As a B2B advertiser, the Yahoo!-Microsoft transition should be on your horizon as something fairly disruptive and as a good opportunity to direct some attention to your web properties.
The upcoming changes will affect both your site’s organic rank (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEM), so you’ll need to have a pretty sound strategy about dealing with all the shifts you’ll notice.
If you had Yahoo! ads running, moving those into the Microsoft adCenter will take some additional work re-writing them to the new character count and adherence to new editorial rules. A bigger impact will be directed straight at your advertising budget: minimum bids on Yahoo! are 1 cent, while on Microsoft’s adCenter, the minimum is 5 cents.
Tactical Advice
Do at least these few basic things, if you have to choose…
- Start using the Bing webmaster tools, in addition to the Google webmaster tools. Compare & contrast the recommendations.
- Expand your keyword lists & re-work ad content (singular and plural count as different keywords in adCenter; adCenter title is 25 characters, ad description is 70 characters).
- Check your regional targeting – learn about the differences between how Yahoo deals with regions/countries.
- Brainstorm ways to take advantage of real-time reporting available to you in the adCenter – you may be able to run some pretty keyed-in campaigns because you can see results as they happen, whereas Google still does not offer this.
- Check Yahoo and Bing ranking in the next few months – figure out if you’ll compensate for low organic position with paid search and be fluid about your approach.
- Experiment: If nothing else, schedule and plan to give your team time to experiment. As this transition proceeds, you will likely need to test and re-test until you find the sweet spot in targeting, creative, and offering.
- Keep an eye out for blog posts on how other advertisers prepare and what they test. It may or may not be applicable to your case, but it may give you a fresh perspective on something to try.
Think Differently
The challenge in B2B paid search is that your buyers do not have the typical transactional mentality of a retail customers. You may need to do some lateral thinking to adjust what works best in paid search for retail to the B2B world – my two cents here is to think about smaller steps & paths to purchase through which you can funnel your audience.
For example, you may want to experiment with ads for:
- whitepapers that are of greatest value (check your analytics reports and offer the most downloaded materials)
- your webinars – recorded or live events
- your online communities (grow these communities by encouraging participation)
- etc.
Mindset of Search
The reason why your audience uses Google over Bing/Yahoo! is often overlooked. You may wish to spend some time characterizing your prospects, including where most of them enter your site and what they search for – on your site and in search engines. Learn their mindset and figure out the best ways to key into what they need, either by changing your site or by ramping up your paid search.
Resources:
Yahoo blog: http://www.ysmblog.com/
Yahoo transition center: http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US
Editorial Guidelines: http://advertising.yahoo.com/transition/en_US/editorial_guidelines
Search Alliance: http://www.searchalliance.com/home
And some good posts on the transition so far:
http://searchengineland.com/whats-new-with%C2%A0bing-yahoo-search-alliance-46721
http://www.avalancheinternetmarketing.com/msn-yahoo-ppc-partnership/
How Are You Preparing?
Would love to hear how you are preparing. Please share your best practices and advice with the rest of the community!
About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is amarketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.
Image Credit: Microsoft Advertising - Microsoft and Yahoo! to Implement Search Alliance
