Search Marketing Sage

In our recent webinar, Get More Leads by Identifying and Targeting Your Buyer Personas, Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute talked about the 5 Rings of Insight and how they can help you understand what motivates your prospective customers to make a buying decision. Janet Driscoll Miller also discussed how you can use social media and the insights you’ve gathered to better target your advertising.

This infographic takes you through 5 steps towards helping you understand your buyer personas, creating the right content to fit each step in the buying process, and mappaing your advertising efforts to the appropriate marketing channels.

I’m in Vegas! So far I haven’t had any Hangover, the movie experiences, but there is still time…. Just kidding! I’m attending Search Marketing Expo: Social Media Marketing. I just checked in, got some coffee, and now am ready to get started.

This session is called “Decoding Facebook Ads: Strategies & Tactics for the New Ad Environment” and I thought this was a perfect follow up to Michelle’s Facebook advertising blog post from last week. Greg Finn is moderating this session with 5 (!!) speakers. I have a feeling each presentation is going to be jam packed with information because they have less time to speak. The speakers are Addie Conner - SocialCode, Zvika Goldstein - Kenshoo, Nate Luman – Zappos, Merry Morud – aimClear, and Christina Park – TriggIt.

Something to mull over as you undoubtedly check in with friends and family (or brands perhaps) on myriad social platforms this weekend: social media marketing is growing up. As we’ve written in recent blog posts (here and here and here), we’ve been seeing incredible success with LinkedIn advertising across the board with our B2B clients. And with all of Facebook’s new offerings for companies (especially Facebook Exchange and its new conversion measurement tool), talks of retargeting coming to Twitter,  and Pinterest offering new tools for businesses it’s apparent that this is a steady trend on social networking platforms across the interwebs.

Business to Business (B2B) search marketing can be tricky.  It’s hard to dispute the value of getting into the consideration set of potential undecided customers that search on non-branded keyword phrases, but visibility isn’t necessarily always going to translate into a lead that a sales force can follow up on and turn into a sale, especially if your product or service has a big price tag or requires a major commitment.

The art of generating B2B leads online doesn’t get the credit that it deserves, especially on those big-ticket, high commitment, complicated sales.  Typically these leads have very high costs per acquisition and very low conversion rates.  The pool of ideal customers for these kind of products is relatively small, especially compared to consumer products or services.

Keyword Demographics?

When it comes to search marketing, both natural and paid, keyword selection can be tricky for B2B niches.  What your ideal customer demographic may search for isn’t always abundantly clear.  Say your company offers services to battery manufacturers to do testing on the batteries they make.  The keyword “battery testing” has approximately 320 searches per month according to Google.  But “battery testing” can mean different things to different people.  For consumers it’s mostly an informational search query about how to test your car’s battery.  A smaller niche of both consumers and businesses might be interested in figuring out how to test laptop computer batteries. And, an even smaller niche might be battery manufacturers (your ideal customers).  Battery testing has “horizontal relevance” in that it means different things to different people.

Keywords mean different things to different people

The hard part about horizontal relevance is that search engines like Google favor what the majority are looking for in top ten natural search results, in other words if it’s mostly an informational search query and mostly searched by consumers the results will likely favor those type of pages.

The topic of “buyer personas” is pretty hot right now – but it’s anything but “trendy.” There’s a good reason why buyer personas has become such a talked-about topic in the marketing industry. By developing personas of your customers, you’ll understand what drives their purchase decisions for your products and services – and how you can better market to them.