B2B Search Marketing Best Practices

Forrester paper by Charlene Li

[eurotrash]

I am still trying to find a link to this paper on the web; it may be that you have to pay for it. I have a copy of the pdf and if I find a link I will edit this post.

This new paper from Charlene Li at Forrester totally focusing on B2B was released this week confirms that search engines were the preferred starting point to research products and services in the buying process. Only 8% said that they could not find what they were looking for; 27% said they researched online and purchased offline; 37% researched and purchased online and 28% were still researching.

Business buyers favored Google as their favorite search engine, then Yahoo, AllTheWeb and MSN respectively. They prefer organic results as opposed to sponsored results with Google 77% clicked first on organic and 23% clicked first on sponsored.

As far as B2B specific search engines were concerned “ThomasNet’s industrial directory sets the gold standard when it comes to industrial search in North America”.

Hope someone finds these figures interesting. Feel free to sticky me if you need more details.