B2B Online Marketing and Personalized Search

We've been talking about personalized search for quite some time. Recently this topic is again becoming a hot topic in our industry. The past couple of weeks, Gord Hotchkiss has provided some food for thought (and great insight) on personalized search over at his Out of My Gord blog. We've been looking at how personalized search will affect individuals but we haven't really looked at how personalized search will affect users on an enterprise level. Specifically B2B marketers and how personalized search will affect their online marketing efforts.

Here's what I think personalized search will mean for B2B sites and online marketers in the online world.

B2B sites will become early adopters will utilize other forms of online promotion – focus will be spent on marketing avenues such as blogs, podcasts and widgets. While the main engines will shift towards personalized and unique search results for users, it doesn't mean that blog search engines, podcast search engines will follow suit. B2B online marketers will look to things such as blog search engines such as Sphere and the use of personalized branded widgets for users to install on their own sites, blogs or desktop.

B2B sites will offer personalized search pages on their own sites – B2B sites will follow the lead of the search engines and provide users with a personalized page on their own sites. When users come to these B2B sites, the will be able to login to their own personalized site page where their most recent articles read, demos viewed, podcasts viewed etc will appear.

B2B marketers will look to other forms of search – mobile search continues to become increasingly popular. B2B marketers will look to non-traditional search avenues to promote their sites.

B2B Marketers will be forced to create updated and relevant content based on their solution offering. While this is not a new practice, the reason the search engines are moving towards personalized search is to provide the most relevant results when a user performs a query. By creating content that is useful and relevant, if your site page is the most relevant and authoritative on a given topic, then you should be found in the personalized results in some manner. This could be an image, a hyperlink, a blog post, a news story, an audio podcast, a video clip, a video podcast etc.

Personalized search is not necessarily a bad thing for B2B marketers, it just makes them more accountable. Gone are the days of optimization tactics and manipulating links to obtain rankings. A number one ranking in Google will prove somewhat useless as there will no longer be a universal search results page. Each user will receive a somewhat unique page based on what is the most relevant (or what the engines deem most relevant based on past activity) to that user. B2B marketers will have to become more creative and realize that the consumers are more in control. The increase and shift towards consumer initiated marketing will become an integral part of the relationship of B2B marketers and their potential consumers. Personalized search just means that B2B marketers will need to listen to their clients more than ever in the past. The consumer will be driving the ship with B2B marketers acting as first mates.