider.

At its core, SEO is about leveraging information to be found when someone is looking to answer a question. This is also true for SEO in Social – in order to influence rankings, you have to have ‘content’ or information that is findable.

The added complexity is that you also have to have the people who are finding and engaging with your content. The content includes information from traditional brand sources, but also includes the activity of your social relationships.

In this way, your social footprint encompasses:

• Social Profile & Relationships: What is your current user engagement? What are the reach, influence, and trust across all of the brand’s active social media?
• Brand Assets: What content assets exist and are they configured to facilitate user engagement and social interaction:
  • Is the domain getting shared, voted, engaged with?
  • Are there structural issues preventing proper signal attribution such as improper redirects or canonicalization errors?
  • Is content properly attributed to the right author?

Once you are able to identify how you are positioned and involved socially, you can begin to make assessments on where there may be gaps and opportunities.

Step 2: Spotlight competitive approaches

After you know where you are standing, the next step is to understand where your core competitors are positioned and influencing discussion. This is not only important from a business intelligence perspective, but also because there are strategies that can be developed to differentiate your offerings.

This consideration is especially true in B2B marketing with the buyers’ journey being so complex, and the decision process being intrinsically tied to differentiation.

Once you identify their position, you can then begin to formulate a matrix of opportunity to position your content in the social market. Every business will have unique needs, but a matrix might examine:

• Does competitor’s social media presence contain a healthy mix of Social SEO elements?
• Is the competitor actively optimizing site content?
• Is the competitor ranking well in organic search?
• How do your social media & SEO presence compare to those of direct competitors?

Knowing what your competitors are doing enables you to make strategic decisions about where you want to focus your social SEO resources.

Step 3: Optimize Your Social Profiles

Now that you have a clear understanding of where you are and what your competitors are doing, the next step is to optimize your social profiles.

For SEO, this will mean Google+ in particular. With so much of the current search landscape being Google dominated it does not take too much imagination to consider how valuable this will be to your SEO effort.

This is especially true when you consider the direction that Google is taking in trying to assure dominance against competitors like Facebook and Bing.  When you add to this to scalability of turning the human networks into algorithmically relevant signals it’s simply a question of when this will be into mass production as a major variable in rankings.

To make sure you are prepared to fully capture Social SEO potential, make certain you optimize your profiles on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook to gain rank on the first page in Google for core brand terms.

The key is to optimize profile copy and attributes to reflect core brand and non-branded keywords. Additionally, make certain to inter-connect social profiles and websites while also optimizing social assets such as photos and videos.

Step 4: Optimize Your Relationships

Where Social SEO and social marketing have very interesting crossroads is in the optimization of relationships. Currently, social networks and the manner in which these relationships exist can vary based on the audience and the network.

Consider the difference in how the business community leverages LinkedIn compared to how consumers use Facebook. These are totally different environments with different rules and expectations, but both networks are based on relationships that are on built on dimensions of trust and credibility.

It is through understanding the variables of trust and credibility, no matter the network, that you can begin to think of your relationships as highly credible sources of relevance.  Additionally, the relationship is becoming the medium, and your brand assets can be thought of as signals that are carried over these relationships.

The trust factors of Social have made social ranking signals a key innovation to evolve the search engines’ ranking algorithms. The search engines aim is to provide searchers with relevant information no matter the dimension, and understanding the social graph allows them to deliver a highly personalized series of results.

When they can serve up the most relevant results, everyone benefits. With this in mind, build the foundation for a Social SEO program that aims to capitalize on this latest evolution on the search world, and your business will be well positioned across the entire B2B purchase cycle.

However, when it comes to creating a brilliant SEO campaign, things are not as easy as simply building a website and hoping the Search Engines smile favorably on your effort. This is due not only to the unique virtues of the almighty algorithm, sacred as it is, but also the complexity in rallying the resources needed to effectively engage the organic ecosystem.

To be successful, you must be brilliant at navigating both the internal marketplace as well as the external marketplace.

Are You Operationally Ready For Successful SEO?

When it comes to SEO, so many of us focus on the tactics and the strategies to move the dial in the engines, but rarely do we discuss what it takes to fuel those efforts. Creating a scalable and effective SEO marketing infrastructure can be challenging for even the most tenured marketer.

It’s rather easy to underestimate the amount of resources that are required to effectively move the needle in the short and long-term. This is due in large part to the number of stakeholders internal and external who are required to play a part in the SEO process.

As you no doubt know, being found in the Search Engines can be a daunting challenge. However, the effort required to be found in the SERPS often pales in comparison with the internal marketplace challenges we face.

Due to our dynamic business environments and organizational complexities, it can be a struggle to formulate an effective SEO approach when the supporting infrastructure is not aligned to serve the interests of the campaign.

The good news is that your search program can be an amazing resource to identify topics of interest to your clients and the industries that you serve. Armed with these insights, being ahead of the curve on thought leadership becomes an opportunity to differentiate you in the minds of your customers.

Put Your Fingers On The Pulse Of Your Market

One of the fascinating things about search is that you can see a cross section of what people are thinking about directly.

While the intent is not immediately decoded, when you mine the trending thoughts and patterns of what people are looking for and apply some intuitive thinking, you can begin to see a clear picture emerge of what is of importance to your prospective and existing audience.

In a way, everyone treats Google as a trusted advisor, and through understanding the volumes and trends of the inquiries made to Google, we can begin to formulate opportunities for thought leadership to add to our content strategy.

Using Search To Develop B2B Thought Leadership Content

In order to create the framework, we need to begin thinking about possibilities and using the data at our disposal to start finding the ideas that will help generate leads or sales.

B2B marketing in particular is often facing the dual challenge of resource scarcity and time constraint. Fortunately, this approach to generating insights need not impede current efforts.

On the contrary, what we can do as marketers is add a simple dimension to our marketing approach that seeks to identify testing opportunities that most likely already exist in our current data infrastructure.

With this in mind, here is a three step process you can follow to help you discover areas of opportunity to inform your thought leadership and content strategy.

Click to enlarge

1.  Make A Practice Of Looking Beyond Campaign KPI

The first step to incorporate keyword insights into your approach is to engineer process to listen to the market beyond the usual KPI’s. There are myriad data sources that can help with this, from Google Adwords and keyword tools, to comScore and Nielsen data not to mention your website analytics and onsite search data.

What you are looking for is data insights that highlight a trending topic or illustrate an opportunity area based on emerging interest.

When you couple these trending keyword opportunities with categories of interest to your business clientele, you can formulate a snapshot based on growing patterns of interest.

As an example, I want to use one of my favorite new social sites, Pinterest. By now you have surely heard about the meteoric rise of this latest of social media sites. With all of the interest around social marketing, I must say I am surprised no social agencies are positioning themselves on this high volume, high interest and low cost keyword.

There appears to be very few, if any, social marketing firms bidding on the term or performing any type of organized SEO. Even though the best practices and approaches to Pinterest are still to be established, this represents a high quality opportunity for a B2B play to differentiate as a social agency.

And just in case you are thinking that this is more of a consumer interest right now, I researched the ‘pinterest business’ and discovered that this is also a  breakout keyword opportunity.

When you begin to institutionally think about where you can capitalize on keywords that are either not yet in vogue, or about to become breakout, you will find that search provides a wealth of potential insight to inform your next big differentiating position.

2.  Evaluate Topics & Determine Market Viability

Once you have begun to think about the opportunities keyword insights can provide, you collect the concepts into a pool of potential targets grouped by theme.

These themes will start to congeal organically because you will intrinsically gravitate to the areas in your business which will provide the least path of resistance and the most amount of return. This could be in the form of a topic where you already have some clients and thought leadership and can quickly go to market with content or positioning.

It’s here that you can discover two important pieces of information. The first is where you already have content or insight that can be purposed to serve the need of the query, and second, where you will have opportunities to develop new thought leadership in the market.

Every business that follows the herd of what everyone else is doing is flirting with market loss, and it’s for this reason that the new content areas that are identified are more than just interesting.  They are your first mover opportunities to out-maneuver the competition and earn new customers.

3.  Use Paid Search To Test Messaging & Fully Develop Content

So now that you have listened for trends, and identified your key categorical opportunities, the next step is to test.

Establish what is expected from your new keyword matrix and create a score to determine market viability. This can be as simple as measuring CTR that is 50% above average, or perhaps time on site for the topic you are testing.

Once you have put the new keyword ideas through your litmus, the final step is to test it for efficacy, and this is where Paid Search is a tremendous channel. You can add it to your existing campaigns without much effort and allot a test budget and trial period to determine efficacy before making the final call to build out mindshare collateral around the new topic.

If there is resonance, and the market is showing interest you will know that you should invest in the topic more comprehensively.

When it is all said and done, thinking outside the realm of simple ‘best practices’ is the way we as marketers gain advantage over the competitive set. Search Marketing and its wealth of data surrounding keyword intelligence is a low cost and high yield environment from which to find real intelligence based off of what people are actually telling the world they are interested in discovering more about.

It’s through this crystal ball of keyword intelligence that you can prepare for the future of what your customers will want to know and position your business to be their guide through incisive thought leadership.

The weighting of social signals, particularly those from Google Plus sources, will be a major factor that can be used to serve more relevant information to its users.  After all, this is how Google will continue to serve its mission “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Why This Is So Important To Your B2B Search Program

The pervasive use of Social Networks and the value of the information inherent within a social network have made social ranking signals an imperative to search engines’ ranking algorithms. The search engines are always striving to provide more accurate and relevant search results.

This will be especially valuable to B2B SEO campaigns considering long sales cycles and complex buying behavior. The B2B lifecycle is comprised of multiple touch points across stakeholder groups and is seldom a linear funnel.

Because of this, it’s important that whatever the needs of the buyer, you are being found when a search is underway. Since this often means stretching your budgets down the long tail, it has often been a challenge to the oft under resourced B2B search campaign. However, with the evolution of social signals informing the SERP’s, there is an opportunity for increased efficiency in B2B search.

With the community at large acting as a form of human filter on what is most important, there is an opportunity to sculpt the relevance of your business to your potential customers. To see this in more detail, check out this post on the subject from Dan Cristo, the Director of SEO Innovation at Catalyst Online.

Increasing Your SERP Position In 60 Seconds

To demonstrate the impact and value of the social signals, I have some screen shots of how this is currently working. It’s important to keep in mind that this is meant to show you the impact of personalized search results on a SERP.

This will highlight the ways and means in which personalized results are influencing SEO. This has become a vital concept to note with Google’s recent announcements on privacy.

In this first screen, you will see how if I type the term “b2b” in an impersonalized SERP, I receive the usual retinue of potentially relevant assets to my query.

Now, if you are like me and tend to stay signed into one browser, you will see now if I type the term “b2b” the nature of some of those rankings has changed to include information that my search behavior and community has deemed relevant.

Specifically, you can see how an eMarketer study highlighting b2b search behavior (73% use search engines) suddenly showed up in my rankings. Naturally, this is a highly relevant bit of information in my realm consulting B2B marketers, and by itself is intriguing enough for its personalization.

However, if I engage with the content and share it, you can see what happens to the content in my SERP. Google has deemed this to be highly relevant to me and has used my ‘signal’ to serve me content I have chosen as highly relevant.

This presents B2B search marketers with a chance to gain first mover advantages in social SEO and inform a strategy for short and long term growth.

Every business has a community of partners, advocates and vendors, and each of these sources becomes an opportunity to influence ranking for searchers who are interested in the subject’s your business is engaged in professionally.

Not only is this a tremendous outlet for social sharing and social marketing, but when also included in a forward thinking SEO campaign can help drive traffic from personalized search.

Preparing For Social SEO

To begin preparing for Social SEO, the first step is to understand current goals and objectives of your business. Since differentiation and authority is crucial to set you apart from your competitors, a good place to begin is thinking about where you have a right to influence.

From here, you can begin to audit your assets and identify where you want to steward authority. Blending an SEO-informed social media presence with socially sharable SEO content will enable your campaign to focus on greater “discoverability” of owned content.

Some key low hanging fruit benefits might include:

1. Increased Referral Traffic: The likelihood of increased consumer click-throughs to branded content is increased as organic search traffic increases.
2. Access to Activated Consumers: According to GroupM Search, 58% of consumers start their purchase journey with search. Since social media is already a vital tool for in the awareness and consideration phases, this provides companies with increased social visibility in organic search with greater opportunity to educate activated buyers about the brand and its products & services.
3. Enable Competitive Advantage: Companies with multiple social channels & assets, including social media channels, blogs, videos & other social content can own greater real estate of first page organic results for key brand terms. This generates increased brand recognition for the brand and decreased space for competitors to rank for branded terms.
4. Reputation Management: the more owned content that appears in a branded search result allows the brand to manage the type of brand-related content searchers are viewing. By optimizing social media presence to align with consumer search behaviors, brands can push negative or competitive listings down in the SERPs with additional rankings via social media.

Given the early stage of Social SEO, B2B marketers should move quickly to gain the initiative. Social SEO presents a valuable opportunity for to earn authority as a key variable in SEO rankings. With 100 Million users of Google+, it’s clear that the majority of rankings will be highly personalized within 12-18 months.

As of January, there is estimated to be 34% of referral visits from Google signed in users (Oct ‘11 – Jan ‘12). This presents a window of opportunity to develop an SEO strategy that focuses on optimizing social signals to improve organic rankings.

As traditional SEO becomes more deeply informed by social ranking factors, the value in understanding the impact to your SEO results will be paramount in determining the optimal strategy to succeed in organic search in the future. As the search engines evolve the focus of their algorithm on social signals, it will become essential for any brand looking to differentiate in the competitive landscape.

By now you have laid the groundwork, and have clear learnings from your 2011 search efforts to build upon.  But … are you operationally structured for success?

The Importance Of The Business Architecture

Marketers are often moving so quickly that they sometimes neglect to make sure they are operating from the optimal framework – their business architecture. Granted, doing exactly that can seem a bit like changing the tires on a moving car, but failing to do so can negatively impact your efforts.

For example, I recently met with a lead gen B2B marketer. At first I was impressed – their strategy was cutting edge, and they were executing on the latest paid search tactics. I thought: Fantastic! These guys are on the top of their marketing game!

But after a few discussions, it became abundantly clear that the foundation for their B2B program was not engineered to allow the campaigns to scale based on calendar demands and performance success.

Unfortunately, the program had a fixed monthly budget that was based on the previous year’s budget, and was in no way tied to the market reality. As a result, campaign performance was permanently limited.

With the above in mind, what is the business architecture that is defining your marketing success?

Evaluating The Business Structure In A B2B Search Campaign

In B2B search marketing, always begin with understanding the goals of the business in order to create a strategy to execute a marketing plan. However, sometimes the search goals can be too generic to frame a comprehensive strategy, and might include broad guidance like ‘grow revenue’ or ‘generate more leads’.

While this might be enough data for tactical execution, the large majority of B2B search marketers would find it challenging to map value to such vague goals, and would come up short in the opportunity threshold that is available. To ensure that you are in the best position to succeed, you have to first look at the frame of your business structure.

To get started, it’s important to identify the business foundation that is serving as the skeleton of your marketing operation.

Every marketer begins with a budget, but when was the last time your budget formulation was fully vetted?

To make sure that the B2B Search Program is engineered to succeed, it’s a good idea to think about the business needs that are driving the marketing campaigns.

Business Needs

The most important implication to consider is the bottom line impact to the business. Is there a need for short-term revenue?  Is there a new product or service launch that requires an ROI in the short-, mid- or long-term? The need for sales is a key driver that tends to define a business foundation for many B2B companies, and it is most often associated with lead generation.

While this might seem like a business need unto itself, it is really the tactical realization of a business driver. Every company needs more sales, but the answer you need to look for is: What type of sale is going to drive the needed performance in the business? Is there a need for a many large-scale clients, or do small to mid-size clients deliver optimal profitability for the business?

No matter the business implication, understanding the areas where the business priorities are met is a key first step to assuring that your program has the right priorities in mind to frame goals and objectives. Once this is established, you can set your sights on defining the goals to meet the business need.

Business Goals

Once you identify and prioritize the bottom-line needs of the program, you can begin to frame the marketing goals that will help to you attain the results you seek. This can include a diverse set of marketing goals.

However, regardless of the composition of the marketing goal matrix, make certain that your search framework correlates with your business objectives. This is critical as it will help you make appropriate business decisions on how to structure the program.

Some examples of prioritized business goals that can inform a search campaign include the following:

Business Strategy

Once you know what your business needs are, and you have established goals to meet those needs, you can begin to frame an operational strategy to set the foundation for a comprehensive B2B search marketing program.

Determining how to approach the program is another business decision that is imperative to ensure that the framework is sound. To be sure, there are costs and benefits associated with each approach, but taking the time to determine the right value is often overlooked in the process.

Outsourcing execution offers many benefits, including overall cost savings in labor, economies of scale, and improved quality in tactical expertise. Moreover, it can be very practical given that oftentimes, the skills needed to execute are not readily available in-house.

If the business needs are going to be met, then the benefits of bringing in a vendor (outsourcing) far outweigh the costs.  Additionally, with a vendor, there is the added benefit of tying performance to a continued business relationship.

On the other hand, if your organization is able to find great talent and keep that talent trained on the latest approaches and techniques, then an in-house approach could be the means to achieving the ends.

The ability to execute effectively across channels (each with very complex tactical dimensions) is a key variable to consider in this approach. If the program is seeking modest gains as determined in the business needs identification, and prior year efforts have met those business needs, then this approach makes the most sense.

However, most often a hybrid approach is the path that a business will adopt, depending on the knowledge and expertise resident in its talent pool.  This might include leaving new sales growth initiatives to an outsourced partner, while leveraging the internal team to execute CRM efforts.

Whatever the results of your execution analysis, make sure that the marketing performance is mapped to the business goals and satisfies the business needs.  Once you weigh the costs, potential benefits, and general scalability of the team, you are ready to begin focusing on brilliant search marketing strategy and execution.