I have some really exciting stuff to report back from SES Chicago. There were numerous sessions last week which were really insightful in terms of new techniques or ways of thinking about search and it’s larger implications to an online and offline strategy. One which I was particularly interested in was the Advanced B2B session on Wednesday morning. The session was hosted by Aaron Kahlow, Chairman & Founder of the Online Marketing Summit. The three main panelists were Karen Breen Vogel, President and CEO of ClearGauge, Patricia Hursh, President & Founder of SmartSearch Marketing, and Adam S. Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer at Clearsaleing. All three contributed a lot to the conversation. Below I’ve put together a punch list of what they spoke about and what they recommend for any 2009 search campaigns:

B2B SEM:
Patricia mentioned a number of key points, but I’ve boiled them down to the ones you should really pay attention to:

Buy Cycle Spectrum: During most of the buy cycle, searchers use non-branded keywords to find information. It’s only at the end of the buy cycle that they’ve made up their mind and start to use branded keywords. So make sure that you have a broad keyword strategy to find people early on in the buy cycle and carry them throughout. She showed an example of how users searching for laptops will search for something similar to this: “laptop information”, “laptop reviews”, “IBM laptops”, “IBM thinkpads” and then purchase. But if you are IBM, you want to be as early on as possible.

Qualifying Ad Copy: She then mentioned that it’s important to have qualifying ad copy for terms which are heavily competed against or which are sometimes too broad. By having qualifying ad copy, you can inform the user what to expect once they click. This is particularly true for vertical advertising. For example, for the keyword “financial auditing”, if you only do auditing for the electronics industry, include that in your ad copy so you don’t get people from other industries.

Landing Page Optimization: Especially in B2B with multiple where many companies have multiple product offerings and multiple divisions, you can’t just send people to the homepage and let them figure out where to go from there. You have to have specifically tailored landing pages where you highlight the keyword they were searching on.

Forms – how long is too long: And to wrap-up, she showed an example of a registration form with way too many fields on it. This was especially near and dear to me, as I am constantly questioning how many fields are required on a form. She said “Figure out which fields you have to have and which fields you want to have.” Only keep the fields you have to have. You have to weigh the users value of information on the other side of the form. If it’s a white paper which will change their life, they are probably willing to submit more. If it’s so they can sign up for a newsletter, they probably don’t want to give you their credit card information.

B2B SEO:
Karen spoke next about B2B SEO. Again, here are the key points:

SEO is king: Karen said that while SEM is relevant in many cases, SEO should take priority from a B2B perspective. Many people are in a research mode and are looking for viable sources of information, not necessarily looking to be “sold”.

Multiple Offers: Karen also said that in B2B, marketers need to provide several offers to users landing on the site. It’s often difficult to know exactly where they are based on a two or three keyword phrase, so just to hedge your bets make sure to offer a few different options customized to different stages in the buy cycle.

Downloads to Dollars: All marketers have to eventually report to a CFO or head of finance to justify budgets and although it’s cool to have 1,000 downloads or 2,000 pageviews, CFO’s understand dollars much better. So as marketers, we need to establish metrics which are recognized by internal constituents as 1-to-1 measurements so you can change 4,000 video views to $25,000 of revenue.

Pros and Cons: Karen presented a sheet a the end with pros and cons on it. The pros being: SEM costs are rising, SEO is a long term strategy important to all B2B companies, along with a few others. Cons are: marketers don’t control search engine algorithms, competition is increasing, and SEO takes time and technical expertise.

B2B SEO & SEM Closed Loop Measurement
Adam Goldberg presented at the end on closed loop measurement platforms. Here are some of the key takeaways:

Digital Marketers Need Ownership: Adam, as well as many of the keynotes, said that as the majority of customers eventually end up on a website to find information, complete a transaction, etc. digital marketers need to take control of the entire reporting structure. So the moment a lead lands on the website to the moment an invoice is sent out to an acquired customer, there is a feedback loop which drives more and more profitable customers into the sales pipeline.

Sales Attribution: Adam also brought up several examples of sales attribution issues across organizations. He showed several examples of multiple search ads which were shown across the sales cycle (i.e. early, mid, late). As marketers, how do you attribute which one drove the sale? This was a really interesting part of the session, as I think many of the marketers in the room had difficulty saying which one was the best method (i.e. the first one, the last one, all three). This is something that organizations need to tackle on their own and figure out what works best for them. There was no definitive method that works the best across industries, yet.

So that’s it. That’s the B2B session in a nutshell. I’ll be posting a few other entries later on this week in regards to some other great ideas and tactics I picked up as well. Stay tuned.