All posts by Lucy Longhurst

Five things I’ve learned in B2B marketing

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Well, I’m moving on to work for Thomson Reuters (the siren call of being able to walk to work proved to be too strong to resist), and I thought I’d get all reflective and try to sum up some of the (many) things I’ve learned at Velocity.

B2B Content Marketing Trends and Spends

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Marketing Profs and Junta 42 haven’t half been busy lately. They’ve produced a report into content marketing, surveying skills, resources, and trends. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive report of its kind, surveying 1100 American marketers in May 2010. These are some of the highlights. All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content [...]

B2B Marketing agency Velocity publishes “B2B Marketing Manifesto”

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency, has produced a new eBook for marketers called the B2B Marketing Manifesto, available for download from the Velocitypartners.co.uk website. The B2B Marketing Manifesto tackles the choice facing B2B marketers today: either step up to the challenge of marketing in a digital world, or continue using the internet for digital brochureware [...]

Sex, Lies, and Advertising

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Back in the 19th Century, you could make all kinds of wild claims about your Tincture of Gripe Water or Dr Astoundo’s Patented Baldness Liniment. Nobody could sue you if it didn’t do what it said on the tin. That changed in the early 20th Century, which is all to the good. It means marketers have to be more creative when promoting products or services, and not just resort to bare-faced lies.

Anatomy of a project: Calnetix

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We’ve just completed a big project for Calnetix, a company that turn waste heat from industrial processes into energy. It’s green, clean, and it saves money. What’s not to like? Watch the Prezi to find out what we did.

Analytics can be fun, honestly.

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Ok, fine; maybe not as much fun as driving a speedboat up the Thames, but it can be extremely handy and oddly satisfying –if you get it right, that is. If you get it wrong, it’s less “fun” and more “total bloody nightmare”.

Why government and SEO don’t mix

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You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines:

“Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

B2B marketing jobs in London

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We want your body. And your brain. We’re looking for talented copywriters, designers and project managers, so if you’re looking for a job in B2B marketing, come and talk to us.

Bite me, Michael O’Leary

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Photo credit: Le Scribbler I’ve never flown Ryanair before. And now I never will again. If I’d wanted to raise my blood pressure, I could have done that for free by reading the comments section of the Daily Mail website. To anyone contemplating a journey with Ryanair, I suggest you shut yourself inside a biscuit [...]

Real women don’t sell

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Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes bras to also make outer garments. Hopefully the dresses will be designed with the logistics of bra-wearing in mind…

Calnetix Power Solutions gets a dose of Velocity

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The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries. Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and industrial applications and turns it into electricity. The process is called the Organic Rankine Cycle, and has been used in large-scale, big footprint applications [...]

What hugging cruets and joined-up marketing have in common

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Answer: Econsultancy. Let me explain… Econsultancy have a brilliant new event called JUMP (which we helped launch a few months ago). It’s the most exclusive “online meets offline marketing” event of the year, and it brings together senior marketers to learn about best practice integrated marketing – all the innovations and developments where online and [...]

Avoid marketing intranet pitfalls

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Here’s an eBook we’ve written and designed for our friends SmallWorlders, the people who create fun and social intranets for marketing teams. Since it’s been up on the SmallWorlders website they’ve seen traffic increase 10 to 20 times the usual, which is pretty damn impressive.

Join the iClan

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Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived to fill the void in your life that you didn’t know you had.

Try to contain your excitement

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Roger Warner, friend of Velocity and all-round PR guru, has flung open the doors to the Museum of Social Media. Before you all start planning an office field trip to see it, it’s actually online – you can visit it here (and no, it doesn’t have a gift shop). Conceived as a repository for the [...]

Nativ gets its mojo on

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We’ve been working with a great company called Nativ, who offer a digital video content management and distribution platform and service.

Velocity gets medieval

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I have to confess to having no real reason for this, except that it’s spring and I always think of these lines from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales whenever it’s April and it’s sunny.

It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it

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The general consensus out there seems to be that French Connection’s new ad campaign is a right royal triumph. If you’ve been living under a stone for the past few months and haven’t seen it, click here to see what I’m on about. This Is The Woman, This Is The Man has a cool, art-housey [...]

We explain ourselves – in infographics

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As you’ll know if you got our newsletter we’re big fans of infographics over here. We got inspired by all of these and decided to have a go ourselves. This is our first, hand-made infographic explaining the Velocity process. It was a lot of fun, so maybe we’ll do some more soon. It was certainly a [...]

‘Margin Killers’ eBook reaches 600 downloads

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We didn’t mention this? We’ve been working with IBS, the wholesale distribution software experts, to produce a content series on the five big success drivers in wholesale distribution. To kick the whole thing off we wrote and designed an eBook called The Six Margin Killers of Wholesale Distribution. If you want to know what I’m [...]

What fashion and marketing have in common

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Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about: the analogous relationship between B2B and haute couture. In fact, fashion in general. And marketing in general.

Marketo’s new Definitive Guide gets some Velocity

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We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in the series of Definitive Guides (you can read the first one on Lead Nurturing here).

The Cliché and The Copywriter

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Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb:

http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101

Oh how I sniggered.

Read this or the world will end

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So Gesu was wondering aloud the other day whether negative or positive headlines are more effective. By negative and positive we mean, respectively, the ones that say things like: ‘Ten things you’re doing wrong in your life’ or ‘How to be even more lovely than you are already’. They both boil down to the same thing: fear.

Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

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Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

You can have it done right, cheap, or quick. Pick two

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Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

B2B marketing agency Velocity powers up IBS relaunch

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Velocity Partners, the B2B marketing agency for technology companies, has announced the completion of the first phase of their project to reposition IBS, the Distribution Resource Management specialists.

IBS injects Velocity into turnaround

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When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

You say tomato… copywriting for international audiences

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We have a lot of international clients. Most of them are European or American, but occasionally they’re based further afield. This generates an interesting issue: how do you accommodate international English speakers in your copy?

B2B marketing agency Velocity creates new website for intranet providers SmallWorlders

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency for technology companies, has just announced a new website for SmallWorlders, specialists in intranets for marketing and brand teams. The agency developed a new brand positioning for the company, new language to describe it’s services and a fresh online presence. Smallworlders built the new website on their own Sandbox™ platform. [...]

Our New Year’s B2B Marketing Resolutions

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Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are the new year’s resolutions from the heavyweights (especially after Christmas) at Velocity: Speak at more B2B industry events - To get the message out there that the old way of marketing is [...]

In Which The Hero Helps SmallWorlders Sell Intranets To Marketers

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We’ve been working with a great company called SmallWorlders. They produce smart, sociable intranets for marketing types. Their Sandbox™ platform, hosted model and marketing-savvy service teams combine to deliver the best marketing intranets on the planet. When we started working with them they knew who they were and what they did but only a select [...]