Last month PPC Summit presented the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco, bringing together the top minds in B2B Search Marketing from Microsoft, Google, Business.com, Marketo.com, YouSendit, Enquiro, SEO-PR, TopRankMarketing.com and HubSpot during a full day of search marketing and social media strategy sharing sessions. Nearly 150 marketers attended the event to hear from search engine marketing (SEM) and social media’s elite practicioners who spent the day sharing closely guarded secrets to online marketing success.

“The growing need for practical search marketing and social media training is more apparent than ever in the B2B Marketing space,” says Conference Chair, Mary O’Brien, and host of the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search Marketing and Social Media Success in September. “We designed this event to provide a unique approach to search and social media training, offering real-world case study lessons and applicable strategies that other training conferences don’t offer.”

The full day of strategy sessions kicked off with an opening keynote from Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro CEO, who shared findings from the comprehensive business-to-business marketing research study — the BuyerSphere Project. Later Hotchkiss, Patricia Neuray of Business.com, Frederick Vallaeys of Google and Valerie Bolduc of Microsoft answered top-of-mind B2B Search Marketing questions during the Expert Hot Seat panel discussion. Jay Middleton, Adobe’s Senior Worldwide Search Marketing Manager, led the afternoon keynote on “The Future of B2B Search Marketing”. The day was chock full of instructive panel discussions, expert Q&A and case study lessons delving into search marketing and social media hot topics from keyword research, landing page optimization, paid search, search engine optimization, press release optimization and much more.

Many themes were covered throughout the event, but the main takeaways focused exclusively on B2B search engine marketing best practices and how marketers can apply them to get better B2B online marketing ROI. The overall B2B case study data concluded the critical keys to successful optimization are: Gain a better understanding of buyer behaviors, create and manage targeted keyword lists and integrate Search Marketing and Social Media for greater market outreach.

Here are some essential B2B Search and Social Media Marketing conference takeaways:

• Utilize Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Landing Pages and Press Release Optimization to boost Search Marketing ROI
• Get to know your audience and stay close to your customers
• Make sure sales and marketing teams are tightly integrated to ensure the sale
• Understand buyer behaviors and customer search habits to help optimize search campaigns
• Integrate Marketing and Social Media channels to further support lead generation and foster branding
• Diversify Paid Search campaigns to boost search engine marketing results
• Incorporate targeted keywords into all Marketing/Sales/Social Media communications
• Pay attention to analytics and focus on cost-per-customer rather than cost-per-lead

Overall the expert led strategy sessions revealed many ‘insider’ search engine marketing campaign secrets for marketers interested in driving B2B profits. The event closed with a lively networking reception where attendees took advantage of the opportunity to speak directly with the experts and get their questions answered. Attendees left the conference armed with a new found knowledge and strategies for integrating search and social media to reach new markets and understand customer buying behaviors to shorten the sales cycle.