Velocity has done a hell of a lot of B2B marketing videos in the last year or so and only a few have been what most people would call viral video — like this one for your favourite marketing automation vendor:

Before running through the different types of video marketing – and giving examples – it’s good to think about the marketing goals that video can serve:

Video marketing goals

Thought leadership video – taking a stance on an issue or simply sharing best practice.

Product marketing video – including product tours, demonstrations and tutorials.

Case story video – including interviews and talking heads featuring customers – and maybe jazzing them up with the more televisual elements of the customer business (great if they happen to make beer or skiwear; not so great if they’re in insurance).

Video that humanises the brand — fun or viral videos – These are videos with a bit of humour; something you hope will be passed around, linked to or tweeted. Like this one we did a while back (a public service video with our new voice-over)

We’ve experimented with using xtranormal (a text to video tool) for this. It’s a kind of off-the-shelf animation tool with robot speech. Fun, fast and cheap. Here’s an obscene example. The humour in these often comes from the fact that a robot is saying human-like things (especially swearing).

Blogger-relations videos – Where one of your senior people name-checks some key bloggers.

We did this for Cisco and the bloggers really responded to it, with lots of backlinks & posts. (The link drops you in at 2:13 for the blogger mention but you can watch from the start if you’re thinking of transforming your data centre).

TYPES OR STYLES OF B2B VIDEO MARKETING

Taking any of these goals, there are then a lot of different types of video marketing, including:

VIDEO INTERVIEWS

Smart people, saying smart things.  One at a time or multi-person films on a single theme or issue

(Five standalone case videos can be re-cut into some themed pieces)

We like using an off-screen interviewer, editing out the questions and using title cards to introduce topics. Sometimes with a fixed and a hand-held camera for cut-aways.

VIDEO WHITEBOARD SESSIONS

Get your best presenters to give an informal presentations at a whiteboard or flip chart.

Like this one we did for App-DNA.

Success depends on a good, natural presenter.

You don’t need fancy production values: you’re presenting a chalk-talk.

These are great for introductory stuff but can also do deep drill-down material for later in the marketing funnel.

ANIMATED VIDEO MARKETING

You don’t have to do the standard flashy icons-in-white-space video. Put a bit of fun in your video marketing with something like this ‘Monty Python’ one we did for Hyperion:

Or something like stop-motion, low-tech video marketing can be really fun in a high-tech market.

Here’s a Lego Man one we did for ShipServ.

‘KINETIC TYPE’ VIDEO

Write a snappy script, animate every word spoken with on-screen type that zooms in, animates, etc. Again, one for ShipServ:

DOCUMENTARY-STYLE VIDEO MARKETING

Treat the topic as a documentary filmmaker would. Like this one we did for VNL in a rural Indian village:

SCREEN-BASED VIDEO MARKETING TOURS

This one for dotMobi combines a screen tour with an interview.

(We shot off the mobile because of time and budget constraints. Should have done proper screen grabs).

WEBINAR OR PRESENTATION VIDEOS

Just capture the audio and show the slides and/or the speakers.

These can be boring to watch after the event but there are ways to jazz it up.

ROUNDTABLE VIDEO MARKETING

Hold a roundtable, shoot the proceedings and edit it into something snappy.

Getting more from your video marketing content

Although you can crank out a decent viral video or video interview with very little budget, video does tend to cost a bit more than other types of content marketing. So here are some ways to squeeze more from your videos:

– Recut previous video content into new pieces – five old case studies can give you the material for a brand new thought piece on a given issue.

– Do ‘Takeaway’ pdfs or web pages that summarise the session (creating new downloads and giving you extra SEO juice). Salesforce.com did these Dreamforce Takeaways – short summaries of the best sessions from the Dreamforce event. A great way to turn video into content that search spiders can crawl..

– Use transcripts of the text – take the whole script and get it on a web page somewhere for easy reading and SEO.

– Turn your video marketing into blog posts, articles or even an eBook – just extract the ideas, simmer and re-spin.

– Create sound bite extracts for presentations and sales teams – so they can drop a 10-second video clip into a powerpoint deck

– An interactive Tablet Magazine for iPad or Android – video is great in an interactive magazine or eBook (we like PressRun for this and not just because they’re a client)

-- Create a soundboard – like this Alec Baldwin one (only much prettier and with good content!)

The Bottom Line?

Video is not only an incredibly powerful medium for B2B marketing, it’s also a flexible one. The trick is to be clear about your goals, choose the right kind of video to accomplish them and maximise their impact through promotion and re-purposing.

So that’s our B2B marketing video summary — and only a little bit of it was really about viral videos.

We’d love to hear your experiences and see any examples of B2B video marketing you’ve done (or just ones you like).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B video marketing, B2B viral videos, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, viral video

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We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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We hopped on the Eurostar at an ungodly hour for B2B content marketers:

B2B content marketing love train.

On the way, we entertained each other by singing B2B content marketing songs (“Lonely days are gone/I’m a -comin’ home/My baby, she wrote me an eBook”).

Then Neil started telling B2B content marketing jokes.

Neil and his niche fan base.

But B2B content marketing jokes aren’t exactly suited to all audiences…

Bless.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in Paris, we had forgotten that we had come in search of B2B content marketing insights. So we just had a massive lunch at La Fontaine de Mars (Cassoulet to kill for) (no, literally: there must have been eight species in that bubbling, bean-studded ooze)…

The Last B2B Content Marketing Supper

Jim The Second

Luke

It was time to walk off that lunch and seize a B2B content marketing photo opp.

B2B content marketers

Followed by a boat tour on the Seine…

Jim mugs Simi

Past Notre Dame

And ended up back in one of the many B2B content marketing bars that line the Paris side streets…

Stan gets them in.

Followed by a brilliant, sunny next day.

Les Bollocks du B2B

Including a bit of shopping:

Le Bon B2B Content Marche

And the train back to the real capital of B2B content marketing: London.

Halina and Wendy

In short: a B2B content marketing good time was had by all.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the new year.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Content Marketing Strategy

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Persuasion victim after viewing the cover of 'Influence'

I finally got around to reading, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. It’s a summary of the secret techniques used by what he calls ‘exploiters of the weapons of automatic influence’ (‘marketers’ to you and me).

Cialdini Ph.D. highlights six of the most powerful techniques that, when invoked, apparently turn us all into defenseless zombies:

Reciprocation – give someone a tiny gift and they’ll be forced to buy your used Porsche with the faulty transmission

Commitment & Consistency – get someone to make even a tiny commitment and they’re yours for life

Social Proof – show them a crowd of people buying your stuff and they’ll turn into lemmings with blank checks stuck to their foreheads

Liking – be nice and they’ll roll on to their backs and do that shakey-leggy thing

Authority – wear a white lab coat and they’ll do whatever you tell them to do

Scarcity – tell them there was a couple from Kansas City in this morning looking at the same fridge and they’ll grab you by the legs and weep until you agree to let them buy it

These techniques are so powerful, they actually turn us into response machines (‘click, whirr’ is the sound Cialdini Ph.D. uses to describe the process).

Cialdini Ph.D. then ends with an impassioned plea for all of us to stand up and join his ‘war against the exploiters’ and collectively reject the ‘tricks of the profiteer’.

All good stuff, really.

But it’s all completely betrayed by the book’s cover, which uses as many of the insidious compliance scams it can cram in:

It shouts, “National Bestseller” (Social Proof) – and calls itself a ‘highly acclaimed book’ (click, whirrr.)

It uses expert endorsements (Authority) – “For marketers it is among the most important books written in the last ten years,.”says the apparently prestigious Journal of Marketing Research (who?).  This one quote turns the entire book from a defense against the dark arts to what it really is: a user’s manual for Satan’s spawn (you and me).

It flaunts Cialdini’s Ph.D. title (authority again) – and the Cialdini Ph.D. bio on the back quotes all his credentials

It uses a cover designed to be attractive (Likeability) and promises to care about us – helpfully showing how to ‘become a skilled persuader” and in the same sentence, “how to defend against them’.

I liked the book. It’s a good summary of the research on influence and persuasion. But I do find it hilarious that Cialdini Ph.D is happy to deploy all the tricks in the dirty book (his own) when he’s got something to sell.

I’m just surprised the cover didn’t say “Only ten copies left and there’s a group of marketers that were looking at them this morning!” or “Free flower inside – no really, it’s yours to keep!”.

—————————————

zombie photo: creative commons, by Sheba_Also

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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“This tweet was a long time in the making,” said Doug Kessler, Velocity co-founder, “The team just hasn’t had the bandwidth lately to get together, brainstorm some ideas, have them copywritten, run them past the Micro-blogging Strategy Committee (MSC) and the Self-Aggrandizement Working Group (SAWG), then create and tag a URL — using an external resource — and send the tweet to the Velocity in-house tweet posting department for eventual submission to the people over in Traffic, the Hashtag team and beyond, to the good folks in ‘Go-Live’ who (together with IT security) control the Velocity twitter account.”

“With this in mind, we’ve streamlined our social media processes quite a lot,” added Kessler, “Now we can submit any new tweet to the MSC and the SAWG simultaneously.  It’s amazing how much time this can save — sometimes cutting down the idea-to-post time from months down to weeks or even, in some cases, week.” (additional quote pending approval from corporate PR and brand consistency secretariat – not for publication)

B2B Twitter Strategy
The tweet, an announcement of its latest press release, was distributed to Velocity’s 704 avid followers (@velocitytweets) and the 2,221 followers of Doug Kessler (@dougkessler) where it was expected to be devoured,  retweeted and favourited by virtually every one of them.

“Our followers eagerly await every tweet from Velocity,” says Stan Woods, MD, “They sometimes skip meals and neglect their personal hygiene for fear that they may miss one. That’s the power of micro-blogging and self-aggrandizement — it becomes almost addictive for the people we’re gracing with our Velocity-related insights and self-promotional updates.”

The latest tweet, one in an apparently interminable series, continues the theme of ‘Agile Narcissism in the Era of Social Self-Pleasuring’ – a theme established in Velocity’s bi-annual blog posts and all-but-dormant LinkedIn Company Page — and expanded on in the new Velocity Google+ profile, a fresh spin on the utterly-futile-but-somehow-critically-important Velocity Facebook Page (currently under review in the company’s Facebook Utility Committee of Knowledge (acronym not used)).

As for its plans for future tweets, the agency is uncertain. “We’re all just exhausted from the excellent work we just created together,” says Woods, “I want to thank the entire team behind this latest tweet — we could never have done it without the 24-28 people who worked day and night to get this thing out in a timely fashion. Now it’s time to rest a bit, celebrate our success and, maybe get the hell back to actual work on a paid bloody project for a buggering client if we can squeeze it in.”

The recent Velocity tweet, all rights frivolously thrown away without a second thought

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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But content marketing is different. The best content marketing tends to be narrowly targeted, focusing on a very specific audience. That’s how we maximise relevance, earn downloads and reward engagement.

Of course, there’s no need to be too narrow. and if a single piece of content can cover more than one target audience, why not go for it? It saves time and money and raises your Return on Content. Unfortunately, it’s not always a good idea to try to kill two birds with one content stone. In fact it’s rarely a good idea. Here’s why:

Different people ALWAYS have different perspectives, agendas and issues

• A board member has a different view of the world than a junior manager (where seniority is the dimension of differentiation)
• A test engineer has a different set of challenges than a sales director (the target’s discipline is the dimension)
• A hospital administrator cares about different things than a high school administrator (market sector)
• An existing customer has a different view of you than a cold prospect (degree of familiarity with your company)
• A Chinese manufacturer has different concerns than a French one (region)

Pick almost any meaningful dimension and you’ll find your prospect base starts to divide itself up along that spectrum.

The key questions are:

– How important are these differences in the context of the story you want to tell?

-- What are the penalties for addressing more than one target audience in the same piece?

Let’s go to the whiteboard please, Janice.

Here are two targets – Persona A and Persona B.
They have some things in common but lots that are not shared:

You’ve got a few options for targeting A and B with content:

• Aim for the common ground– keeping your story in the lavender zone; this is good if that zone is still compelling enough to both A and B. The downside: you’re often forced to leave out really good parts of your A story or your B story.

Tip: Signal the scope of the piece in the title and the introduction, then tell people up front who it’s for and why: “This piece is for A and B — we know you’ve got a lot of differences but here’s what you have in common and why this piece is great for you.”

• Try to tell the whole A + B story– signalling to the reader that ‘this bit applies to A’ and ‘this bit applies to B’. The downside: B people get bored during the A bits and vice gets bored during the versa.

Tip: Sidebars that clearly signal “Hey Mr A! Read this bit!” can help you balance your agenda without boring the pants of of one target or the other.

• Do a piece of content for A and another for B– This lets you tell your best story to each audience. The downside: it costs more and takes more time.

Tip: Use broader, more generic content to buy time while you develop your targeted, persona-specific stuff.

Of course, it’s great if your target audiences have a lot more in common, so the middle ground contains most of your goodies:

But sometimes, you cant fake it. Your two targets have so little in common that almost every paragraph contains a fork in the road and every sentence needs a conditional:

B2B Content Relevance & Alienation
There are two tests to help determine if the piece you’re developing really ought to be two pieces:

The Relevance Test – lumping two audiences together means each will have to wade through things that are not relevant – that’s a negative experience and can lose readers.

How much of your content is actually irrelevant to A or B? Can you make it relevant by explicitly building bridges? If a third of your content has no relevance or resonance for one target or the other, it’s probably time to split the piece.

The Alienation Test – Even if there’s lots of common ground, a single message that’s gold dust for A can be a major turn-off for B. One example: when marketing some kind of media (trade show, magazine…) one audience (the exhibitor or advertiser) is selling to the other (the visitor or reader). In this case, talking all about how the former will enjoy a ‘captive audience for your sales team’ will be perfume to A and skunk juice to B.

Is there any important message to one audience that will actually alienate the other? These need to be managed carefully — and lumping both targets together is rarely the answer.

Of course, sometimes — like on the home page – you have to address the issue and find the most compelling common ground. But if there are significant relevance or alienation issues, you want to stream people off of that common ground home page as quickly as possible so you can look them in the eyes and sell to them without fear.

Why this matters
As a reader, you know when you’re reading a great piece of content: it seems to almost have your name on it. It’s aimed at a spot right in the middle of your forehead. It uses the language you use to describe the challenges you face in terms you recognise.

You also know when a piece is not quite aimed at you. It uses unfamiliar language; is pitched at the wrong level (too techie, not techie enough); talks about problems you haven’t experienced and skips over ones you have.

The penalties of badly targeted B2B content marketing
Making a piece to target two different audiences forces some bad things to happen:

– You’re forced to use generic language – instead of language that’s specific to one of the audiences.

To a hospital administrator, “increase asset utilisation” is a bore, but “double your operating room throughput” resonates. But you can’t say that if you’re also targeting high school administrators with the same piece.

– You talk about abstract ideas – instead of concrete realities.

To a marketing director, ‘improve process efficiencies’ is ho-hum jargon while ‘get more campaigns to market faster’ is lean-forward stuff.

– You’re forced to ‘couch’ your killer messages – instead of letting them fly.

‘For people like A, this widget halves costs and for people like B it’s doubles revenue.’
‘Finance guys love it because it saves money; engineers love it because it improves performance.’

Yuk.

The Bottom Line
(because all lines have bottoms have and all bottoms, alas, have their lines):

Non-specific, abstract, couchy talk sucks. While specific, concrete and direct talk moves mountains and blows away molehills.

‘All things to all people’ results in boring work. While relevant points told in familiar language feels ‘just for me’.

Great content hits people between the eyes. And mediocre content falls at their feet with a pffffttt.

The time to discover which of the two piles your next piece of content marketing  falls into is at the outline stage – where the problem will leap off the page and kiss you full on the lips (but in a bad way).  That’s reason enough to always do an outline stage.

The Reco: do occasional broad-brush content marketing but, as a rule, do more pieces and make each one highly targeted, with a persona so clear you can talk to it.

How about your own experiences? Any pieces you wish you had split into two or three? Any that spanned different audiences but worked just fine?
We’d love to hear about it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, Copywriting, persuasion, Thought Leadership

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Having spent my entire career in marketing, I’m hardly an anti-capitalist. But there is one form of advertising that I’d happily see banned tomorrow: billboards.

The multi-billion dollar outdoor advertising industry is built on a premise that all marketers should reject: that it’s okay to sell people’s eyeballs without their consent or benefit.

As a consumer, you can opt out of online spam (or at least filter it into your junk folder), but none of us can opt out of the worst spam of all, the visual spam that spoils our cities and turns our environment into a shrill marketplace. — the spam pumped into our eyes by Clear Channel, CBS Outdoor and the other outdoor advertising giants.

Drive through any city and count the billboard ads. You can’t do it. There are far too many. We’ve grown so used to them that we think all cities and towns have to look like this. But they don’t. We can easily get rid of billboard ads.

Back in 2007, Sao Paolo, the world’s seventh largest city, banned outdoor advertising as part of its Clean City Law. There was a massive howl from the outdoor advertising industry – especially from Clear Channel – but the sky didn’t fall, it emerged from behind the billboards.

“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution,” said Sao Paolo Mayor Gilberto Kassab, “pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”

And ‘visual pollution’ is as good a definition of billboard ads that I can think of.

It’s hard to say what Sao Paolo will look like when all the emtpy billboard structures are removed but the residents are starting to see a new city — and 70% of them support the ban on outdoor advertising. (Check out Tony de Marco’s flickr photostream of the emtpy billboard dinosaurs)

Following Sao Paolo’s lead, San Francisco, Seattle and dozens of other American cities have started to experiment with some sensible limitations on all new billboards. Again, Clear Channel and the outdoor advertising industry are lobbying hard to fight the trend (“Outdoor advertising is culture!”). But as people start to see how nice their cities can be without 50-foot Big Macs and Bruce Willis billboards at every intersection, the tide could turn.

As you’d expect, McDonalds is the world’s biggest outdoor advertiser. The billboards they post in two years could wrap the world — as indeed they do. (Much as I like a quarter-pounder with cheese, I’ve half a mind to boycott McDonalds until they stop their assault by billboards).

Can the B2B market do anything about the blight of outdoor advertising? A lot. And it wouldn’t hurt much — outdoor is probably the least efficient of all B2B media (it’s better for burgers). Even billboards outside of convention centres during big trade shows are still 90+% waste. It may be a ‘clear channel’ but it’s the worst B2B channel of all.

Here’s an idea: the next time you see outdoor advertising in a marketing plan, suggest cancelling it and doing more content marketing or SEO. The return on investment will go up and you’ll have done something tangible in the fight against billboards, Clear Channel and the outdoor advertising industry.

You’ll also have done something positive for your neighbours.

What do you think?

Am I missing some hidden benefit that billboard ads deliver?

Am I being unfair to Clear Channel or McDonalds?

Is the outdoor advertising industry worth protecting?

Or are you just a fan of billboards?

———-

Photo: Tony de Marco

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, billboards, outdoor advertising

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I just got back to the desk the day after Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar event in London so I thought I’d file a quick report on it.

The event was fantastic. A buzzing, interesting, challenging day full of best-practice insight on demand generation and marketing automation. Not to mention the chance to meet lots of people who are at various points on the learning curve.  It was a room full of a new kind of B2B marketer: the kind who are ready to take responsibility for their company’s revenue pipeline.

I couldn’t help but feel I was witnessing the tipping point for marketing automation and revenue performance management in Europe (it feels like it tipped a while back int he US).

I only made the afternoon sessions, but they were excellent:

By way of disclaimer: it opened with a new video we produced for Marketo – I’ll link to it once it’s posted.  Then:

Fergus Gloster on The Secret Sauce for Revenue Growth – Fergus took us through Marketo’s own processes to show how good it can be. I love the way Marketo not only walk the talk but also share their own experiences so openly.

Case: Billy Boyle, Owlstone Co-Founder – Billy’s a great speaker and a convert to marketing automation. He showed how his company uses Marketo to automate marketing for a product that’s a bit off-piste for the company but has lots of potential. They didn’t want to throw sales resources at it, so they automated the pipeline – including some cool new features like integrating web chat with Marketo.

Liz Smyth on The Secret Sauce for Measurement & Analytics – Liz started by asking what you would do if they came to cut your marketing budget by 10%. She then proceeded to show how, with proper revenue performance management in place, you could defend that budget by showing exactly how much revenue would be lost due to the cut.  Very powerful stuff.

Rockstar Panel – (including Stan Woods, our intrepid MD) a Q&A session on the ins and outs of marketing automation and content marketing.

Then drinks.
Then more drinks.
It all went blurry after that.

Marketo raised another $50 million yesterday. Their European operation is ramping up fast. Marketing automation has hit our shores in a big way. If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not doing it… you’re not doing it right.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Demand Generation, marketing automation, Marketo, Revenue Performance Management

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Content marketing has hit the tipping point for B2B marketers. At Velocity, we used to have to evangelise the concept of content marketing , then spend lots of time telling clients and prospects why it’s such a powerful thing. Today, those conversations are a lot shorter. B2B marketers have discovered content marketing as the engine room of their marketing strategy and there’s no going back.

But as more and more B2B marketing departments ramp up their content marketing efforts, a new bottleneck is developing: the content development bottleneck.

Content development is the process that drives the conception, development and production for your content marketing machine. And since it’s a fairly new discipline in many B2B marketing departments, there aren’t a lot of best-practice processes in place for it.

A good content development process turns a bunch of random activities into some kind of a system, covering everything from idea generation to copywriting, design, production and the all-important approvals process.

The goal is simple: quality at scale — being able to produce the right amount of excellent content with the team you’ve got. (Notice I said ‘the right amount’ not ‘the most content you can generate’. Sometimes fewer, better pieces is the way to go.)

Here are nine content development tips to help:

1) Start with a Content Marketing Strategy

Not having one is the number one cause of content development inefficiency, because everything is ad hoc. A good content marketing strategy starts with your goals; then summarises a quick audit of existing content; captures the core messages you need your team to deliver; outlines your target audience personas; creates a topic list. It also outlines the team roles and responsibilities and captures any core content principles you want everyone to follow. This is your content marketing playbook.

2) Create an Editorial Calendar

This is essential for maximising your content development resources and keeping everything on track. Some editorial calendars identify a different theme every month or quarter; others map the content to the different stages of the buying cycle; others cover one product line at a time. Whatever editorial strategy you choose, get it down in a calendar so you can see what’s due when and who’s doing it.

3) Use timelines for every piece of content

Sounds too obvious to mention but every piece must have its own production schedule detailing the major milestones and their corresponding dates. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to skip this and mark everything ASAP. But it’s amazing how often people will hit deadlines if there really are deadlines to hit.

4) Avoid ‘stop & start’ content development

A lot of content marketing teams we’ve seen tend to focus on the big pieces and let everything else stall. Tips 2 and 3 should help avoid that, keeping early stage projects progressing even as the big pieces get the attention they need. Otherwise you get peaks and troughs in your content marketing efforts instead of a nice, steady flow.

5) Make the most of each piece of content

A big part of the art of content marketing is the art of ‘atomising’ your content to get the most out of your budget – without seeming to be repeating yourself everywhere. So a big, fat eBook gets re-purposed into a slideshare, series of blog posts, guest posts, articles, worksheets, videos, etc.

Each gets a re-spin but they’re all based on the core ideas, so exploit the original research and development.

6) Make your blog the foundation of your content marketing

A content marketing strategy without a blog is like a speedboat without an outboard motor. When there’s no time for a major piece of content, there’s still time for a blog post. Use the blog to promote content, test new ideas, atomise existing content, build relationships with influencers and encourage engagement.

7) Use content curation

You don’t have to produce 100% of the content you offer to your target audiences. A lot of great content is essentially curated content – stuff that you’ve found out there in the world or on the web, added a bit of value and linked to. The key here is to add that value. If you’re writing about ‘Ten Marketing Strategy Posts We Love’ summarise why you love each post and give a glimpse into the content. Done well, content curation stretches your budget without diluting your content brand.

8 ) Use outside resources effectively

It’s a rare content marketing team that can produce everything in-house. But if you throw everything out to agencies and writers, you may lose the authenticity that makes for great content. The trick is to find great resources (writing being the absolutely critical one) and use them intelligently, playing to their strengths and yours.

9) Let the data be your guide

Analytics is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Measure the things that matter most and test the things you need to learn about. The data will tell you where to put your content development resources. Without it, you’re in ‘spray & pray’ mode.

Follow these nine principles and your’e on your way to that lean, mean content marketing machine that’s the envy of your B2B marketing peers.

A few content development resources:

Our Content Marketing Workbook – a primer on the art & science of content marketing

The Content Marketing Tutorial – a short, sharp Prezi that outlines the process of developing a great piece of content (view it in full screen mode).

The Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute – tireless evangelists and best-practice advisors

Managing Content Marketing

Managing Content Marketing – the book by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose

The Econsultancy Content Marketing Best Practice Guide – free if you’re a member of Econsultancy (you are, aren’t you?)

Creating Content That Sells

Creating Content That Sells – a guide to content marketing for demand generation

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog – all about it for B2B marketers

Got any other tips for content development?

We’d love to share your thoughts with fellow B2B marketers, so do comment away…

[BTW – This post was written using Inbound Writer, the content development tool. It scores a 70 on their Document Score. I reviewed Inbound Writer here but was maybe a bit sarcastic so this is my attempt at using it for real. I'll add my thoughts to the review post itself.]

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Photo: Creative Commons by zigazou 76

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Development, marketing strategy, Thought Leadership

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We’ve been huge fans of information graphics at Velocity ever since Edward Tufte self-published his brilliant ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information‘ book. But as the B2B marketing world has gone B2B infographic crazy in the last year or so, we’ve been much more likely to be disappointed than delighted.

Most B2B infographics are really just simple data charts (bars & pies) made pretty. Or they take a bunch of different data points, give them to an illustrator and turn them into an editorial-like page with big, fat numbers, twitter birds, logos and lots and lots of explanatory text. The data didn’t really have to be visualised. The chunks of stats don’t really hang together or interact or contribute to each other. It’s just a pretty page that might as well be text.

For us, a great information graphic is one in which:

• The visualisation actually adds value – it’s not about making data attractive to children; it’s about making data sing
• The picture tells the story – or many different stories; very little text is needed
• That story is BEST told in graphic form – it’s not just text & data with colours and shapes
• One glance makes you lean forward – making you want to know more & dig deeper
• The graphic combines many dimensions – change in a single value over time is a chart; great B2B infographics have layers
• But there is almost no ink that doesn’t contribute – no twiddles and bar-chart-as-city-skyline (what Tufte calls ‘chartjunk’)
• The final effect is beautiful – they can’t help but be so

The Chartball posters by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Senior Graphics Editor/Programmer at the Wall Street Journal, tick all these boxes and are an absolute delight. (Joel Avery, the newest hire in our design department turned us on to these. And we’re really glad he did. The Chartball posters are fantastic.) Here’s a small detail on the pitching staff of the 2009 Yankees, strikeouts against walks (pardon the png quality):

Andrew clearly loves data (not just illustration) and that passion leaps off the page. You could spend hours with any one of his poster-sized summaries of a single sports team’s season. And as you absorb the data, the season actually comes to life. You can see, touch and feel the texture of the season. Star players pop out. Winning streaks emerge and fade back to normality. And, best of all, the data sub-plots relate to each other, adding insight and suggesting causation as well as correlation.

We’ve seen very, very few B2B infographics that do all this (and we’ve struggled with it ourselves). But this is what we aspire to.

Anyone out there have any great examples in B2B?

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B design, B2B infographics, B2B marketing agency, Content Marketing

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