Search Marketing is the strategic use of Search engines to attract visitors to your brand’s website or other online content. While it’s a common strategy in B2C marketing, Search Marketing is less commonly used in B2B marketing. According to Optify’s B2B Marketing Athlete Survey, in 2012 only 70% of B2B business owners spent any time on SEO every week and only 43% spent any time on PPC marketing.

Even in 2017, search marketing is low on the priority list for many B2B organisations. With the majority customers turning to search as their primary to research new business products and services, if you don’t have a presence on the search engine results pages you’re likely to be missing out on a lot of potential business.

This is especially true if your competitors are active in their search marketing efforts. If the competition is turning up in search engine results and you’re not, you’ll end up losing out to them a lot of the time.

Many B2B marketers are deterred by the cost of search marketing (it can get expensive for popular keywords) and also because of the technical skills that are often required. There’s no doubt that search volumes are lower in B2B areas than B2C but there is still a lot to be gained from an active search marketing campaign.

For cost-conscious B2B marketers it’s worth considering the lifetime value of each customer. Yes you may need to outlay a certain amount on customer acquisition but if you consider the lifetime value of each of your customers you’ll often find that PPC is not such a bad investment after all.

Here are a few tips that will help you get good results from your search marketing:

• Target long tail keywords and make them specific. Using long tail keywords is more cost effective, more likely to get you targeted traffic and helps ensure your ads are only being shown to the most relevant searchers.
• Clearly define your message for the search engine results pages. What do you want to tell your potential visitors and why should they visit your site or landing page? It’s not enough to get your ad to show up in searches, the wording needs to be compelling enough to encourage a visitor to click through to your site.
• Make sure you use localised meta-data for the area you’re targeting. This helps you stay specific and relevant to each geographical area.
• Build backlinks using outreach and PR. Strong backlinks will help to improve your performance in the organic search engine results pages.

Whatever the nature of your B2B organisation, search is the primary channel that your customers are using to research your products and services. This is why it’s so important to make sure you’re visible in the search engine results by building your organic rankings and making strategic use of pay per click (PPC) platforms.

The post How to Harness the Power of Search Marketing for Your Business appeared first on Next Marketing Agency.