As an attendee, you’ll absorb rich information from true thought-leader s– info you can bring back to the office so the whole team stays on the cutting-edge of technologies, trends, tactics, and techniques specific to your biz.

As a blogger, you’ll churn out a ton of valuable content sure to beef up your B2B publication (fresh traffic, readers, links, hooray!) and get on the radar of the conference organizers and speakers (because who doesn’t like when their genius is favorably promoted?).

And lest we forget: The bevy of after-hours networking events, opportunities to mingle with industry rockstars and soak up some juicy secrets of the trade….

So yes, congratulations. You’ve got the green light to attend cover dominate B2B conferences. And. You. Are. Stoked.

But Where Do You Begin? What Tools Do You Need?

The exact contents of any conference blogger’s arsenal will vary depending on who you are and what show you’re at. But there are some tried and true goodies every conference attendee should have on hand, or at least have access to.

Read on for a list of essential 10 tools that help ensure ultimate coverage and optimal experience.

1.  Conference Agenda + CTRL+F (Or Command+F)

First things first. Before the show kicks off, you want to know where you’ll be going, what you’ll be seeing, and who will be doing what. That means cozying up with the conference agenda for at minimum a day prior to the opening keynote. Put on a pot of coffee or open a bottle of wine and pour over the event homepage, list of speakers, and day-to-day agenda.

Get a little CTRL / Command + F action going on… find names of speakers you recognize and keywords in session titles or descriptions that may be of interest to you and your social community (“Mobile,” “Local SEO,” “B2B,” “Social,” etc). Plan your coverage schedule accordingly.

We’d actually recommend doing this well in advance for a few reasons:

• With a comfortable understanding of how the conference is laid out, you’ll feel less frazzled in when you get there.
• You can start talking about the conference before it even begins. Follow the event hashtag, tweet to see who’s also attending, get on the radar of the conference organizers and speakers.
• Publish a blog post with a schedule of the sessions you plan to cover… simple, fresh content that plugs the event and showcases your excitement and dedication.

2.  Notepad & Excel

Without a doubt must-haves for turning live-tweets into rockstar conference coverage. Scrape tweets, sanitize formatting, reorder tweets, remove junk, connect the dots, and behold! A stunning showcase of the pearls and gems shared by speakers mere moments ago.

3.  Digital Camera / Smartphone

Nothing says, “Hey, I was there!” quite like a crystal clear photo snapped by your very own hand. Keep a digital camera or smartphone nearby and don your field journalist hat. Snap pictures in the expo hall, crowded keynote ballrooms, of the speakers, of attendees, or the guy who made you coffee in the convention center lobby.

Post them to Twitter, Facebook, or save them for your blog posts. Your online community wants to feel like they’re with you, so take them along.

4.  Irfan View / Pixelmator

If you do decide to save the photos for your conference coverage blog posts, show them a little extra TLC before releasing them to the masses.

A quick run through a streamlined image editing program a la Irfan View (free, super stripped down, for PC) or Pixelmator (cheap, more features, for Mac) can turn an ordinary photo into a glamorous feast for the eyes.

Crank saturation, tweak contrast, up the brightness, and resize appropriate for your blog in a snap. Quality images from the frontline will only add authenticity and value to your coverage.

5.  Hotspot

Any conference blogger will tell you, convention center wi-fi ain’t always so good. It’s no discredit to the conference organizers – a ton of people are clamoring to hook up to the Internet, and there’s only so much bandwidth in the universe.

Pack a Hotspot or similar wi-fi device in your laptop bag and activate it when the conf signal gets weak going gets tough. Share the password with a neighbor to make a friend for life.

6.  Power Splitter

Speaking of friends for life, nothing solidifies absolute devotion and loyalty (or, at least gratitude) like giving the gift of electricity to a conference attendee in need. Power outlets are precious. Should you be the shining savoir brandishing a gadget that turns one outlet into multiple, be prepared for an instant spike in popularity.

7.  Comfortable Shoes

Some conferences have a dress code, typically business casual. Do yourself a favor – wear something presentable, but leave the spike heels and sole-destroying (get it?!) dress boots at home. We’re not suggesting scuffed Reeboks from yesteryear. Go with some conservative and comfortable (repeat, comfortable) kicks that compliment your snazzy ensemble.

Break time between sessions is sometimes as little as 15 minutes, and you want to get to your next room as early as possible to ensure a seat at the head of the class. Choose comfy kicks. Seriously.

8.  Granola Bars

Or some similar snack that suits your taste-buds. Ask any conference blogger… food can become a coveted item during these events, and many media members skip lunch to meet deadlines and publish timely posts. Chuck a couple granola bars or high-protein yummies in your bag and avoid fainting mid-PowerPoint presentation.

9.  5 Hour Energy

Whether you down it before heading out to a star-studded networking event or nurse it the next morning to stave off a hangover amp up for the day, these little babies come in handy when your fuel tank is running low.

10.  Thick Skin

Believe it or not, not all people appreciate conference coverage. If you’re live-tweeting, some followers may complain about the frequency of your updates. Some folks may totally disagree with philosophies or teachings you rebroadcast from various speakers. Some people are just hate-spewing trolls. Get over it!

Shake off the Negative Nancys and remember: You’re doing an awesome service for your company, industry, community, and the conference itself. So chin up, and go get ‘em!

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.

Your next move… LinkedIn Ads:  https://www.linkedin.com/ads/

LinkedIn Ads is an offering from the popular professional networking site that provides many targeting options and cost-effective innovative ways to reach your audience.

Campaigns can be created to target a specific message, product, general brand, promote a web conference or anything you want to make sure your audience is aware of.

Here’s a look at how you can use specific targeting options to make your LinkedIn Ads campaign work for you.

Step 1: Create Your Ad

This process is similar to other ad networks we all use to promote brands, products and offerings. Make sure the messaging in line with what you want your audience to do…buy a product, sign up for a conference, add a new service offering or just plain remember your brand. Don’t forget to include your company’s logo. Brand awareness is key and helpful.

As you can see in the image above, ads can be simple text or include an image. The headline allows for 25 characters and the body text can span two lines with a total of 75 characters.

Step 2: Determine Audience Targeting

This is where the real value of LinkedIn Ads is… very granular audience targeting! Here is a summary of the six main ways B2B marketers can target business buyers.

Geo-Targeting

Pick your continent, pick your country, pick your state, region, pick your metro. You can target your audience right down to their exact location. While this is similar to many ad networks just wait and see what else you can do…

Industry Targeting

Targets can be selected based on the industry they serve. You can reach those in agriculture, arts, construction, education, government — to list a few.

There are even more specific categories within those broad industry categories. Be mindful that you can only select up to 10 industries. If you need to reach more industries, I recommend that you create separate campaigns. This approach also allows you to offer more relevant ads.

Company Targeting

You can select your audience based on the company they work for (or have worked). Do you have a list of leads that you want to notify about your latest product offering or conference? Create a campaign and remind them they need to sign up or update their product.

Selecting companies by their size is also available so if you need to reach small business you can opt-out of companies that may be too big for your offering.

Role/Title Targeting

Only need marketing managers? Skip the C Level and go straight to the Marketing department. Know the exact job function you want to reach? Simply enter the specific job titles.

Targeting the right people has never been easier. This feature is great if, for example, you are trying to increase registrations for a conference that would be helpful to Fortune 500 Marketing teams.

Group Targeting

Are you trying to reach a certain group of people not necessarily based on their company or job function, but rather groups they are members of …yeah you can do that too. For instance, B2B marketers may want to reach members of organizations relevant to a certain industry.

One example: targeting a CPA group because your business offers software for financial auditing.

Demographic Targeting

Finally, do you only want to find women or individuals in their 30’s…you can reach them through LinkedIn’s targeting offerings.  All you have to do is opt in.

Step 3:  Optional ReTargeting

You can keep your ads running outside of the LinkedIn platform by opting in to the LinkedIn Network which allows you to follow that Marketing Manager that you are targeting if they visit any site in the Network. This option is similar to PPC search retargeting – across various content/display networks.

Target Your Business Buyer

For B2B Marketers reaching your exact audience has never been easier. Setting-up a LinkedIn Ads campaign is at your fingertips. And remember, this isn’t about driving the biggest click-thru-rate this is about reminding prospects of your business, product, or upcoming conference. This is about awareness.

If I remember anything from my advertising studies at Penn State its frequency, frequency, frequency…and LinkedIn Ads offers this in an affordable, highly-targeted format.

But where there’s people, there’s opinions. And there was something about that article’s point or perspective that didn’t sit quite right with some of your community members…

Yes – while you, the good-intentioned B2B Community Manager, were fast asleep in your bed, dreaming of sunshine and pussycats and holistic befriending in cyberspace, that benign Facebook post begat a runaway comment thread. Now, it’s spiraling out of control, a mass of aggressive debates, all pouring in the gate faster than you can mediate, or even monitor.

Your community members are at each other’s throats. What do you do?

Discussing digital crises, from prevention tactics to boots-on-the-ground management, can give some companies the willies. They don’t want to imagine living in a world where consumers have negative brand experiences and broadcast said negative experiences across the Internet.

We find most reticence to discuss the darker side of social media often comes from the B2B end of the spectrum — companies that may be a bit more buttoned up and a bit less familiar with letting their community do the talking for them.

The hard truth is it doesn’t matter how anxious the subject makes you. Social community crises and/or conflicts happen whether or not your company is comfortable addressing them. Best to prepare yourself for such an event, so when it does happen for real, you’re ready to take the helm with a cool head and calculating hand.

Tomorrow morning, should you log into your business Facebook page to find a runaway Facebook comment thread, consider this 5-point action plan and address the issue with confidence, grace, and master-ninja authority.

1.  Keep Calm

Sounds irritatingly obvious, but skip this crucial first step and good luck trying to follow the rest. No matter how nasty the comment thread has become, keep reminding yourself that no one died (unless your product, service or company actually killed someone, then… call the lawyers), and this is something you can handle.

You’re not a headless chicken, you’re a professional! And ninety percent of the time, you won’t even be dealing with a true crisis, but more of a conflict. Go ahead and toss that word “crisis” out the window when thinking about the issue, it will instantly shave a few digits off your blood pressure.

2.  Identify Intent

Scan the thread to get the general themes and tone of the conversation. Get an understanding of the main characters in the conflict – is the thread a stream of new people dropping by to share their two cents on the controversy? Or is it more a group of two, four, six community members coming back repeatedly to expand their arguments? Are things getting personal, maybe inappropriate? Or is it a healthy, albeit heated, debate?

This knowledge will come in handy while you make your next moves as the community’s Master of Ceremonies, not to mention when you debrief the upper-ups (or client, if you’re an agency doing the community management). Either way, it’s just good practice to know who’s who and what’s going on in your cyber microcosm.

3.  Monitor Diligently

The deep B2B Community Manager is the voice of her brand, but she’s just as much the eyes and the ears. That means always having a finger on the pulse of the community, in good times and bad. All serious CMs should be armed with a smartphone if possible, for tackling (among many other things) emergencies and overall active crowd control on-the-go.

Real-time alerts are essential. If you’re a registered admin of your Facebook page, you can opt to receive email notifications when people post to, comment on, or message your page. Facebook will simply send alerts right to your FB-associated email address. Simple enough.

For whatever reason, if you don’t have an email address associated with the Facebook page in question, and access to said email account isn’t the easiest, you can always leverage third-party tools. I’m a fan of Hyper Alerts. You can track by Facebook account (which, we know in this hypothetical case, would be inconvenient / impossible), or track by URL.

Yup, just enter the URL for any Facebook page under the sun and receive timely email alerts (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or as soon as possible) whenever a post or comment is made to that page. *Cough* killer competitive intelligence *nose tap* *wink* *elbow nudge* *more winks* *creepy smile*.

4.  Keep Out Of It (Until You No Longer Can)

Yes, diligent monitoring is vital, and community managers should always be ready to step in and mediate as needed. But some conversations, however controversial, are better left uninterrupted. As the page owner and as the poster of the content in question, you’re the host of the debate. You don’t have to take sides, you don’t have to participate at all.

Let the thread uncoil naturally– let your community members vent, rant, make and defend their cases. Provided no one’s getting picked on, even the most intense exchanges can create value for the community by illuminating different perspectives. If nothing else, it’s spirited engagement. That said… onto the final action point…

5. Prune Accordingly

If people do start getting nasty, kick them out. It’s your page, it’s your space. Remove comments and ban fans as you and your company see fit. Weigh all comments against your Social Community House Rules (which you should have established before the cyber-stuff hits the fan).

If someone’s breaking the rules, eliminate them – they don’t deserve the privilege of interacting in your community. Keep the thread of constructive criticism intact, and prune for troll-spew nonsense.

Post inspired by one SEL post’s truly tweet-tastic comment thread.

The research also showed that industrial professionals are still largely passive users of social media, preferring to read and watch content, versus creating and sharing content.

From a user perspective, B2B search engine marketers should take note of the following responses and percentages.

LinkedIn Usage Among Industrial Professions

• Participation on LinkedIn grew from 37 percent in 2010 to 55 percent in 2011. 86 percent of industrial professionals on LinkedIn belong to at least one group, with 38 percent belonging to four or more groups.

Work Related Activities On Facebook

• 19 percent of the content/friends on Facebook are work related with 60 percent “liking” a business within their industry and nearly 40 percent participating in work-related discussions and reading/researching content for their jobs.

• 54 percent of respondents have smartphones and 60 percent use their phones for work-related tasks such as checking e-mail.
• 29 percent of industrial professionals have already created accounts on Google+.
• While Twitter usage was up from 2010, that percentage was only 22 percent of total respondents.
• 67 percent of respondents used Google Reader and aggregated RSS feeds from blogs, news, and other sources.

• 67 percent of respondents were blocked from Facebook at work, 61 percent unable to visit Twitter, and 57 percent without access to YouTube.

This column combines recommendations found with in the survey document, with third party observations, and client experiences, to deliver key action items for B2B search engine marketers working in engineering, technical, manufacturing, and industrial sectors to consider.

1.  Industrial Marketers Want To See Thought Leadership

Because industrial marketers are more passive in their interaction with social media, the opportunity to establish a presence may be much easier than in other industry sectors.

There are several opportunities for B2B search engine marketers in this space to lead the effort.

• Video, graphics, and visualizations of complex industrial processes might perform well in blended search engine results as well as provide share-friendly assets in social media platforms.
• Blog posts published on even a weekly or bi-weekly basis (take a look at the social media frequency chart below) still have a good opportunity to be seen in the industrial marketer’s RSS reader.
• Blogs and publication contributions should also leverage the Google Authorship program in an attempt to gain enhanced brand visibility for key thought leaders in the organization.

While the first mover strategy presents risk, the benefits of easier visibility and establishing an initial footprint in the industry sector through the production of high quality content could outweigh that risk.

2.  Don’t Assume Traditional Office Hour Activity

Understanding that many B2B industrial marketers may have limited social media accessibility during the regular “9 to 5″, consider how social and search marketing strategies need to be customized as a result.

• Pay attention to Web traffic reports to confirm time of day visitors tend to land on the site.
• Test social media updates and their effectiveness during off hours and weekends.
• If PPC is part of your search marketing strategy, consider extended visibility of ad placements later in the evening and optimizing ads for mobile search.

3.  Build Easy To Consume Content

As realized in the chart above, B2B industrial marketers indicated that watching a video ranked the highest in terms of social media participation, while creating a video ranked the lowest. The point is that more passive participation in social sites is important to realize when marketing to the B2B industrial space.

To that extent, easily digestible content and well placed communication strategies need to be considered.

• Via Derek Singleton’s article on social media for manufacturers, “consider making video demonstrations of products and processes, a tour of your factory, or showcasing customer testimonials”.
• Succinct LinkedIn group participation, including link references, descriptive context, and distribution in profile updates (and possibly company-specific updates)
• Regularly published news content, highlighting industry trends and events

4.  Create Benchmarks That Tie To Real Business Value

Tying this all together, remember that customer acquisition and lead generation are the primary goals for B2B industrial marketers and have been the top two marketing goals for the past three years (source).

While the Globalspec’s social media usage survey does not provide a direct connection to lead generation success, the following metrics can be established for demonstrating effectiveness and productivity.

• Developing email marketing lists for B2B lead generation
• Link building opportunity development through the build out of quality social media networks
• Branded traffic growth, new visitor growth, and improved conversion rates across these segments

Final Thoughts

While setting a social media plan in motion should become a priority for B2B search engine marketers in these industry sectors, social media platform identification, resource allocation, and a push for aggressive but flexible benchmarks are important.

KPI measurement through traditional Web reporting tools and analytics resources provided within applicable the social platforms are important for assessing success (and failure) and making adjustments as appropriate.

The full research report, which contains recommendations and key action items for industrial marketers from GlobalSpec as well, can be downloaded from the Marketing Maven blog with limited form field requirements.

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.

Today, savvy business marketers are defining search marketing success not just in terms of pre-defined conversions… but rather, based on the value of multiple, desirable online actions.

That’s right — they are thinking beyond the white paper!

4 Questions To Help You Evaluate Search Marketing Value

I urge you to ask these four questions when considering how to evaluate your search marketing efforts:

1. What are the various actions prospects can take on your website?
2. Do these actions indicate some level of interest in your company; your products and services?
3. How might each of these actions relate to a prospect’s buying process?
4. Is there some marketing value (even if it is small) associated with each of these actions?

This is particularly important for B2B companies selling high consideration, complex products or services, and companies with long sales cycles. B2B marketers at these firms need to think in terms of engagement and relationship building — not simply registrations forms.

Consider All Website Actions

In addition to the obvious tasks (i.e. conversions) such as form completions,  evaluate all the other actions website visitors can take. For example, most business marketers would agree that there is definite value in getting a prospect to:

• View a product page
• Use an app such as a Dealer Finder, or a Product Selection Tool, or a calculator
• Access a client case study
• Read an analyst review related to your company
• Take a product tour
• Watch a demo

All of these actions are indeed valuable. All of these actions indicate interest. All of these actions involve some level of engagement.

et, most are not considered “conversions”, do not require a registration form (hopefully), and are not tracked nor evaluated in the vast majority of B2B search marketing programs.

Website Actions Provide Clues About The Buying Cycle

The website engagement process also provides clues as to where a prospect may be in the buying cycle.

For example:

• Early-buying-cycle prospects are in education mode. They are looking for general market information and basic industry knowledge. Assets that provide a good overview, or discuss broad market trends can be a great way to engage these visitors.
• Mid-cycle prospects who are already familiar with the industry, are typically evaluating options and vendors. At this stage, website information and downloadable assets like comparison papers or analyst evaluations are very helpful.
• Late-stage prospects are ready to select a vendor/partner and purchase. At this point, they are looking for specific information on packages and pricing, terms and conditions, and service contracts.

Business marketers, make sure your website offers information that is helpful and meaningful to prospects at all phases of the buying cycle. It is important to get your brand in front of potential customers early and often as they research, compare, select and purchase products and services.

Estimating Conversion Value

In terms of online registration forms and other conversions, typically B2B marketers start with the lifetime value of a customer and then work backward through the lead funnel to determine an estimated value.

For instance, the value of a white paper registration is probably based on:

• percentage of registrants who provide valid contact information
• percentage of these valid contacts who are target leads
• percentage of these target leads that are worthy of follow-up by your sales team
• then, high quality sales leads
• and finally… customers

The lead management and sales process described above can take months for many B2B firms.

Regardless of the time required, B2B search marketing leads can deliver big results.

Point in case: I work with a software firm that recently obtained a new customer. The initial sale was worth nearly half a million dollars. The origin of the contact was a $3.50 PPC click that resulted in a white paper download.

Estimating The Value Of Other Desirable Actions

Tracking and evaluating search-generated conversions can be difficult enough, but what about all those other online actions? We’ve determined that they do represent engagement and interest, and we know that these actions help prospects move through the buying process.

So, why wouldn’t you want to estimate the value? After all, getting prospects to take these steps is a direct result of your search marketing and website investment. But what’s the best way to estimate the value of all these possible website actions?

Here’s a crazy idea: Guess!

That’s right… estimate a small, but reasonable value associated with each web site action. Base it on other marketing efforts, if possible. Talk with your marketing team. Start with a very conservative value that everyone can agree on.

Ask yourself: what is it worth to your company to:

• Get your brand in front of a prospect (ppc ad impressions or organic listing)
• Have someone click through to your home page (or landing page)
• Go beyond this page and surf around your website
• Visit a product/services page
• View a case study
• View an online demo
• Interact with your Find a Dealer application

…you get the idea!

Perhaps a search engine impression is only worth a few cents. A search visitor is worth a few dollars. Getting the visitor to move beyond the landing page is worth even more; and viewing a product demo or accessing a case study – provides even more value yet.

I encourage you to assign small, estimated values to all of these actions – defined as goals or events via your analytics platform.

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

We used to encourage online marketers to “think beyond the click”. Now it’s – “think beyond the conversion”.

B2B marketers should take these steps to estimate your true search marketing ROI:

• Make sure your website offers plenty of engagement options.
• Ensure that you are offering information and assets that aid all types of prospects across the entire buying cycle.
• Verify that you can isolate paid and organic search traffic in your analytics data.
• Track all desirable website actions using goals and events.
• Assign a small but reasonable estimated value to each action.
• Include the estimated value of all of these actions in your search marketing ROI calculation.

Tracking online conversions is important… but there’s more to the search marketing value equation.

One solution is to attend a few industry conferences, conventions, trade shows, seminars, or networking events throughout the year and churn out rockstar blog coverage on behalf of your company.

Covering events in your B2B industry by way of live-tweets and blog posts is a surefire way to amplify your content and link building strategies, not to mention help establish your brand as an active, engaged, beloved contributor to your B2B community.

The influx of fresh, unique, valuable content, showcased on Twitter and your company blog will attract new eyeballs from interested readers / potential subscribers, customers, and evangelists. More social shares of content from your blog mean more positive social signals sent to the search engines, and impressive coverage can definitely garner inbound links from a variety of relevant sites.

Another great perk of covering industry event is you don’t have to be the thought-leader; you just have to be quick enough, deep enough, and caffeinated enough to rebroadcast the gems, jewels, and pearls of wisdom thought-leaders in your industry share straight from the podium.

Live bloggers in the front row @SMX

Live Tweeting

Live-tweeting is a terrific means to get the goods to the masses in real-time. Instant coverage is welcomed and appreciated by folks who can’t attend, and shows the community you’re a trusted and reliable source to follow during that (and future) events.

The crown jewels of conference coverage, however, are the comprehensive recaps you post to your B2B blog. Real(ish)-time blogging might seem more daunting than live-tweeting, but it doesn’t have to be– and you can provide both real-time tweet coverage to the community as well as follow up (same day) write-ups that serve as stand-alone, powerful resources and live on your company blog.

Follow this 7-step guide to turning live-tweet coverage into rockstar conference blog coverage and you’ll be well on your way. It provides maximum harmony between quality and efficiency so you can deliver amazing work without burning yourself out.

1.  Scrape Tweets

Step 1 is really ”Live-tweet the heck out of a conference session,” but let’s assume you already did that.

• Go to your Twitter.com profile and with your cursor, highlight every tweet from that session.

Naturally, the initial bits of coverage will be towards the bottom of the page and the closing tweets will be towards the top. So…

• Scroll back as far as you have to to reach the first tweet of the session.
• Once you have every shred of live-tweet coverage highlighted, copy onto clipboard.

2.  Sanitize Formatting

• Paste into Notepad on a Windows machine, TextEdit on a Mac.
• Notepad automatically strips formatting from where you copied the content. If you’re working in TextEdit, click “Format” -> “Make Plain Text”.

This will remove things like your avatar, hyperlinks, and other messy nonessentials from the web.

3.  Remove The Junk

Sanitizing format won’t strip all messy nonessentials, such as timestamps, your Twitter handle, or hashtags. So…

• Copy your text from the notepad into a Word document and get ready to prune some more.
• Take a look at what’s there in abundance and should be hacked out.
• Do mass “find” (CTRL / Command F) for what you want to hack and “replace” with a single space bar. This will, in effect, remove those nonessentials.

Remember, we’re going for efficiency here. When you approach step 4 and start to turning the tweets into a blog post, you’ll want as little filler present as possible. Sanitizing format and removing the junk will leave you with the Grade A Top Choice meat of the tweets.

4.  Reverse The Timeline

Now you have a long list of tweets from your session, fat trimmed and ready for business. Only one problem: They’re in reverse-chronological order! To quickly flip the timeline of your tweets, head to Excel.

• Paste your tweets in Column B.
• In Column A, fill in the numbers, 1, 2, 3, etc – one number per cell.
• Select your three numbered cells and drag the corner down to the cell next to your last tweet. The numbers are what we will use to reverse the tweets.
• Highlight Column A, click the “Sort” button.

Et voilà! Column A should house a stream of numbers, largest to smallest, and Column B should house a stream of your tweets, from the start to the finish of the session. Next…

• Copy Column B, paste back in your notepad to remove formatting carried over from Excel.

5.  Dump In Backend Of Blog

• Paste tweets from notepad in the WYSIWYG of your blog.
• Make a fresh pot of coffee or pop open a can of Mountain Dew. Now onto the fun part.

6.  Connect The Dots

Just as infants don’t come out of the womb ready to discuss Einstein’s theory of relativity, live-tweets aren’t ready to thrive in the blogosphere without a little TLC.

Connect the dots between each individual tweet– each individual thought, tactic, tip, and takeaway– until you’re left with cohesive, sensical content. Make it flow. Add transitions, clarification, (perhaps even mild humor!) where appropriate. If you’re a strong live-tweeter and the speaker delivered a strong presentation, there really shouldn’t be too much work to do in this step.

7.  Polish Formatting

Make it look like a blog post.

• Add images, whether stock or photos from the show
• Link to speakers’ names or companies, if so desired
• Break up dense paragraphs with bullet points or numbered lists (like this one!)
• Add sub-headers to indicate new topics
• Bold important tips

Use blockquotes to hammer home significant takeaways, or as another way to spice up the aesthetic of the post.

Ah yes, there is one final step to this guide:

8.  Have Fun!

B2B Internet marketers need new content to enforce and build upon keyword strategies, acquire links, and attract attention in social media.

In my experience, effective SEO-centric content creation requires planning on both the long and short term impact, and a strict attention to detail. With a myriad of responsibilities on the B2B marketer’s plate, it certainly is not uncommon for details to be missed and corners to get cut.

Some of the SEO best practices I see get missed:

• Optimization of key page elements (HTML titles, meta descriptions, etc)
• Cross-links between relevant content assets
• Share-friendly icons and functionality
• Social media and traditional link building outreach

With a little assistance from Help a Reporter Out, here are four examples of B2B content marketing initiatives, that stand out because of their focus and adherence to SEO strategy as well.

Social Media Combined With SEO In Neolane’s Campaign Management Infographic

Digital marketing software vendor Neolane recently launched an infographic poking fun at a significant challenge campaign management providers face, the ability to overcome the onslaught of spam in online marketing communications. Running through the social media marketing initiative, here are examples of key SEO best practices merged into the process.

• Application of keyword strategy in traditional SEO page elements (HTML titles, Meta descriptions, body copy, etc).
• Social media buttons for popular social networking websites at the top and bottom of the post.
• A specifically “share-friendly” HTML page with social media buttons for similar social media websites (including Pinterest and StumbleUpon) that points users right to the infographic content. This page also contains keyword-specific cross-links to solutions pages and back to the company blog.

• Embed functionality for the infographic on the main blog post and a more share-friendly page.

Delivering Link Communication Through Social Media Assets In The Healthcare Space

Kaysha Kalkofen, co-founder of the St. Louis-based digital marketing agency tSunela, talked to me about their client, Christian Hospital. The hospital engaged tSunela for search engine optimization (SEO) and social media outreach.

In addition to core SEO best practices for keyword optimization and social media asset visibility, Christian Hospital actively maintains a communication to their network through popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and now Google+.

This communications includes announcements of hospital events, workshops and information, as well as content they feel their audience will find of value and hopefully share as well.

It appears to be working thus far. Here is an example of Ragan’s Healthcare Communication News picking up and publicly thanking the organization (linking to their Google+ account) for a valuable piece of content shared.

In addition to examples like this one, Christian Hospital has also experienced an increase in website activity since the beginning of their SEO efforts and a more immediate way to respond to patient care concerns through social media monitoring.

Content Marketing & SEO In Enterprise Technology Event Coverage

The Wikibon / SiliconANGLE team produce live video coverage of popular enterprise technology events like EMCWorld, Strata Conference, and Hadoop. The end result is a series of video, blog post, and research assets from contributing members of their team.

• Blog posts contain cross-links back to video and event coverage.
• Video assets contain social media sharing elements and embed functionality
• Assets written and produced are consolidated in one curated content page (below), which can more easily be distributed for outreach to bloggers and site owners.
• The screenshot below represents a nice win from a link building perspective: a link on a highly visible page within an HP product site.

Vocus: Maximizing The Value Of A Content Marketing Asset

The team at Vocus did their part to wrap tactical SEO initiatives around the launch of their Expert Guide to Online Content Marketing white paper. While the PDF itself is not a great example of a content format optimized for search, careful application of SEO strategy was applied to help ensure organic search engine visibility.

• First, Vocus created an SEO friendly landing page which incorporated clear conversion action, social media sharing functionality, a summary of key information for the user.
• The team published blog posts in 3 phases to make it more digestible, and created associated video to support the guide, and linking to the full PDF in each posting. Assets were distributed through applicable social media assets as well.

From Stacey Acevero and Scott Benson of Vocus, with respect to using direct PDF links in blog posts, “we’re tracking each click on the PDF link as an ‘event’ in Google Analytics and also counting this as a traditional “PDF download” – much like a lead generation lead, but without the user information. It was a basis for measuring the posts success, not a true lead.”

From the social media perspective, “not only are people sharing our post socially, but this piece is directly responsible for as many as 79 new Twitter followers and 101 Facebook Likes – each of these “goals” has [a defined] value to our company.”

Final Thoughts

The above examples are meant to provide tactical tie-ins between SEO best practices and specific B2B content marketing initiatives. This is not an evaluation of any of these organizations’ overall B2B SEO strategy. While these examples provide B2B marketers with a short list of factors in the content creation process that help enhance SEO, make sure to adapt those used as reference to your own organizations needs and priorities.

Good luck in your content creation and marketing efforts and make sure that SEO remains a key focal point in all of these endeavors as well.

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.

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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.