Beyond Email Part 3: SEM for B2B Media

For most B2B media brand sites organic search traffic, mostly Google, is responsible for as half is sometimes even more of all site traffic. Email the second most important source for total site traffic while direct links and social media are typically a very distant third and fourth source for total traffic. Now let's make sure we are not confusing quantity with quality. Email is still more vital to the brand's business model because it mainly consists of repeat visits from known and qualified readers.

This is a totally natural and expected result. Where is the first place you go when looking for answers to just about any question for whether work-related or personal? Google (or Bing for the contrarians amongst us).

While a high percentage of the organic search traffic is generated by users that do not fit into your desired qualified reader segmentations, it still plays a very important roll as the most common path to content discovery by new potential qualified readers. This is not a revelation to anyone but it justifies the investment every B2B media company makes in at least industry-standard SEO best practices.

Organic search is not the only option for generating search traffic and therefore new readers for your site's content. Paid search, or search engine marketing (SEM), accounts for 15% of all web site search traffic. Very few B2B media sites are taking advantage of SEM today.

To learn just how prevalent the use of SEM is with B2B media companies I ran an experiment by running the domain name for 50 individual B2B media brand sites from 50 different companies through SpyFu, a very useful site that exposes the SEM history for any domain to anyone (a paid subscription is required to gain detailed access to additional data such as the specific sponsored phrases).

Out of those 50 sites, only 7 have been recorded as running any SEM campaigns in the past 17 years and only 4 of those 7 media brands have run extensive campaigns. I absolutely applaud the brands that have at least experimented with SEM, but that still means that 84% of this sample have never even tried.

Your Customers Are Also Your Competition

If 15% of all web site search traffic is coming from SEM and B2B media sites are largely not involved, where is this traffic going? The answer, at least in part, is your customers. Your customers are dedicating a portion of their marketing budgets to try to capture a greater share of related search traffic via SEM.

The data shows that search users find paid search results helpful. 75% of people says search ads make it easier to find what they are looking for.

Why does this matter? Your customers' SEM investments is potentially undercutting your efforts to generate leads for campaigns they run with you. To see how this relates to your brands, check out the SEM spend for your recent customers in SpyFu.com.

To test this theory, I reviewed ten sponsored B2B content pages (mostly webcasts and podcasts) executed in the past 60 days by 10 different B2B media companies covering 10 different industries. I then Googled the content's topic as I would if it were a topic of interest to me as a B2B buyer, carefully avoiding the actual title, overly generic phrases that are searched for by a wider audience than just B2B buyers (such as "cyber security") or any company/product names.

During regular business hours, four of those 10 Google searches* yielded the sponsor as the first paid result (but never to promote the content). The remaining six searches yielded paid results at the top of the page from the sponsor's competitors and in three cases paid results from the sponsor somewhere in the first page. In only two cases did a link to any content page from the media brand hosting the sponsored content appear at all in the first page of organic search results.

*One important note on Google searches. Day and time play a big factor in some B2B-related results. Weekends and evenings return fewer, and frequently very different, sponsored results than during regular business hours.

This is admittedly a very small sample but provides a powerful warning to B2B media companies:

Your customers widely use SEM to capture your shared audience. Don't give them any reason to believe they can access the entire buyer audience independently.

B2B media sites are traditionally trusted sources for industry-specific news, information and analysis supported not by the readers but by the industry. The industry will continue to support B2B media companies as long as we continue to provide them with unparalleled timely access to their desired prospects. The only way to ensure that remains true is to continue to capture and retain the highest quality, curated qualified audience for our B2B marketing customers through every available channel.

That means not ceding any audience communication tactics to the exclusive domain of industry marketers.

Executing a B2B Media SEM Strategy

There is a legitimate reason B2B media companies have overlooked SEM: unmonitored and/or unsophisticated SEM campaigns gets very expensive, very quickly.

Develop a detailed strategy and well defined benchmarks tied to your sponsored content campaigns for success. Here are a few tips to jumpstart an SEM trial program:

1. Define the team responsible for developing a series of SEM trials. This team should be a collaboration between audience development, marketing, editorial, and IT.
2. Arm the team with the tools and certification/training required to develop a trial. This should include access to your chosen analytics platform(s), access to the brand's Google and Microsoft Ads accounts, and access to users licenses to platforms that will help them research the specific keywords and phrases for the trial. Don't overlook MS Ads -- it allows you to import your Google Ads campaigns and creative so you don't need to create the same campaign twice.
3. Select the specific evergreen site content and hub pages to use as the URL for paid search results. Select pages that will remain relevant and will help readers to quickly solve problems. Make sure to select pages that include a well defined and attributable call to action. For inspiration check out the existing paid search result pages used by your customers for related search terms.
4. Select the best keywords and phrases to bid on. Research the current bid levels for each keywords or phrases in the Google Ads Keyword Planner and the assemble a search term competitive landscape using tools like Semrush and SparkToro. Avoid overly competitive and expensive terms that will include too much unqualified traffic by putting yourself in your desired audience's shoes when searching for these topics. You want to select phrases that will self-select for buyers, not general curious audiences.
5. Create a trial budget. This includes setting daily spend limits and limiting the campaigns by geography and time of day/week to try to find your specific audience segmentation when they are working.
6. Ensure your SEM campaigns with conversions are properly tracked by your analytics tools. Measure the campaign results and refine the campaigns, but not for 30 days.
7. Refine and expand your strategy. Consider including an SEM budget for sponsored content programs.

Closing Thoughts

SEM is a vital tool that can help B2B media companies engage and expand their specific reader and customer audiences. An investment in SEM will also help you to improve your organic search result traffic by improving your search rankings specifically for keywords and phrases likely to be used by qualified readers.

If you have any questions about starting up with an SEM program or have any specific questions about best practices and metrics related to your existing email strategy, please don't hesitate to comment on this article or message me directly.

I intentionally did not show any specific examples or name the B2B media sites or sponsored content I tested for this article. If you are curious about the specific brands, webcasts/podcasts or Google search phrases I used, please contact me directly.

I'll be back with Part 4 of the Beyond Email series next week to examine the power and application of browser and app notifications for B2B media companies, which was originally intended to be Part 3.

If you missed them, check out Beyond Email Part 1: SMS and Beyond Email Part 2: LinkedIn.