“Small and midsize businesses are using search in place of newspaper and magazine advertising,” said Marissa Gluck, managing partner at Radar Research, which conducted the online survey of 867 search-engine advertisers and agencies in December and January. “We’re seeing a definite shift from print. That’s because [search is] efficient, and [advertisers] understand what they are getting for their money.”

Gluck said search’s edge is attributable to its efficiency and easy-to-track ROI. “Advertisers are really looking for efficiency and they want to mitigate risk; and search engine marketing fulfills both of those because you only pay for those [online users] who click.”

The North American search marketing industry grew overall from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion last year, exceeding SEMPO’s earlier projections of $11.5 billion.

This year, it predicts spending will reach $15.7 billion.

An overwhelming majority of dollars spent in 2007 (87.4%) was captured by paid placement, while organic SEO garnered 10.5%. Technology investment nabbed 1.4% of spending, and paid inclusion, 0.07%.

Nine of 10 advertisers (89%) said they use SEO. More than half (56%) said they expected to spend more on organic search this year compared with last year.

( source btobonline)

Business-to-business marketers have unique challenges when it comes to measuring the success of their Web site. Because it’s not as obvious as number of product sales, b-to-b marketers must look deeper into Web analytics data to derive conclusions about brand building, advertising effectiveness and prospect interest.

The first step, as with all successful optimization strategies, is to define your goals. Are you trying to drive Web site visitors to ask for a quote? Register for membership? Complete a request form? Pick up the phone? This event is the “desired action,” and you will want to measure traffic to this action and all of the components of your site that lead visitors to take this action.

The next steps are testing and optimizing. Do more visitors click through to the desired action when the link is in the top-right corner of the site or in the left-side bar? Which is more effective—text links, buttons or clickable pictures? This process is vital to the success of your Web site.

It’s also important to combine online ad data with Web analytics data to get a sense of how and why visitors are coming to your site. Pulling in information from search marketing campaigns allows b-to-b marketers to better understand what visitors searched for to find their site and what text-based ads elicited the highest click-through and conversion (action) rates. In turn, these data can help marketers optimize their sites with language that resonates with their target audiences and customize their home pages with links that are most important to their visitors.

The same is true for banner ads and e-mail. Monitoring the effectiveness of banner ads, e-mail and search campaigns to drive visitors to the desired action can help marketers more effectively allocate advertising budgets.

Finally, brand exposure and customer activity can be measured by number of page views and length of time spent on the Web site.  ( source : target media )

· Web Site re designs—Make your web site more compelling and maximize it for strong conversions, by helping prospects find quickly what they want, piquing their interest and having strong calls to action &  compelling landing pages. Industry research has shown that a very high percentage of  business web sites in numerous industries fail to achieve core objectives.

· E-mail Campaigns—With high ROI, they are the best way to keep in front of prospects as they go through a normal buying cycle.

· Internet marketing —PPC, organic SEO, banner ads…all work extremely well for most products and services.

· Blogs and web PR -Effective use blogs and press releases to enhance your “online business value” relevant to your industry (Google loves blogs ).

Source: MarketingSherpa, Inc. Search Marketing Benchmark Guide