Selling a massive piece of machinery should be as much a part of search marketing as selling a consumer good like the iPhone.

A few years back when we talked affiliate marketing with eBay, we ended on a note about industrial and similar businesses that could make more of their online marketing efforts, but for myriad reason did not. Search marketing offers potential returns a B2B firm should consider.

The KoMarketing Associates blog showed seven ways search marketing, with Google as the central theme, promise so much for the business to business market. For starters, they recommend a B2B company enter its products into Google Base.

A huge benefit comes from having products uploaded to Google Base. At the top of the search results for a relevant query, just under the paid search section, one's listings might appear as part of Google's Product Search.

For placement purposes, making it to this section means a lot more people see it, and since those viewers searched for terms related to that B2B product, they may have a strong interest in closing a deal.

Using YouTube to promote a company by demonstrating products and providing other information serves as a complementary way of marketing via search. A query for how to manage a piece of machinery, answered in an authoritative way with a video on YouTube, helps reinforce brand authority for the viewer.

That's a powerful marketing prospect, one that firms should be loathe to overlook. The arrival of universal search, where videos and images mix with text links in search results, means such videos stand a chance of showing up in Google's heavily used search pages.

KoMarketing Associates also noted the virtue of promoting a B2B appearance at a trade show through both SEO and SEM. With search marketing, a clickable ad that leads to an appointment at an event may carry through to a sale.

They also stressed the importance of marketing for export, as well as for local markets. A B2B customer in one's local market makes for a valuable commodity, one that a little SEO strategy should help capture.

Size doesn't matter in B2B, as a company with products and a market in demand for them benefit from connecting. If competitors already embrace search marketing to capture this, a firm that isn't doing as much needs to play catch-up to help with profitability.