In our bumper edition Xmas newsletter, you’ll find:

A super-shiny new White Paper, ‘The Hierarchy of Benefits‘, which identifies one of the most important phenomena in B2B marketing: the inverse relationship between credibility and perceived value.

A recap of an old favourite, ‘Marketing Through the Hype Cycle‘, which explains how to work within the ‘Hype Cycle’ framework described by those clever boffins at Gartner.

A ‘best of the best’ roundup of Velocity blog posts from the past couple of months, including:  a discussion about Microsoft’s (strangely odd) ‘I’m a PC’ ad campaign; a hitchiker’s guide to essential web marketing tools; help on naming things properly; and some good excuses to create a social networking platform in a B2B environment.

In addition, we introduce you to all the new faces here at Velocity HQ – including nice guys Neil and Lee; plus a quick roundup of all the client love we’ve been generating lately (hint: great things happening at dotMobi, Psion Teklogix, and Secerno.

Excited!?  hell, we are!  Go grab it now…

Meantime, happy holidays one and all.  Have fun.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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And since clients never fail to throw flowers at our feet when we’re done explaining it, we thought we’d turn it into a new Velocity Paper free to the first thousand people to download it (and the next thousand too).

The paper identifies one of the most important phenomena in B2B marketing: the inverse relationship between credibility and perceived value… but we’ll let you discover that for yourself.

If you read nothing else today, read this new paper and put its ideas into practice by lunchtime.

Other things that might change your life…

Our Marketing Through the Hype Cycle paper

We mentioned this in the last newsletter, but Gartner has since picked up on it and, instead of suing our asses, they’ve recommended it in their blog. So now you really should download and read it.

The only B2B Marketing Blog you’ll ever need

Well, ‘need’ may be a bit strong, but more and more B2B marketers are finding it a useful challenge to conventional wisdom. Recent posts include:

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town
Roger’s excellent blog post that brings together all the online apps and widgets we use to pimp our clients’ SEO, pay-per-click campaigns and content marketing.

The importance of naming things
A quick post on why we like words with TM after them, like Boswelox^TM, Pentapeptides^TM or Nutrillium^TM.

Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign
And why we think it’s a really, really embarrassing mistake.

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in B2B
Are you using social networks yet? If you’re in doubt, think ‘micro-facilitation’ and ‘macro-facilitation’.

The Power of Mobile Marketing
Marketing to mobile phones is taking off in a big way. We think it’ll be bigger than the desktop web. We’re also doing our bit to make that prediction come true by creating our blog to stay on top of it.

Meantime…

The Velocity family grows

B2B marketing heavyweight Neil Stoneman has joined us from his role as thought leadership supremo at BT Global Services. Need to lead some thoughts? Drop Neil a line.

We’ve also lured in a recent design graduate named Lee Hosford who’s working directly with Stuart Rothwell, our Senior Designer. Lee has oodles of talent and scads of enthusiasm. We like oodles and scads.

The Velocity client list grows

We couldn’t hire all these talented people if clients didn’t keep coming back for more. We’re excited about new projects for dotMobi, ipaccess, Econsultancy and ShipServ and thrilled to welcome some great new clients including:

Psion Teklogix – makers of rugged PDAs and mobile computers that make mobile workers more productive (and happy).

Secerno – the gurus of Active Database Control – an intelligent security perimeter around any database (very cool technology).

Plus a sexy annual report for Portrait Software, done together with RMA.

Thanks for reading. Until next time…

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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It deals with the fact that most technology companies are run by smart, technical engineering types – and these folks are pre-disposed to take a running jump from tech-speak to Big Business Benefits when tackling their corporate positioning and corporate message development projects.

In doing so, they’re approaching things in the same way that Evel Knievel used to approach the Snake River Canyon — because they recognise how far away the Land of Really Meaningful Business Benefits is from the World of Technology.  And the result is predictable:  they fall down.

The truth is, companies can’t leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits when describing themselves.  They have to build a bridge between them.  Better still, they need to swing across this ‘benefits chasm’ on a Vine.

And that’s what this new Velocity white paper is all about. It’s a killer set of diagrams and best practice advice for slaying any daredevil message and positioning pretensions you may have.

You can download it today, FREE, via:
http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2008/11/25/tech-benefits-recipes-for-corporate-positioning-and-corporate-message-development/

About Velocity

Velocity is the consulting-led B2B marketing agency for the Interweb era, specialising in technology. Projects range from strategic consulting to marketing acceleration programs to digital engagement campaigns that include through-the-line content, creative, websites, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising and web analytics. Clients include dotMobi, Gartner, ShipServ, Clearswift, ip.access.

For further information about Velocity, see:   http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk

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Post tags: B2B marketing, Benefits, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, credibility, Mobile Marketing, Relevance, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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Neil joins us from a two-year stint at BT Global Services where he drove the company’s thought leadership programmes. Before BT, he had B2B tech experience with two agencies, Brodeur, and Now Communications, which he helped set up in 2002.

Neil’s been thrown straight into leading our effort on two key digital clients, handheld PC leader Psion Teklogix and IPTV player Amino.

“When I used to run Brodeur back in the dying years of the last century, I earmarked Neil as someone I wanted to work with again”, said Stan Woods, Velocity’s MD. “I’m thrilled it’s finally happened.”

About Velocity

Velocity is the consulting-led B2B marketing agency for the Interweb era, specialising in technology. Projects range from strategic consulting to marketing acceleration programs to digital engagement campaigns that include through-the-line content, creative, websites, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising and web analytics. Clients include dotMobi, Gartner, ShipServ, Clearswift, ip.access.

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They’ve actually been around for a while, under the guise of ‘forums’ ….But this new breed of FaceBook’ish tools that we’re now using are a little more sophisticated in terms of functionality:  they provide a bunch of extra widgets to help us throw sheep at one another, give people minute-to-minute status updates and generally stay in touch.  In other words, they’re built more strongly around sociability.

So how can this new-fangled stuff work in a B2B environment?  Well, you can start thinking about creating more ‘social’ platforms and content as PR tools that can be used by interested parties – staff, customers, partners, etc – for  facilitating dialogue, spreading your messages and enabling you to manage your relationships in new ways.

This can be done at both the micro level and the macro level.  Here’s some broad brush ideas….

Social Networking Micro-Facilitation

• Make your content easy to link to and/or embed in other people’s sites and online profiles.  For example, rather than solely hosting and branding your own video, think of the benefit of using YouTube as well:  aside from giving you another potential audience, YouTube outputs code snippets which allow people to feature your content on their web sites.  The same goes for images on Flickr, presentation material with SlideShare, and so on…
• Make it easy to bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites by including aggregation tools within your content, like ‘AddThis‘.  (In turn, these social bookmarking sites will make your content more available to other people.)
• Render your content assets in a ‘Widget’ format, so that others can access it and feature it on their own sites as (for example) a sidebar feature.  There are now a ton of interesting widget-ization services available, many of which are free and do the work for you if you’re creating simple tools:  see WidgetBox, for example.
• If you can find the right angle, create more sophisticated widgets or applications to feature on other Social Networking platforms.  For example, recruitment is a great social application that’s enjoyed early success on Facebook and others thanks to these platform’s innate viral properties (‘pass it on’, ‘recommend a friend’, etc)..

Social Networking Macro-Facilitation

• Create a ‘user generated’ FAQ section or forum for your site, or create a profile via a hosted service like Get Satisfaction.  Allow your customers and partners to engage directly with you and others on support issues.
• Create your own Social Networking platform for specific activities via hosted tools like Ning, or other Open Source social networking tools.  Good applications for Social Networking environments include:  events management (allow people to meet and greet online); education or training (host your coursework in an interactive space and have people mark it up, amend and improve it); and best practise hubs (share your tips, tricks and insights in information-hungry or ‘expert’ environments)

The above examples show you how easy it is to engage in new dialogues, manage relationships in new ways and to help other people to spread the word on your behalf.

That said, it’s important to identify the right kinds of application for using social media.  ‘Build it and they will come’ is a dangerous mantra in this field.  Just because you have an audience and a brand, you can’t expect folks to automatically care for your latest social networking marvel.  The most successful applications of social networking in the B2B space tend to be those that are focused and designed to support a specific activity or application – eg, events support, customer support, and the like.

So, enough of the theory.  Go experiment….!  (And please do share your experiences with us!)

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Online PR, Social Media, Social Networking, Web Marketing

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Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, SEO, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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The fault usually lies in believing our own hype:  in assuming that the things that get us all lathered up are the same things that get customers, web searchers and reporters excited too.  More often than not this is simply not the case.  The fact that your widget has successfully passed a beta test phase for version 11.5.2 is probably of interest to only five people in this world – and four of them are likely to be sat in the same cubicle as you.

And even if you do know you’re on to a hot thing, how often are we wise enough to factor market forces into the planning process?  We might be selling very hot cakes indeed, but if everyone else is too then it’ll be extremely hard to make ourselves seen and heard.

In practice, it takes a great mind to fathom this stuff.  The skills for getting it right aren’t really marketing skills per se, they’re more about being a good salesperson.

The trick is to get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to reach, and to understand the competition for their mindshare… and only then to figure out what it is that you’re going to write or produce and how you’re going to distribute it.

Good salespeople do this all the time.  They have a keen appreciation of things like ‘pitch angles’, ‘buying cycles’, ‘competitors’ and ‘budgets’ (or someone’s ability to cough up cash)…. all of which requires a great handle on the pulse of the marketplace.  Conversely in marketing, when it comes to generating new ideas for content, we’re more likely to organise a 30 minute brainstorm meeting, then neck a Diet Coke (or three) and start hammering away at the keyboard.

This approach is not good.  It can result in a bunch of boring, irrelevant deliverables or things that are destined never to be heard amongst a sea of white noise (and sometimes both!).  Worst of all, doing things this way nearly always represents a gamble in terms of time, money and resources – since we have no idea if there will ever be a realistic market out there for our new-fangled stuff.

The salesperson’s trick is to know the pitch thoroughly and to have researched the market well enough to know whether she will be wasting her time – before setting off.   Now whilst it isn’t always possible for us marketers to do an in-depth analysis of our customers – reporters, web site visitors, etc – there are some great new tools that we can use to make our work more scientific.

Over the summer months Google released a stack  of (FREE!) new search marketing research tools to help us understand what the web is interested in.  Their Keyword Suggest tool is primarily designed to help people make better decisions about keywords for Google Adwords (Pay Per Click / PPC) campaigns, but it’s also an very valuable app for researching the popularity of our content offers and the language that we use to describe them, as well as understanding our competition.

For example, I’m thinking of creating a new white paper on ‘mobile marketing’ to help me go and sell to mobile marketing-type people.  What Google Suggest tells me is that there’s a healthy number of people searching for this term – approximately 31,000 per month right now.  But if I run a normal Google search on the phrase I also find that I’m up against approximately 33 million other web pages who are also interested in marketing ideas, products or services in the same area.

Alternatively, a bit of research on the phrase ‘mobile promotions’ gives me 1,600 searchers per month and just over 1 million competing web pages; and ‘mcommerce’ gives me an audience of around 900 per month and only a million or so competing pages.

Now assuming that my budget is limited, I have some valuable new information to play with.  I know that it’s going to be far more cost-effective to create content offers around ideas and phrases such as ‘mcommerce’ than ‘mobile marketing’: and, whilst the general thread of my piece may not be radically different from what I’d originally planned, if I optimise the content around these new ideas I stand a far higher chance of engaging with people through search (because my corresponding web page will be fighting it out for the top spots on Google with only one million other pages, as opposed to 33 million.)

In addition, I might just find I have a bunch of new angles to play with.  Let’s say I decide that ‘mcommerce’ is a different kettle of fish to plain old ‘mobile marketing’ – as mcommerce speaks to buying and selling over a phone, whilst ‘marketing’ may be more about finding and influencing people.  Hey presto!  Another rich – and marketable – seam of content ideas is opened up.  Further, this angle might just ring a few new and meaningful bells for the piece, as it’s the importance of the transactional capabilities of the mobile web that my sales guys have been banging on about for the past six months……

With Google to play with there’s really no excuse for inventing our content plays in a vacuum.  Pulling useful research data from the interweb has never been easier, and it ought to make our work more effective.  So buff your pitch up.  A 30 second stint of research might make your content efforts go a whole lot further than you thought….

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Keywords, SEO, Web Marketing

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As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief – around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it – this globbet of content is really, really important – this is your ‘sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky – use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better – your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, SEO, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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This is our latest and greatest project on WordPress. Those super smart investment guys at Kennet – whose funds assist great tech firms such as Clearswift (also a Velocity client), Kapow and Daptiv – asked us earlier this year to help them revamp their corporate positioning and give their web site a lick of paint.

Well, here she is: a totally new web presence for a totally different technology Venture Capital fund. We like to think we nailed this one – in fact we’re super proud. Although it’s a small site, it’s deeply layered with some luscious design and content touches that set it apart from the competition as a thinking man’s investment firm.

In fact, we can vouch for this first hand. We’ve worked real close with Kennet’s senior team over the past few months to get it off the ground. So, big thanks to Max Bleyleben (check his blog on the European VC scene here) and the crew for being so clued up and game for trying something a little different.

Credits:

Strategy, words, direction and project management: Velocity
Design: Tourist
Development and implementation: Two Thirty

Warm glows all round.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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Download this B2B Technology Marketing White Paper in pdf Format

We’ve always been mildly allergic to the reductive matrices, models and quadrants peddled by the analysts, but we’ve come to recognise a ring of truth to the Gartner Hype Cycle. The Hype Cycle maps a curve that describes the way new technologies become adopted by the marketplace over time.

Few companies actually ride the entire curve. Rather, the curve describes the trajectory of a technology. Companies tend to enter and fall off the curve as time passes. Only the biggest (with the deepest pockets and the most diversified product portfolio) usually ride the entire length.

Gartner has named the five parts of the curve and identified the dynamics specific to each segment or ‘phase’.

Over the years, we’ve worked with companies competing in each of these five phases. And we’ve learned that the way you market needs to change depending on where you are on the Hype Cycle.

Here’s what we mean (Gartner’s own description is in bold, ours in normal text):

The five phases

1. “Technology Trigger”

The breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.

Very few new products or new companies are lucky enough (or visionary enough) to launch a new Hype Curve. But when Venus aligns with Mars and you find yourself associated with the Next Big Thing, it’s good to take a view on the roller-coaster ahead.

The marketing challenge during the Trigger stage is not just to get on the map, but to draw the map. To stake out the terrain for the market in way that favours you.

For CRM to be born, Siebel had to create and sell the vision.

For ERP to take hold, SAP had to evangelise the hell out of it.

Our client, Magus, is pioneering Website Quality Monitoring by defining the web quality landscape and showing how monitoring is the missing (but essential) piece.

This is pure thought leadership. To win, you need to become a firehose of content: white papers, conference speeches, Powerpoint mountains, analyst briefings, interviews, brochures, websites and microsites, videos, case studies… everything you’ve got.

And it all has to pound away on a very simple story: this is the problem; this is why it can’t be solved with the current approaches; this is how we solve it; this is what it’s called; this is why we’re perfectly placed to seize this opportunity.

During this stage, you need your vision and your story to win. You also need to your language to win. In new markets, nothing has a name yet. If you’re there early, you need your names to be adopted by the industry.

This means trademarking the proprietary technologies and products that you need to own but also creating some terms that you’re happy to release to the market (like CRM or ERP) – making sure that your name is welded to this new generic term.

2. “Peak of Inflated Expectations”

In which a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

As the market ascends to this peak, it’s important to balance your bold, exciting vision with practical, realistic solutions that can be bought into right away.

By all means, paint the pretty pictures of the future you’re helping bring about, but don’t forget: every vision has an equal and opposite reaction. Keep your marketing feet on the ground and sell your tactical solutions alongside your big story.

The first big wins for CRM were really just providing a single view of the customer that could be exploited by other applications.

The first big wins for ERP were fairly prosaic efficiencies in billing and inventory control.

Its also essential in this phase to align yourself with the over-hyped category while hedging your bets and creating a unique space that can survive the imminent market rejection of your vision.

You do need to associate your company with the hot new thing, but you also need to stand for something uniquely yours so you maintain control over your destiny. Live by the hype, die by the hype.

At its peak nothing was hotter than the Application Service Provider (ASP) market. But the hype preceded the industry’s ability to deliver on its promise (things like bandwidth, security and viable business models just weren’t in place).

Ip.access (yes, another Velocity client) is riding the femtocell market surge but is preparing for the coming Trough. They know that until the early field trial results are in, femtocells can’t leap to the Slope of Enlightenment. They’re executing a brilliant thought leadership strategy that manages expectations and positions them as the experts in femtocells (they’re also making money on another product line to fund themselves through the Trough).

The Peak is a good time for case studies, testimonials, editorial excerpts, awards and other credibility builders. Partly to address the skeptics who resist all hype waves and partly to prepare for the upcoming Trough…

3. “Trough of Disillusionment”

Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.

We’ve seen excellent companies with great technologies left bewildered as the market gets pulled out from under them.

Usually, as the Hype Cycle shows, this rejection is temporary and over-stated. It’s the pendulum swinging too far before coming back to the sensible centre.

If you played the Peak right, you should have some marketing assets to take you through the Trough. If not, and you find that you company name is synonymous with the rejected category, your choices are limited:

• Duke it out – Keep evangelizing like mad; counter every objection; double your media relations and analyst relations efforts; find those early adopter champions and promote every success.
• Jump ship – Mothball Plan A and re-invent yourself.
• Hybernate a bit – Reduce the burn rate, live on your wits and wait for the market to re-discover the power of your offer.
• Rename everything – a new category, a new product set, new promises… it won’t fool many but it helps keep morale up.

If, during the Peak phase, you took our advice and sowed the seeds of something apart from the hyped category, now is the time to focus on these assets. Make them what you’re all about. Go back to the core benefits and re-spin them in your new light. But always keep your stake in the temporarily discredited vision. It will be back.

Do it right and the brand values you build during the Peak and Trough will transfer neatly into “Vision, Take Two: the Enlightenment”.

Sonitor (a Velocity client) makes an ultrasound-based alternative to RFID for use in hospitals. They rode the RFID wave until it crashed, but stuck to their ultrasound message. They’re perfectly placed to exploit the market’s disillusionment with RFID and demonstrate a better way.

When the early CRM implementations proved disappointing, dozens of the vendors that had rushed in, turned tail and re-invented themselves as niches within the CRM eco-system. In doing so, they stopped asking prospects to buy the whole vision and got them to shell out for some specific apps with a new spin: they worked.

Our client ShipServ was the last e-marketplace standing in the maritime industry (there were over 60 during the dotcom bubble). They kept their costs down, focused on one small but indisputable benefit (process efficiencies) and kept selling.

4. “Slope of Enlightenment”

Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.

The ASP vision was right all along. Now it’s called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and it’s owned by the application vendors themselves (not by third party platform players).

Only the biggest and best-run companies actually survive the Trough and get to enjoy the Slope. More often, new vendors emerge to ride the fun part of the Hype Curve while the originators curse them from the sidelines.

How you market during the Slope of Enlightenment depends on how you got there. If you’re a survivor of the Trough, you’ve got cases to peddle and stories to tell. All you need to do is re-discover your confidence (the most under-rated asset in marketing) and tell your story with attitude and energy.

ShipServ survived the Trough and is now enjoying a fantastic surge as the original vision becomes a reality. Now they’re attacking the market with total confidence.

If you’re a new player, hopping on board during the Slope, congratulations, you’ve mastered the other critical asset: timing (sometimes called luck). Your challenge is to make up for your lack of customers and case stories with a crystal clear vision that matches the accelerating market.

Salesforce.com helped revive CRM by turning it into a SaaS model. The world was ready for SaaS (and for practical CRM).

Marketing during the Slope phase is less about pure evangelism and more about differentiation, confidence and credibility. About supporting your claims with facts, case studies and testimonials and demonstrating momentum by generating a constant stream of news.

It’s also time to position yourself as the blue-chip supplier of the new technology. New competitors will be rushing back in. You need to be seen as the safe pair of hands. The ones who really get this stuff. Think white papers, speaking opportunities, eBooks…

5. “Plateau of Productivity”

In which the benefits of a technology become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations.

A plateau doesn’t sound like a very exciting destination after all that suffering. Gartner could have chosen a better term for this phase, but you get the idea: this is what Geoffrey Moore and the Chasm Mafia call the Mainstream Market.

Marketing on the Plateau is what most tech companies are doing right now. Trying to differentiate themselves while still evangelising the generic benefits of the new category. The Plateau is al about earning attention and rewarding that attention with real insight into the challenges of the buyer. Nothing new here (but never easy either).

Service-Oriented Architectures went from the hottest thing in the hot competition to a deadly silence… then emerged as pretty much the only way to build software and infrastructures.

Marketing on the Plateau may sound like a maintenance job but actually, it needs to be just as creative and visionary as any other stage. The idea is to differentiate with new spins on the same basic themes and issues that have now been accepted by the market.

Often, this comes as different vendors specialise in different areas of the market, building out the offer, deepening the technology, adding features and functions. It’s a could time to seize a niche and own it.

Portrait Software couldn’t win against big CRM but it could specialise in Customer Interaction Management – the point where CRM actually touches the customer.

As Web Content Management matures, EPiServer is becoming a leader in web marketing applications that can be driven from within the content management system.

Change your tune to suit the dance

So the role of marketing changes as a company or an industry progresses through the Hype Cycle. But there are a few constants that apply through all five phases:

• Thought Leadership is always essential
  The winners are the ones with the best ideas and the best stories crafted to deliver those ideas. It’s always a good time to take a strong view on the marketplace and present that view clearly and compellingly.

• Content really is king
  To even hope to shape the changing debate, you need to keep the content coming. Not the promotional bumf, the practical, useful, visionary content grounded in real market experience.Papers, demos, e-Books, presentations, videos, podcasts, blogs, microsites… you really can’t do too much of this stuff.

• Build a community
  As your ecosystem evolves, you’re stronger if you can get yourself into the centre of a growing community of insiders. To do that, you often need to create the community.Hold events, start an open forum, publish a wiki, recruit subscribers to your thought leadership material, get a social network going or exploit the existing ones… The Hype Cycle can be a lonely place. Build your believer base through all five phases.

• Master the art of search
  We could do a paper on the changing role of search engines through the phases of the Hype Cycle. But for now it’s enough to say that search plays an important role in all phases and a disproportional role in Phases 1, 2 and 4.Get yourself an agency partner that really gets search engine marketing, can analyse your current performance and recommend specific actions to improve it (here’s one we prepared earlier).

Experienced technology marketers will recognise all of the above. And we’ve said much of it before in different ways. But the Hype Cycle can be a new way to think about the marketing challenges you face right now and can throw new light on your priorities.

The important thing to take away is that your company does not have to be the victim of Hype Cycle forces. You can do things to control your destiny by getting the right stories to the market at the right times.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
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