What will 2009 be remembered for in the world of B2B marketing?

From our point of view, it was the year that B2B went beyond business as usual. What do we mean? Maybe this is best illustrated by a brief track back through the Base One Beyond blog and flagging up the most read posts. After all, we can think what we like but the acid test is what attracts the most readers. If the people don't get it, it's not working.

One of 2009's most used words was 'social media' and it dawned on many B2B marketers in 2009 that this was something to take notice of. This then spawned the term 'Buyersphere', which we have been quoting ever since we first blogged about it in March.

The following month saw a great example of how social media makes people tell the truth. Or rather how it exposes people when they don't, with the story of Damian McBride and his smear emails.

But the realisation of how B2B marketers needed to change what they were doing - and change how they were thinking - came to the fore during the summer. Our take on these developments was summarised by an interesting chance encounter with a traditional magazine editor (one of a dying breed in 2009), and by the fascinating debate over who exactly should be talking for your brand out there in the Brave New World of social media.

Whose job is it anyway? Your PR dept? Your marketing guys? Your CEO? How about - just possibly - it might be everyone's job. One of the realisations of 200 was that, as marketers, our job is perhaps not so much to do it as to enable it.

But there was also a wonderful feeling of goodwill around in 2009 - which is odd considering the economic climate. The awareness that peer-to-peer information sharing was increasing - the fact that buyers were talking to buyers - convinced many a gnarly old marketer that we could no longer talk at our customers. It was all about sharing and, well, being nice. Etiquette was big news in 2009 as it became clear that brands needed to give something of value if they were to receive the valuable attention of their target audience. A popular metaphor was that we were all invited to the world's biggest cocktail party - and we had to behave accordingly.  

But where was the proof that all of this was working? As proponents of the 'new way of working' we were keen to flag up a good success story when we saw it, and May showed us why it was more important than ever to listen to customers!

The following months, the discussions continued, with pieces on the problems with data capture, the true meaning of viral marketing and how to spot spammers. (I've also learned not to include the word 'spammer' in a blog post - search engines don't like it...)

As if to prove that going beyond business as usual was not limited to the business of social media, we then introduced a little culture into proceedings with B2Beat poetry - an anthology of inspiring verse from our very own poet laureate, Noel Ponthieux.  This obviously struck a chord with marketers around the world as the modest print run that we produced quickly sold out.

We chose scandal for our next topic, with the outrageous story of how Pepsi endorsed casual sexism in its social media marketing. This was followed by Jamie-Lee Wallace's excellent lesson in selectivity, before we then segued effortlessly into a comparison of Star Trek and B2B marketing. Trust me, the link is highly logical.

So in summary, it has been a year to remember for B2B marketing, and one for which we were proud to provide a commentary here on the Base One Beyond blog.

As an aside, it was also the year when someone pointed out that the words 'gold' and 'blog' are mirror images of each other. This makes 'blog gold' at the same time a palindrome, an excuse for a logo (see below) and a great name for the award we give to our best blogs.



And for 2009, I can think of no one who has boldly gone further than Ms Ponthieux with her Star Trek piece.

Thank you all for reading - see you next year.

There’s been a lot of talk about social media recently. It’s certainly a hot topic, but we can’t help thinking that it’s really just a symptom of something bigger. Social media tools - from the ostensibly trivial Facebook and Twitter to the weightier LinkedIn - are getting all the headlines, but we shouldn’t let this vogue distract us from what is really going on. What is really happening is that we, as marketers, are losing control of how our brands appear on the web.

But it’s not about web technology, it’s about buyer behaviour on the web. The truth is that buyers get more information online from other buyers than they have ever done. OK, this has been enabled by technology, but what we have to deal with is the fact that there is a place out there where marketers are no longer in control. We call it the Buyersphere, and it consists of every point of contact online between the buyer and the brand. Every place where a prospective buyer picks up information about a brand - whether via a formal network like LinkedIn, or a serendipitous search. It is the sum total of millions of buyers collecting and sharing information online. It is the total universe of online content that influences buyer behaviour (it doesn’t just influence brand preference because what buyers read might also inspire them to inspire others and so on in the now-classic viral distribution pattern).

The Buyersphere had to be defined because it is more than influencer marketing, it is more than online reputation management, and it is a mind-shift away from conventional brand management.
 
As marketers, we have to be aware of it. It’s there, we have to deal with it. And the brands that thrive in the Buyersphere are the ones that recognize how to harness this buyer behaviour. After all, these days we’re not building the brands, they are.

Base One hosted their first event on the 10 September. It was part of our Beyond series, titled Beyond Search. We invited a load of clients, key contacts and prospects along for a 9am-1pm session. I like to think it was a huge success (as I was the organiser). The thing that really struck me was the relevance to our Beyond thinking - and how perhaps these types of events/conferences/workshops, whatever we like to label them, are going to become one of the best ways to inspire the word of mouth promotion of services in the future.

Is this one of the rivers that my colleague David Thomas is referring to in his Word of Mouth blog post? Getting people together who fill similar roles within different companies is a sure fire way to inspire debate and simply get people talking.

Watch this space for the video take of our Beyond Search event - for all of you who missed out on the day...

The use of video and rich content across the web is now ubiquitous. Just look at BBC Olympics coverage: I watched most of it online - often live - rather than on the telly (not during working hours of course), and could access highlights for any event, at any time. It was great. I now expect this functionality on websites.

That's a high profile example, but this trend is coming to B2B too. For instance: highlights of b2b events can and should be taped and streamed online. I don't want to read a boring long, text based case study, I want to watch customers talking enthusiastically about the company I'm considering. I don't want to download a technical PDF of how to do something, I want to watch someone showing me. I want to interact.

It's all far more engaging for prospects and customers, and brings far more proof to what you say.

And now there's another reason to develop this content, as highlighted at the Beyond Search Event at the Tate Gallery this week: with Universal Search, rich content will now be indexed and appear in search results alongside traditional entries. These entries standout against others and mean users are far more likely to click on them to visit your site.

The barrier is that this content takes more thought, determination and time to produce. And will cost more also, though the increased return should balance this.

Because of this though, I think it represents a real opportunity for those prepared to embrace this: while others find reasons why not to do it, it gives those who are determined a chance to move ahead of the pack.

When a new client comes to Base One wanting to increase their position in search engine results, there are two options:

pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

vs.

search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO means optimising a client's website so that search engines can bring it to the top of their organic results page when potential customers type in relevant queries. These results are known as organic results because the engines find them naturally - there is no money exchanged between sites and engines (stay tuned for PPC below!).

The Base One SEO assessment typically includes analysing a client site for visitors' usability, reviewing the types of links the client site holds, altering the site's infrastructure to make it more search engine-friendly, and other top secret techniques.

Pay-Per Click on the other hand, is just that - clients paying for every click their site receives. You probably recognize the neat little 95-character boxes from these advertisers, which turn up on the right side of the search results; these are called paid results. 

When trying to reach top placement in paid results, there are two key components. First is the "bid" and second is the client site's quality (engines do not give away exact %'s on which factor is more important). A client bids on keywords relevant to their website's products, competing against other sites bidding on the same keyword; whoever has the higher bid and better quality site is placed at the top of the page. Base One works hard to build a strategic, well-coordinated PPC campaign so all relevant keywords are covered within each client's budget. 

Each method, PPC and SEO, has its drawbacks. In PPC, if you bid high enough, a brand-new or poorly constructed site can be placed at the top of the PPC results, but this will mean high costs and will be expensive to maintain. SEO is a slower beast, needing time to be register in search engines as a worthy and relevant piece of content that deserves to be at the top of the results pages. But in the end, it's virtually free.

Plus, users are more likely to refer to the organic results on a page, so clients have a greater chance of being clicked on by ranking higher in organic results. SEO improvements can also improve a PPC campaign's quality score so that clients don't have to bid as high; instead they can rely on their site's quality score to put them at the top of the paid results page.

Ultimately, both tactics deserve space in a client's search plan. To immediately increase traffic a PPC campaign can be a great catalyst, during which time implementing SEO tactics can improve the organic listings of a client's site. Eventually, depending on the competitiveness of the industry, PPC can form less of the equation.

You have no idea how many times I get asked this, and the different ways I have tried to explain what it is, and why it is so important. In fact, in some cases I've just given up. My mum, for example - I just let her believe I work for Google, and leave it at that.

But I'm kind of worried people think SEO is just some buzzword, like "Web 2.0", which by the way in my opinion sounds like a mysterious disease, like colic or IBS. You can just imagine your doctor saying "I'm sorry Sir, you have Web 2.0".

Back to the point: SEO is NOT a buzzword, it's not something you possibly should do to be keeping up with the Joneses. No, no, no sir! If you are serious about your online presence SEO isn't something you should consider - it's something you should most definitely do.

Ok, before you think I have totally lost my marbles and I get lost in a tangent, let me start with the basics, defining SEO:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it describes how you adapt and moderate a website specifically so that it is indexed and ranks highly within a search engine's organic (free) listings. See below for where the organic listings are.

To optimise (modify) your website to get traffic through the search engines (mostly Google as they own over 80% of the UK search engine market share) you need to know a lot about how the search engines work, and more importantly how the search engines' algorithm (the mathematical equation) determines which web page is more important than another. Now I'm not going to go into details on these techniques here, as that's a totally different tangent.

But WHY should you do SEO?

In essence, by ranking highly in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for keywords that are relevant to your business, you will get relevant and targeted traffic. Optimising your website for search engines is the simplest and most powerful way to reach an audience that is actively looking for your product or service. Now this is a really important part, yes they are already LOOKING for your product or service by searching through the search engines for keywords that describes YOUR business. How's that for already doing half the sales job!

Some stats

• 80% of Web users visit a search engine every day
  
• Search is responsible for 49% of online purchases
• In B2B, 93.2% of customers use the internet to research a purchase or service

Now, why you need to rank Highly!!

Just being listed in the search engines is NOT enough. If you are position 56 on Google for a chosen keyword you are not likely to get any traffic. Why? If you think about it, when you use the search engines yourself, how often do you go past the first page of Google when you have done a search? Exactly! You are probably more likely to change your search query/keyword before you venture to that horrible "next page" button. Who has time for that, right? Here are some stats on exactly that:

• 93% of users won't go past the first page of a search
• Less than 1% goes beyond the 2nd page of a search
• The top 3 positions in the organic results receive 80% of the clicks

Here's a diagram from a company called Enquiro visualising the click distribution of the organic search engine listings: