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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.

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Sometimes it is worth fighting your corner – usually I take the path of least resistance, which means I tend to let people have their way particularly if it avoids conflict. But sometimes clients have plans that just aren’t right for them, and rather than rolling over and going along with it, sometimes it’s a good idea to push back. Ultimately clients usually respect your independence, even if they don’t agree with you.

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Headlines are difficult – I hate writing titles or headlines. I’ve got better at them over the past few months but we’re never going to be friends. In fact, this point could be ‘the shorter the word limit, the harder it is’. I used to think I was pretty good at pithy, but the more pared down the text is, the more difficult it is. But it’s a fun challenge.

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Don’t believe the hype – it’s a truism that the internet is full of twaddle, and I don’t mean videos of dancing kittens. People write all kinds of tripe. That means that winkling out the nuggets of gold in all the dross is difficult, but worth the effort. It also explains why writing quality content really matters, and why people really, really appreciate it.

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A hideous website is bad PR – fugly design, poor spelling and grammar, clichéd images… you might think company websites are just there to give people a bit of information and some contact details so it doesn’t matter what it looks like. But you would be wrong. Websites don’t have to be complicated, or with expensive glossy design. But they do need to be good looking, and they do need to sound human. And they really do need to be spell checked. Otherwise you’re letting your own side down.

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Curb your Briticisms – slap my thigh and call me Nancy. Apparently sounding too British is distracting, and actually I think that’s true. I love all the ‘Cripes Jeeves!’ type of expressions and idioms but they can be at best ridiculous and at worst alienating. So while attitude is good, too much British English slang is as bad as kick in the Alberts*. Know what I mean?

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The credit for learning this doesn’t go to me. It goes to Doug, Stan, Neil, Stuart, and Mel for showing me what ‘good’ means.

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*Albert Halls. I’ll give you one guess what that rhymes with.

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Photo credit: Barbara Bessa

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Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, Copywriting

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Jeff Ogden’s blog is consistently good, but we particularly liked his series on How To Grow Revenue: Six Keys to Marketing Success. They are: simplify, entertain, educate, serve, listen – and the last one – share. This is a message we can all get behind – it’s the bedrock of content marketing and the new way of doing things we evangelized in our B2B Marketing Manifesto.

Marketing + Brains = We’re keen on science at Velocity, and we also like brains. So Patsi Krakoff’s post on neuroscience and writing persuasive content really appealed to our inner zombie. Have a look, it’s useful stuff.

Now or later? Sales are always complaining that marketing aren’t giving them enough of the right kind of leads. The mismatch between the two departments is a classic problem in lots of companies, but you have to understand why it happens – and how to stop it. Ardath Albee dissects the problem here.

Un peu de Savvy fare (if this pun gets past Doug I’ll eat my hat). Savvy B2B Marketing always have their fingers so firmly on the pulse that they risk giving someone an accidental Vulcan Death Grip. They’ve done it again with a post on engaging people with your blog. According to Forrester, “most B2B blogs are dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion”. Ouch. Make sure yours isn’t one of those by reading what the Savvy Sisters recommend.

Getting your hands dirty This blog from dirty hands marketing calls marketers “marketeers”, which I love because it makes us sound like buccaneers, musketeers, privateers… basically everything cool ends in ‘eers’. Its analysis of the rebranding of shoe manufacturer Melissa is detailed and insightful: take a look.

Marketing Sherpa’s Nuggets A rundown of the most important points from the B2B Summit, courtesy of Marketo (and while you’re there, have a shufti at some of their other resources).

Never get blogger’s block again Dianna Huff has a cure for the paralysis that comes from staring at a blank page. It’s simple, cheap, and it’s good for your health. And no it isn’t Syrup of Figs. Find out what it is here.

We liked these and thought you would too.

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Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing

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All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content marketing is widespread, and companies are spending increasing amount on it. But people aren’t particularly confident about it, and there’s a real need for education. In particular they need help to produce relevant and engaging content. Content marketing is here to stay, but marketers have to get used to it.

Nine out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their businesses. Popular tactics include:

• Social media (excluding blogs): 79%
• Articles: 78%
• In-person events: 62%
• eNewsletters: 61%

Most use a mixture of around 8 content marketing methods.

Enthusiasm for content marketing is high; however, marketers are still unsure about the effectiveness and impact of individual tactics, distribution channels, and measurement techniques. For example, among those who use content marketing, 79% have adopted social media tactics (excluding blogs), but only 31% of those who use social media rate the tactic as effective in their marketing.

We’re particularly unsure about Twitter: it seems like a lot of the tweets disappear into a black hole. On the other hand, our B2B Marketing Manifesto has had quite a lot of Twitter attention, so the jury’s out here.

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Content marketing adoption is high across the board, regardless of industry, although the computing/software industry reported the highest level of adoption. Maybe not that surprising given how quickly the technology sector changes (change makes buyers information hungry) and how readily techies (and tech marketers) use the web.

Marketers report that content marketing supports multiple business goals:

• Brand awareness: 78%
• Customer retention/loyalty: 69%
• Lead generation: 63%

The least widely employed goal for content marketing is lead management/ nurturing.

We expect this number to grow with lead nurturing adoption. Content is the fuel of the lead nurturing engine.

The best marketers allocate a much larger percentage of their marketing budget to content marketing, around 30%. Less effective marketers allocate only 18%. So it does seem you get what you pay for, to a certain extent. But we’ve found that low budget content marketing can be enormously effective, so throwing money at the problem isn’t necessarily the answer.

In general, it seems that marketers are still struggling to become more effective: 36% of respondents said that their biggest challenge was ‘producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers’. And there’s still some difficulty measuring the effectiveness of social media and tailoring campaigns to fit the most useful channels.

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There’s a leap in uptake of content marketing, but confidence that we’re doing it right is lagging. This will partly change naturally, as time goes on and people settle into it. But it will also take effort. And there are other reasons to try harder too.

If everyone’s getting in on content marketing, then the question becomes how the savvy B2B marketer can find a niche to exploit. The obvious answer is to be really, really good at it. That means producing content that matters to people, has real passion, is well-written, well-argued, and well-researched.

Upping your game will raise the standard of content marketing across the board, as everyone competes. In the future, marketers will drive the whole of their business, by generating leads and moving them further down into the sales funnel. For more on our ideal image of the future, read our B2B Marketing Manifesto.

Get the whole report here.

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Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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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 and serving the sales team with collateral support.

The role of B2B marketing within companies has changed and a new marketing mindset is needed to make the most of the new opportunities. The eBook outlines the five imperatives every B2B marketer needs to have sorted before going any further:

Get a world view

Expose your beliefs

Get some chops – and use them

Start thinking and generate relevant ideas

Think beyond digital

Once you’ve got these things, you need to get really good at content marketing, analytics, testing, lead nurturing, search and community. While keeping an eye on mobile. Easy.

Doug Kessler, Velocity’s Creative Director said, “The Manifesto is a bit of a rant and a call to arms for B2B marketers. This is the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer – but it’s just too easy to coast along doing what we’ve always done. The Manifesto is meant to rattle some cages.”

About Velocity

Velocity is the B2B marketing agency for technology companies.

Website: www.velocitypartners.co.uk

Blog: www.velocitypartners.co.uk/our-blog

Twitter: velocitytweets

Contact: Neil@velocitypartners.co.uk

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Ok, I lied. There’s no sex in this post. Adverts, on the other hand, aren’t technically allowed to lie. Back in the 19^th 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 20^th 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.

But there’s no law against bad spelling, grammar, or inaccurate use of terms. I’m one of those people for whom bad spelling and grammar are akin to the screech of nails down the blackboard of my soul. I spent a good 15 minutes staring at two pieces of bad advertising on the Tube this morning:

1) Nintendo DS’s 100 Classic Books. “100 classic novels… from Jane Eyre to Hamlet”.

Hamlet is not a novel. It’s never been a novel. It’s a bloody play, as anyone with half their wits about them knows.

2) Magnum Temptation. “It’s name? Magnum Temptation”.

This kind of thing puts me in danger of injuring myself, such is my righteous ire. There are talented young people out there busting a gut to get into copywriting, and some smug pillock can’t even be bothered to read through his or her own copy and check for grammatical howlers like this one. And, apparently, neither can anyone else in the agency. It’s an insult to the audience, to people who genuinely care about the quality of their work, and to the whole institution of ice-cream -eating. I will never buy a Magnum again.

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Photo credit: Michael Karshis

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Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Copywriting, writing

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No man is an island, entire of itself, especially not on Facebook (that’s the point of it, after all). But increasingly it’s becoming an island to analytics. It’s not alone, either. The shift towards tightly controlled properties such as Facebook or iAd from Apple is going to cause some problems for web analytics, because tracking is that much harder.

Facebook has made a concession to marketers by providing them with its Insights program, which has the added advantage of being free. But it’s not as sophisticated as the kinds of analytics marketers are used to.

But our friends at Econsultancy aren’t worried:

“Are walled gardens as troublesome from an analytics standpoint as they might appear? In my opinion, the answer is no, and there are two primary reasons why:

Many — if not most — companies aren’t looking at platforms like Facebook as standalone, self-contained entities. Oftentimes, they’re using them to drive actions off-platform. For instance, a status update might contain a link to a promotion hosted on the company’s website. Or might entice a user to send a text to participate in a mobile contest. These actions can easily be tracked using an analytics solution of choice.

There’s nothing stopping companies from developing Facebook-based marketing campaigns that are designed to produce actions that take place off of Facebook, and that can therefore be tracked using an analytics solution of choice.”

I have to disagree, at least up to a point. Because while what Econsultancy says is true, it’s only part of the story. Take, for example, fans and fanpages. It’s arguably impossible to know how many fans truly read a brand’s status updates. Can you assume that all the fans will read a brand’s updates? Probably not. So you can’t count them all as impressions. You have no clear idea of the impact your brand is having. You could survey your fans, but surveys are notoriously unreliable. People overestimate, underestimate, forget things, lie. Surveying is only useful to a certain extent, and it wouldn’t be wise to rely on it.

Does it matter? Well, the short answer is yes. The stakes are high, because lots of companies have invested quite a hefty sum of money in their analytics platforms over the past few years. Discovering that you’ve been locked out of the technological party hurts. Luckily for analytics, there’s likely to be somebody working on a way to (figuratively speaking) prise open the bathroom window and sneak in. In the mean time, us analytics fiends will just have to stand outside on the lawn listening to the music.

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Post tags: B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing

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Photo credit: Anoldent

Am I normal?

Ask people about bounce rates and they’ll tell you that a high bounce rate is bad. Fair enough, it sounds pretty logical. You don’t want lots of people taking one look at your site and running away screaming. But how do you know what’s a high bounce rate? What is normal?

Trawl the internet for the answer to this and you’ll find everyone and their Auntie Fanny has an opinion on it, especially B2B marketers. Some people say that anywhere between 15-50% is normal, others that 60% is fine. That rather suggests that there’s no such thing as normal (which, fortunately for this office, is true in so many aspects of life).

The fact is that bounce is rate is highly variable, depending on specific circumstances. It’s too particular to your website to be comparable to anyone else’s. That’s not much help when you’re starting out. In that case you have to take the temperature of your bounce rate at the start and then compare with yourself over time.

Bounce rates are a very useful internal benchmark. But it’s just one tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, it’s not a guaranteed indicator of the health of your website. But, as one forum contributor said: “What should your bounce rate be? Lower than it was yesterday”.

A point to note:

There are occasions when a high bounce rate is a good thing. If you host lots of adverts on your site, you’re likely to get a high bounce rate – especially if the ads are really targeted and relevant. Or similarly if you’re an online publisher you may well get people visiting just one page: an article or a blog post. So the take home message is: stop looking at other people’s bounce rates and don’t panic.

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Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Analytics, SEO, web analytics

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Lots of B2B marketers are fully paid up members of the I ♥ Analytics club, but not everyone’s convinced. One of the reasons for this is that there’s often a surfeit of information that isn’t very informative. B2B marketers drown in too many numbers and statistics, and decide therefore that analytics is a waste of time (thus throwing a very useful baby out with the bathwater).

There are some things you can do to sift the gold nuggets from the river mud:

Don’t just look at the short-term

Short term reporting is quite useful, but you need to keep an eye on long-term trends. As any statistician will tell you, you can’t infer generalizations from snapshots. If you react to some spike in your stream without thinking about its context and the longer view, you’re likely to end up with a knee-jerk reaction that may actually damage your campaign. In fact, the bigger the volume of data, the more accurate your results will be.

Keep it regular

Analytics is like a pint of Guinness – it just can’t be hurried. That means they’ll just have to wait if they want anything approaching accuracy. So don’t grab data at random, even if someone is breathing down your neck about a report they want by yesterday.

Analytics takes a little planning. You need to timetable a regular round of data collection from each stream. This must be done consistently: say, always at 11.30 on a Tuesday morning. That way you’re comparing like with like, as far as possible.

It’s true, analytics can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. But that’s not the fault of the system, it’s the fault of the operator. So if your analytics isn’t playing ball, it’s probably because you’ve done something wrong. As comfortable to admit as a wooden clog up the jaxie, sure, but that’s the way it goes. B2B marketing can be cruel.

Photo credit: Munksynz

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Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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Photo credit: Dan the Man

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)

Apparently DEFRA, the Department of Health, and others, have been resorting to paid search and running up large bills. So far, so what? “Government department squanders cash on pointless marketing” is hardly news. They’ve been doing it for years. Every time someone fancies some new departmental pencils they embark on a rebranding exercise. It’s practically law.

The BBC helpfully tries to explain what paid search is, and gets it wrong: “Organisations can pay search engines to ensure their websites appear at the top of users’ searches. They are often charged for each person who accesses their sites via the link.”

Often? How about “always”? I don’t know a single search engine that doesn’t charge by the click. They certainly don’t do it for free.

But aside from the BBC’s poor research skills, the real scandal here is that government departments are using PPC advertising at all. They don’t need to. All they need is to do some serious SEO work and optimize the bejesus out of their web pages. Then they’ll get to the top of Google without having to resort to expensive PPC. As it is, this is the internet equivalent of dad dancing: the government trying to get down wit’ der kidz by using SEO techniques and getting it wrong.

But what really got my goat, tied it up and did unspeakable things to it was Tory MP Damian Hinds’ reaction to these figures:

“Of course there are times and subjects when getting the information out there is an absolute imperative.

“But in general I don’t see why government departments should spend large sums improving their showing on search engines.

“I would have thought the search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find.”

Pardon? “Search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find”? You might have thought that search engines should act as a government mouthpiece Damian, but you would have been wrong.

A search engine is not a library catalogue. They’re a commercial concern, and for all that Google massages its own ego by propounding its fatuous motto “Don’t be evil”, it’s ruled by naked commercialism. Public service doesn’t come into it. If I ring up NHS Direct, I expect to be given impartial advice because it’s a public body. If I ring up GlaxoSmithKline and recount my symptoms to them, I expect to be sold something (or to be hung up on).

Search engines don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, because they don’t have one (something a politician should relate to). They’re refreshingly amoral: anyone can buy their services, and that applies equally to governments, arms dealers, purveyors of hardcore pornography, and charities. But the operative word in that sentence is “buy”.

Whining that official information should get special treatment goes against the free market nature of the web, and besides, it’s a specious (and slightly alarming) argument. Government propaganda should come first? Henry Elliss made an excellent point about this on Econsultancy’s blog:

If the Government want priority-listing in search engines, what happens when the next election comes along? Do the incumbent party get first dibs on the top results for searches like “Immigration” and “Job losses”?

It’s a short step from automatic priority listing for government information to censorship. Of course, some would argue that it’s for our own good, but personally as a fairly autonomous adult, I’d like to be able to make my own mind up. And it’s my considered opinion that Damian Hinds is a halfwit.

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Post tags: B2B marketing, SEO, Social Media

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