If you’ve been a regular reader of the RefreshWeblog, you might have noticed that I’ve been conspicuously absent for a while. I fell into a funk about social media, blogging in particular. After almost nine years of very regular posting on multiple blogs, I burned out. My personal blog got downloaded, the site turned into a 404 error. Maybe in a few years, I’ll make it through four years of near-daily posts from my old Typepad. It’s hard to inspire your team when you don’t feel inspired yourself.

Let’s be honest: for me and for a lot of other people, B2B is a hard area to be inspired about sometimes. The cool campaigns, the word of mouth stuff, the die-hard fans? That’s the stuff of B2C. When it comes to B2B and social media, we wind up talking to ourselves a lot of the time, whether that’s marketing department to marketing department or techies to techies. We have amazing clients whose companies do great things. They just don’t happen to be the sorts of things that lend themselves to the fun social stuff that gets touted as examples at conferences and luncheons. I ran out of hopeful, helpful ideas for a while (and was starting to worry that I wouldn’t have more).

But then there was SXSWi, a conference I did not attend this year, even though the convention center is about fifteen minutes away from my house. Even though last year, it made me care about my industry at a level I hadn’t thought I was capable of. If there was a time I should have sat in on the best and brightest, it was the other week. Instead, I worked in my office and at home, listening to the rain and watching the endless deluge of tweets and Facebook and Tumblr updates go by, telling me what I was missing. Instead of moping about it, I thought about why last year was so great, why it brought me back to the enthusiasm I felt the first few months on the job.

What I remembered was the sense of infinite possibility, the fun of finding more elegant solutions, of fixing something a client has been struggling with, and watching how the work we do at RefreshWeb can transform someone’s business. We’ve been getting back to our roots, back to the model that the business was built on. I’ve been working on ways we can help local businesses, at a price they can afford. The more I work on that, the more I’ve found myself daydreaming ways to teach it, to help people who don’t breathe the rarefied air of the tech super elite. It turns out that spending time solidly focused on the present, instead of straining toward the future, was just the thing I needed to do to help our clients and friends do what they can to secure the future of their businesses. We’re talking series of simple, digestible bits that answer your questions, teach you how to do the small things that can make a big difference. I’m really excited about it, and I hope that you will be too.

This is a very interesting time, as we’ve got multiple projects requiring keyword research, and very different requirements:

• Revisiting a national marketer’s site after almost 2 years of client inactivity
• Finessing a technology client’s site after doing our PPC experiments
• Optimizing a couple of new healthcare technology sites
• Starting up a PPC campaign for a client marketing to IT managers

Working on new sites is always like solving a puzzle, because you have to dig into their business quickly, take the keyword research you have, and apply our marketing experience to make recommendations about how the site should be structured. You have to think about the one person making the initial search (when they have a vague idea of how to solve their problem), and then multiple visits from multiple people as the solution is researched, the company is closely inspected, and the search activity becomes a genuine lead. You have to write for awareness, consideration and evaluation, writing good marketing copy, but interweave the best search terms in such a way that the prospect doesn’t notice.

Technology companies are especially challenging, because you use the vocabulary of an engineer, who may be searching on heat dissipation, cooling, fans, heat sinks, or thermal management. (Doesn’t that sound just like an engineer? Optimistic that the problem can be completely controlled, if the right technology can be found.) Over the space of a few months, a leading edge technology will engender more and better searches as the topic gets presented at conferences and in the trades, so we have to stay open to the change, refine our research, and revise our strategy. Quickly adapting to the trend gets you a lot more search, because you’ve already established some authority for the topic.

The PPC campaign for IT managers is also very interesting professionally. The client had been with a PPC agency on the West Coast, but it was obvious that they didn’t do their homework…generic keywords, vague terms, scattershot campaigns, and an absurd offer. After doing technology marketing for 20+ years, I understand that our clients’ prospects are usually very intelligent, marketing-averse people. Fortunately, I’m curious about technology, like to dig into the details, and can generally help the client communicate more clearly–and certainly more persuasively, but without the condescending cuteness of “agency creative.” Taking that experience into the field of paid search, with a classified ad to communicate and one shot to get the prospect to register, requires some real focus (and the willingness to test several approaches). I’m excited about it because I get to work with some very analytical marketers, and because we’re doing an experiment which can be replicated for other clients.

Tech marketing via PPC ads isn’t easy, especially when you know only 20% of the prospects are willing to click on an ad, but if we can generate good results with this tough audience, we know the effort was worthwhile…and we do want all of our clients to succeed. Because search marketing is measurable, it’s all about the metrics and measurement of results…and in taking the time to understand the prospect and doing the keyword research to find the terms that are most likely to convert.