Buying Decisions – Consumer Behavior: Most people do an online research on the products and their suppliers before they choose to buy one! B2B decision makers or business buyers (including government agencies!) also spend many hours researching product and service information. These statistics indicate that in today’s business environment, a strong online presence and giving buyers easy access to your product information is not only important, it’s a necessity. A new discipline of management is evolving to make it sound more corporate-like: SEM.

Search Engine Optimization – Web Marketing: With so much hype about search marketing and getting top spots in the search engines, everyone knows the drill: use metatags, title tags, keywords, backlinks, etc. But the important thing to remember is that search engines are constantly working to make search more effective for end users. So while following proper SEO techniques matters, what is more crucial is truly understanding how buyers are searching for your product or service, and leveraging that information to ensure search engines – and ultimately buyers – find your business.

To succeed, one needs to focus on the foundation: a targeted message that addresses buyers’ needs and then employ SEO best practices. Other factors to consider: the best place to find relevant traffic might be on vertical search engines. Also, placing links on prominent industry websites and online directories are powerful ways to highlight your business in a place where targeted buyers are already searching for your products.

Online Video Ads – New Media Advertising: Business marketers are constantly seeking new strategies for engaging buyers in a more interactive way, and the newest trend toward accomplishing that goal is rich media ads like online videos. Spending on online video advertising will increase in 2007 and beyond. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, rich media companies are bringing TV quality to online advertising and offering marketers new opportunites. Video has growing appeal due to marketers’ ability to track leads, conduct real-time analysis and measure effectiveness.

Online Advertising Spending – Media Planning: As ad revenue is shifting to the internet, spending for online advertising is projected to grow exponentially. Online ad spending increases have been driven by the growing ability to measure campaigns effectively. In today’s market, the question isn’t whether to advertise online – that’s a given – but rather smart advertising. Its not about buying clicks cheaply, but rather about buying the right clicks. Make sure you’re reaching the right people. The CPM or CPC to reach targeted buyers might be higher, but so will your return on investment. The bottom line is, like so many things in life, quality is more important than quantity.

Lead Generation – New Business Generation: The proliferation of data readily available online actually creates an opportunity for marketers to generate leads. BtoB buyers rely on the “information superhighway” to do their jobs better and find the products they need. In order to get their hands on good information, buyers are willing to divulge some personal data, such as email addresses and phone numbers – but only if what they get in return is relevant and valuable. Value could be in the form of a deal or discount, but it could also be intellectual capital such as white papers on hot industry topics or case studies showing how their peers solved a common challenge. Positioning yourself as an expert source of reliable information, providing value-adds or offering special pricing online, could open a treasure chest of lead generation opportunities.

Targeted Messaging – Market Segmentation: With so many choices online for BtoB buyers, and the inundation of emails in their inboxes, ensuring the messages offered to potential buyers are highly targeted is crucial. Speak directly to your audience’s specific wants and needs, and don’t waste their time by loading them down with unwanted information. In addition, with all the technology available for managing databases, target markets can be more tightly defined, segregated, sorted, compiled and marketed to, providing a higher return. The key here is segmentation. Divide your audience into highly targeted segments so you can send information that’s focused to their particular wants and needs.

Management of Your Online Reputation – Brand Building: Remember back in schools, when you were worried about your reputation? You found out someone was spreading rumors about you, but you didn’t know who it was? It’s not so different in the business world today. With the popularity of blogs, message boards and other forms of user-generated content, perceptions about products and services – both good and bad – can spread around the globe at lightning speed, making it difficult for marketers to monitor what is being said. Because a great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build, it should be the thing businesses hold most precious.

If you can’t control what others say online, you can influence people’s opinions about your business. First “Google” your company and see what turns up in the search results. Secondly, regularly post your own opinions and responses on your website and contribute to relevant blogs and forums. Take steps to create your own blog or message board and regularly issue optimized press releases. Another avenue to consider is hiring a company that offers “brand monitoring” services, which provide intelligence about online usage and distribution. To succeed, protecting your brand and online reputation is probably the most important marketing trend for 2007.

Search Engine Bowling – Watching your competitors: Experts say that Key to SEM is to have the Best Website in the World for a category. But now-a-days there are many unethical ways used by some bigger players to harm small and popular online competitors who might one day find that the “Best can be Buried”. They use stunts like:

1. Posting a lot of spam-like links all around the web, pointing to the competitor’s site.
2. Reporting a competitor for using paid links (even if they use it themselves)
3. Filing a copyright complaint against a competitor
4. Push a competitor into the duplicate content trap by republishing their content on another site
5. Launching a Denial of Service attack against competition servers
6. Commit click-fraud against a competitor’s AdWords campaign, wasting their budget

There can also be some other unknown ways. Of course, you can also retaliate. Online marketing can be good or bad, depending on which side of the fence you’re sitting on, and for every winner, there’s also a loser. This is a real zero-sum game, but should it be! Right, Google is a superb engine that benefits millions, but it’s still just an engine. And what it turns up can have remarkably deleterious impact on hard-working people and businesses around the globe. You need to watch Google/Yahoo, your competitors, your own website, user traffic and your actual business to succeed!