B-to-B search the next generation: Marketers layer branding on top of efforts to fill the sales funnel

David Ward

This article looks at the role of search strategies in B-to-B marketing and explains how the future will be a continuing battle to get on the first page of search results.

Despite all the changes that have gripped the marketing industry in the past decade, there has been one constant for most B-to-B brands — a reliance on search engine marketing (SEM), including pay-per-click programs like Google AdWords, and search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the number of visitors to a website. "The reality is that search is a core component of research, discovery, and evaluation for any B-to-B product," says Ken Baker, founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based digital agency Metric Theory.

More than 90 percent of brand marketers and agency professionals worldwide, in both B-to-B and B-to-C, used...

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