Digital Training Academy: Croatia Classroom

BUSINESS TO BUSINESS SEARCH?

Search is the perfect advertising tool for B2B brands. Within a click from almost any office computer a customer can be on your website and moving forward in their customer journey. It's the way the customer actively seeks you out that I really like about Search marketing. It's not just the right customer, but it's at the very moment of their greatest interest in your service. That's uniquely powerful. Remember many search engines will let you start advertising at a very low price so you can easily see what works and what doesn't. You'll also discover how you can buy customers at different process depending on what combination of words you select so look out for the cheaper words that may still give you the volume of leads you're looking for. (Hint: find some smart search engine marketers to give you a hand).

HOW DO YOU GET THE MOST SALES, FASTEST?

Start with a plan and then build a process. If your plan is to sell 100 units of product X then be clear about whether that's an objective for your own site or a retail partners. Follow the customer's journey through step by step and look for ways to improve conversion. Use your web analytics to see where customers drop off, and try lots of different approaches on each of the poor performing pages until you start to see the real uplift. The golden rule is to make it easy to buy and that often means streamlining overly complicated web pages. To bring your customers here in the first place, any part of the media mix might work effectively for you - from pay per click search and SEO, to emailing existing customers, to PR communications. There's a huge range of tools available, but they'll only work if you convert the customer effectively within your site.

WHICH FORMAT GETS THE BEST SALES?

That's probably one of the trickiest questions to answer because it depends on so many things. The most immediate to launch and instantly accountable formats will be search and email, but for a search campaign to work well your customers have to be out looking for you – that will be true some of the time but not all of the time. Reaching out through graphical advertising to boost brand awareness , image or purchase intent, is a well-understood process in marketing and it is just the same online. But pay particular attention to your media plan: the web is not one channel but millions of niche channels all connected together. Think about the niches that matter most to you and really focus on them. But whichever channel you try, use your web analytics to track what works and what doesn't; only by listening to your customer's behaviour will you be able to answer the format question accurately for your own brand. One final thought: why not use the analytics to try out several channels as tests to see where the results really come from?

AFFILIATE NETWORKS?

The key thing is to make sure that they're considered for the strategy. They might not be right for every brand, but they're a powerful element of online marketing and need to be considered. As part of the process assume that you'll have to spend some energy on managing those affiliates and looking for ways they can work harder for you. The network businesses may take some of the work off your shoulders, but a smart client will stay close to their affiliates to look for ways to boost sales.

What do you think about affiliate networks like "Zanox" or "Affili"?

1. In product placement and product sales, which banner format and banner creative is the most profitable (generates the most sales)?

2. Which Internet channel (banner, article, direct mail...) is best for direct product sales?

Best, Tajana

Question:

How do you see the future of B2B search engine? Do you have any surveys' results concerning B2B search engine users and advertisers' expectation?

Thanks in advance for your answers.