A keen understanding from every b2b agency into how these devices are used across the business world will pay dividends in audience engagement and client ROI. We have been researching the effect that such mobilisation of technology has had on the business world in our recent @Work State of Mind report, and the findings highlight an appetite to use mobile tech to its fullest among key business decision makers. 84% of those polled felt better prepared to make decisions because of the freedom it gives them to work anywhere and at anytime.

Every creative agency should look to utilise this willingness to blur the line between personal and professional to develop campaigns solely built for mobile and social communication platforms. Not only will this strategy grow engagement in a world increasingly hostile to brand messaging, but it will help push the boundaries in the global b2b industry and establish each b2b agency as a leading force in the sector.

Take a look and try them out:
1. Make your Google+ identity part of your online properties and campaigns. Now that it influences search results, it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

2. Put your +1 button everywhere. It not only enables quick engagement that’s visible through your customers’ social graphs, but it also gives you measurement capability. Perhaps most important, it allows you to “store” user engagement around an event or campaign long after the event itself has ended.

3. Leverage Google Hangouts. Take a look at ChefHangout.com, a company whose entire business model is to use Google Hangouts to sell cooking classes online. A professional chef teaches the classes, and students can even choose the cuisine they want to learn about. It’s a clever idea that leverages Google’s massive infrastructure investment to deliver a great service to a potentially global market at very low cost.

4. Keep your pages fresh with quality content instead of quantity.

5. Social media is social only if people engage. Ask for interactions.

6. Use lots of rich media. Google+ is a good environment for that.

7. Don’t think of social and mobile as a medium, but as a bridge between offline and online. A customer is looking at your billboard. What happens when the customer points his mobile phone at it? When someone sees your product online, that person will want to know what her friends think of it. Are you enabling that feature?

8. Overall, get mobile. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Half of the United States has a smartphone, but 80 percent of businesses don’t have a mobile presence. A custom website or landing page is great, but even something as simple as a listing in Google Maps, or the ability to click a phone number to call you, can be useful and welcome.

For many more insights from the keynote, you can see the full webcast here.

Originally published at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

It is possible. We’re doing it, and here’s some initial feedback from clients who have been exposed to this new thinking:

You guys are on to something.”

“This definitely makes a lot of sense.”

“When can we see more data? I can’t wait!”

Essentially, our methodology helps uncover and optimize for the “who” in search. While this type of intelligence isn’t commonly used today, it should be if B-to-B marketers are serious about installing a legitimate competitive advantage.

And there are plenty of applications for this data too. Perhaps the most obvious are instances where the keyword being purchased or optimized for is general and appeals to diverse audiences. For example, if we’re pursuing the term “web security software,” how sure are we that we’re reaching the intended IT decision-maker? Perhaps a consumer is trying to avoid catching the latest virus on her personal computer, and so chose to search for that term as well.

Wouldn’t it be great to have definitive answers?

But the larger issue here is that B-to-B communications (search included) have long assumed that its intended audiences are other organizations. With the explosion of both mobile and social technologies, though, we’ve begun seeing evidence of the business decision-maker interacting with digital platforms and content both on the go and in very consumer-ish ways.

It’s effectively caused us to rethink our assumptions about business communication.

Humanly Relevant Engagement

It’s simple, actually. Businesses are comprised of people, and those people are the ones who effect purchase decisions. Like you or me, they’re imperfect people. They often behave as consumers do online, act unpredictably and base decisions on emotions over entirely rational criteria. They’re people.

But reaching those people via search has become increasingly difficult. The results pages themselves have become a noisy place, and home to not only the traditional organic and paid results but also image, video, news, expandable listings and vertical drill-downs. Standing out among these varied result types is no easy task, and if our client data is any indication, this noisy landscape has forced a majority of the click-through activity to the top results.

In order to be humanly relevant and stand out across a cluttered results page, successful B-to-B search programs must connect with the people behind business decisions. Relevancy of the message and content are paramount. Sure, tightly aligning keywords to ad copy/meta description and landing page is important, but that’s become tablestakes. To be humanly relevant means to speak directly to discrete human personas based on the query.

It’s critical to know your audience, and that’s where advanced analytics come in.

Knowing Your Audience

Search analytics like the type described above are no pipe dream. That data is available and currently free from a handful of providers. But simply having access to the data is only half of the solution; you have to know how to apply it.

There are two critical applications to this type of intelligence for the serious B-to-B search marketer:

1. Confirming (or not) that our search programs are reaching their intended audiences

2. Identifying the specific vocabulary used by various organizational roles, by size of organization

With this data in your hip pocket, you can not only demonstrate performance gains across search but can also profoundly impact every facet of marketing communications! By identifying and understanding the self-expressed interests of your nuanced audiences, you can empower every other marketing activity that seeks to connect with those discrete audiences.

Smartly applying this type of advanced search analytics to truly know your audiences will facilitate humanly relevant communications that stand out from the noise.

by Ryan DeShazer
Vice President, Global Practice Leader – Search

Follow Ryan on Twitter @RyanDeShazer

Cross-posted at Ignite Something on the Forbes CMO Network

I booked my tickets online and was sent my e-ticket confirmation by  email. Then 24 hours before I logged on to lufthansa.com via my blackberry to check-in. The site is brilliant example of how to present content on a mobile device. Not only is it designed specifically for that purpose, which means I don’t have endless scrolling to find what I want, but it has all the functionality of the regular site.

It features full demos of their mobile flight booking or check-in processes that show every step with dummy data. This means that the less tech-savvy of us can see just how easy these services are to use. And it proves that the service works which avoid getting a certain number of steps in only to find that action doesn’t work on your mobile (The Times online take note!).

Lufthansa have replaced the boarding card with a QR code. I’ve never understood why boarding cards need to be the size they are and whether folding them means the strip on the back can’t be read. With the QR code it’s not a problem.

All you need to do is enter your flight reference number and choose whether you want to receive a link to the code by email or text. They then send you a message with a link to your unique code. Easy. Then at the airport you simply call up the code, present your phone and they scan it for you.

It’s a brilliant example of a simple digital innovation that genuinely improves air travel. (I’d have preferred the tech budget to be spent on individual seat video screens rather than the obscured view of the shared telly mounted in the celing 20 yards away but you can’t win them all.)

Try the demo for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/nbqxky