All posts by Roger Warner

Expedia Affiliate Network

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Re-positioning a market leader to sharpen their story, target three key sectors and produce great content.

Velocity December Newsletter: Tech-speak, feature-talk or benefit babble?

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We see this one all the time. A tech company that’s great at describing its technology but not so great at making the story compelling to prospects. Or a company that waves a big, bold benefit flag – that nobody pays any attention to.When we see marketing problems like these, we reach for one of [...]

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in a B2B Environment

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How can Social Networking work in a B2B environment? Well, you can start thinking about creating more ‘social’ content as PR tools that can be used by people for facilitating dialogue, spreading your messages and enabling you to manage relationships in new ways.

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town

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Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general….

Buff Your Pitch Up. Google Suggest & B2B Content Marketing

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Often we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’. In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of trying to grab people’s attention. The fault usually lies in believing our own hype. Here’s some Google-inspired ideas on how to avoid falling into the trap…

Quick Start Pimp Your Content Guide to SEO

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I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb…. Read on for a super-simple guide to pimping your content to search engines.

Riding the Hype Cycle

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A marketer’s guide to Gartner’s Hype Cycle – how you market depends on where you are on the curve.

Marketers everywhere – get a little mobiThinking

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…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but not as you know it.)

Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

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We’ve been beavering away over the past few weeks on an important new campaign for one of our shiny new clients in the mobile internet space. It’s a fascinating area – full of over-hype and under-delivery a few years ago; now ripe and ready for prime time…

New Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter Available!

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The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to make your marketing activity really drive new sales…

Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter May 2008

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What Your Sales Team Says About You Behind Your Back Sales people think marketers are wankers. Marketers think sales people are ham-fisted brutes. This antipathy is a major reason that so much B2B marketing is so… mediocre. Your friends at Velocity have just published a short, sharp paper on this topic. It’s called Marketing, meet [...]

The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

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This Mind Map gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and – once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site – follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations…

B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win

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For B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits. Here’s why…

Love Writing? Love Tech? Love Marketing?

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We’re in hiring mode once again. We’re a fast-growing, insanely ambitious B2B agency specialising in technology markets. We need a copywriter who can turn dry technology into compelling stories…

Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

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Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come. Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts…

ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

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We’re proud to say that shipserv.com launched successfuly this morning. May all who sail in her find reasonably priced shipping supplies from a broad (and competitive) selection of maritime vendors….

New White Paper Available: How to PPC in B2B

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Hey! We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment. It’s hot, hot, hot! Here’s a snippet…

How to PPC in B2B: Five Rules for Effective Lead Generation

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Pay per Click (PPC) is manna for marketers who operate in hotly contested B2C markets like online gaming. But what about the rest of us? If you’re struggling to use PPC effectively in a B2B environment, then we have some answers…

Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation

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I just returned from a great week away in the Lower Hebrides – the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already. None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

Keywords: how to build an effective strategy in B2B

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We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why – to explain what separates a good keyword strategy from a stinker. I thought I’d share a bit of the thinking with you…

Whose Tipping Point is it Anyway? A B2B Perspective…

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There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed. It’s compelling stuff, but what’s the point of ‘tipping’ and the pursuit of ‘influencers’ in a B2B environment..?

Tweakonomics: Why B2B Marketing Agency Retainers Suck

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This post hereby announces the death of the good old monthly agency retainer. Tweakonomics is what you should be using to pay for your marketing services – it’s what we advocate for all our clients. Let me explain…

The Couch Potato is Dead

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‘Digital Proposition Management for on-demand entertainment’ can sound abstract (if you’re not an IPTV firm). So Velocity did something different for AssetHouse…

Pico-Branding: New Rules for Marketing

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How does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging, and every other web 2.0 BlaBla service change what we need to be doing in marketing, and what are the concepts that matter? If you really want to know then read on…

B2B web marketing trends for 2008

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Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms…

Why Blog in B2B? The Final Word…

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The ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B – and nowhere more so than here at Velocity. Our conclusion: the biggest and best reason to blog in the B2B space is because – if it’s done properly – it’s a relationship winner…

How NOT to sell yourself online

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I was just uploading some images to our Flickr stream when I caught sight of the one of the most useless, intrusive banners of all time…

Sites we like: Flickr Tag Browser

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Normally the idea of an unconventional navigation scheme makes my skin crawl, but this is outstanding because it’s so slick and central to the tool…

Why Web Usability Matters

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You know the scene. You or your boss thought it’d be great idea to build a new web site and it’s the first planning meeting. Across the table someone shouts: ‘No! It’s gotta feel sharp!’

12 Days Later: SEO Velocity Style – Get Results Quick!

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Yes, we’re a living lab, practising what we preach and telling you all about it. 12 days ago I blogged about our (re)birth as a presence on Google. Today, we’re #2 on our key term ‘B2B technology marketing agency’ on Google.com (that’s right .com!). Here’s what happened in the interim…

What’s the freakin’ (Power)point!!??

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What’s the point of Powerpoint? A crutch to help you through an uncomfortable challenge (public speaking)? A useful visual aid to convey stories? A pain in the butt, killed to death, hackneyed, eyesore, head-f**k for boring people to death?

A letter from Mr Al Fayed. It’s how you say it that counts….

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I was doing some long overdue filing this morning and came across the following letter….a response to a misguided mass mailer that inadvertently invited Mr Al Fayed of Harrods to a seminar in London on the subject of (eek!) open source software… Pin It

x5 reasons to blog

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That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em: Improved SEO – a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search engine spiders will pick up on this activity, register it and re-index your site with greater frequency. Blogging also gives you the opportunity to create new [...]

What’s in a (domain) name – part deux

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See here another list of domain naming snafu’s. Note to all – before you book that domain name, write it down on a piece of paper and scan it real quick. Then think again. If an obscene thought doesn’t spring to mind, you’re free to go…. 1. “Who Represents” is where you can find the [...]

Reasons a business should blog a lot…

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I’ve just read an interesting piece in this month’s Wired magazine on the subject of blogging. I’ve written elsewhere about the various benefits of blogs as early product conversations, focus groups and general sounding boards amongst a tight knit community, but here’s another thought….reputation management. Reputation management is a hackneyed term amongst PR folk who [...]

How (Not) to do email marketing

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Another great post from the “Permission Marketing” guru, Seth Godin. Basic rules for email relationships with customers/prospects – don’t go too quickly, but do try harder (than the next guy). Pin It

What makes a good web site?

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Originality, originality, originality!!! See “No One Belongs Here More than You”, a promotional site for Miranda July’s book. Now, I know its SEO will suck because it’s all images and no text, but I bet you it’s getting a lot of traffic and interest anyways. Pin It

Web 2.Over?

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Check out this piece from Peter Rip, of Crosslink Capital, a VC firm from Silicon Valley. It’s a nice summary of what legs the ‘web 2.0′ movement now has left…. And I guess he ought to know, being one of the guys that’s funding all of this shiny new stuff. His main point is that [...]

What’s in a (Domain) Name?

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It’s usually best to think these things through – in this instance by writing a url string down on paper before getting hitched to it. God knows, the penny MUST have dropped when the name was purchased – ie, BEFORE they spent all their hard-earned on creating a web site that to the rest of [...]