Social Success: a new content site for Salesforce.com
February 2nd, 2012 <...by Doug Kessler
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…
Should we still be talking about the B2B marketing funnel?
January 23rd, 2012 <...by Ryan SkinnerI’m thinking we should give up on the funnel. But what would life post-funnel look like?
The funnel seems kind of wobbly these days. Here’s why:
No buyer wants to think he’s in a funnel.
It doesn’t align with how buyers feel like they approach a purchase. Can we say a model is good if the protagonist of the story dislikes it?
You’re not in charge.
In a market characterized by information surplus and driven by search, social and rich content signals, the buyer owns the rhythm. Not the seller.
Buyers don’t proceed. They swirl.
The stages in the funnel (defining a need, drawing up a shortlist, etc.) just don’t sync with purchase journeys anymore. Buyers don’t do linear. They circle.
You don’t have time for mapping.
The funnel model assumes that there are some absolutes, that the ground isn’t shifting underneath the market. In fact, all is in flux.
Buyers’ journeys don’t just end.
The funnel assumes that there’s a pool of people called the market who don’t know you, and that your job is done once they’ve bought your product. “Plop! You’ve gone through the funnel.”
There are smarter people than me who have been saying much the same thing for years, like Steven Noble of Forrester, MarketingProfs and countless others who say the sales funnel is dead. They replace the funnel with flows, maps, nets, circles and webs – everyone wants to own the next model.
Does the death of the funnel apply to the big B2B decisions? Yes. We have piles of information from trillions of sources – this applies just as well to the professional as the personal world. Industrial tumult is just as strong as consumer tumult, if not stronger.
The funnel was a model for storekeepers. The top of the funnel was the street. Then the funnel led into their shop, browsing, comparing, asking questions and then going to the register. The current model needs to be crafted on an Italian piazza. Consumers bounce in and out and all over the place, asking countless questions, listening in to conversations, examining and gossiping.
Funnels don’t do bouncy very well.
So what’s the fallout of a post-funnel world?
If the funnel doesn’t fit well with buyer behaviour, then the tools based on this model won’t work. Prospects who don’t act like they’re in a funnel will get treated in ways that don’t suit their actual intent. Vendors seem to be racing to address this, but it’s a tough move, as many were built up on the foundations of funnel thinking.
Funnel-based content will start to feel funny. That one case study that applies to that one particular part of the theoretical buyer journey goes flat. It feels faked, forced, one-dimensional and lame to buyers who have a three-dimensional view of the market.
Efforts to push prospects through a funnel process meet resistance. Marketers who push themselves on webinar attendees to read the next piece of corporate literature fail. Prospects can see through tired funnel-driven tactics. They’re not buying escalation.
That’s a start anyway.
So what would I do, post-funnel?
I’d start by thinking facilitation. No matter where you think you have a prospect, you don’t. You. Don’t. Have. Them. They’re in charge. You’re just facilitating them. Help them. Don’t push, and don’t play games. To hell with your sales quotas. But do get serious when they get serious.
Build out your non-linear expeditionary forces. Buy a blogger breakfast. No joke. These independent expert-istas are the developing gauge of influence in a noisy market. They are the conversational coin in the new media bazaar. And don’t send them emails studded with your opinions and product news. Buy them breakfast. Lunch? Drinks? Then chat.
Think non-competitive business development. Start partnering with people who are in your space, but who you don’t compete with, to develop content, events, staff trades and such. A pretty clever marketer named Joe Chernov said: “When you are the only one tweeting about your infographic, you probably blew the execution.”
Assume you don’t know where people are coming from. When someone lands on a page of your website, do not think you know why they came there, or that you know what they’re looking for. Be humble. Offer choices. Like this:
Those are my ideas anyway. Do you have any of your own?
B2B content marketing: when target audiences clash
November 23rd, 2011 <...by Doug KesslerMarketers are instinctively inclusive. Our default is to set our crop-sprayer on the widest possible setting, covering the largest possible audience for everything we do.
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.
Closing The Kimono: Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign
June 20th, 2011 <...by Neil StonemanIt’s a bittersweet day at Velocity. I can confirm the rumours are true: Project Open Kimono has – until we bring it back at least – come to an end.
The project has been our commitment to showing business value from our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign. If you’ve been following then you’ll be familiar with the ‘warts and all’ B2B analytics case studies we’ve published along the way.
It’s been great fun but now – after a long campaign and an equivalent budget spend of £25,000 (made up of our time and a dabble of a few hundred quid in PPC experiments) – comes the definitive wrap-up post for the first six months. Did we fulfill our promise of last year? Or have we been hoist by our own petard?
Let’s find out.
Business Goals
Conversions
We set two new business targets.
Two projects from new clients
We’ve smashed this target. We’re sure the likes of Baynote and AppCentral will be happy to rubber-stamp the fact.
Three projects from existing clients
Another tick in the box. We loved welcoming Magus and Elateral back into the office for new campaigns and projects.
So what’s that in actual ROI terms? I talked to the guys huddled by the company abacus and they assured me the top line return is running at 700% plus. One of them actually smiled (rare for an abacus guy).
But what about the bottom line? Well, the figure of 175% (hat tip to the Lenskold Group) after only six months makes some pretty tidy reading.
Business Pipeline
We also set a target of fresh fuel for lead nurturing campaigns.
Gather 200 names for our database
A slam dunk. Of the thousands of new contacts, we added 392 names that meet our criteria (demographic and psychographic) to our prospect database. The others are still in our wider list of ‘people we’re happy to know’.
We expect a future ROI boost as our B2B lead nurturing campaigns work their magic and turn prospects into future sources of revenue. The pipeline’s rumbling.
So the job’s a good one and, if we’re writing a senior management report, we would probably stop here.
But if you’re keen to know the details that underpinned our success, we’re keen to share them.
Operational Goals
Site Performance
We had three main key performance indicators (KPIs) measured over six months and, when relevant, benchmarked against past performance.
Generate 1000 Manifesto downloads
Another winner. In six months the flood of downloads (1506 to be precise) means we’ve outperformed our target by over 50%. Here’s a month by month break-down.
Inspire 50 comments on the download page
A tough assignment but a success. You’ll find 87 (minus one we made ourselves) lined up on the download page, and at least a dozen more across various other parts of our site. It helped that we begged:
Drive 25% increase in thought leadership downloads
This one’s out the park. We scored an ultimate 171% uplift in downloads as the Manifesto itself became a huge source of referred traffic as visitors came, in droves, to check out our B2B content marketing library.
Search Performance
We wanted to improve our overall search performance in three ways.
Get higher up Google.com and UK index for ‘B2B Marketing’
Whoops. We’ve been up and down here (as you might expect) but finished the project down four spots in the UK and even further adrift in the US.
Increase search traffic on “B2B Marketing” stem by 50%
More like it. A 86% increase in search traffic shows why you should never forget the value of longer tail searches.
Increase search conversions on “B2B Marketing” stem by 35%
Close, but no cigar. But a 26% conversion rise is still a decent return (see the small green number under “Goal: Conversion Rate):
We also wanted to match the backlink performance of Content Marketing Workbook. The current running totals from SEOmoz (excluding internal links initially counted*) are:
We’re happy with the results for three reasons: the content marketing book is 14 months older, it’s a more instructive (rather than inspirational) read and it has benefited from campaign cross-promotion.
Social Media
We also used the Content Marketing Workbook as a benchmark for our social media results.
Increase visits from social media by 50%
Back on track. We scored a 65% spike from key social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, SlideShare, Reddit, Delicious and Facebook.
Increase social media conversions by 100%
I think we’ve done it. Is a 2910% rise enough? It’s almost too good to be true.**
Improve our time on site and bounce rates
Two boxes, two ticks: a 21% and 8% hike respectively – see the small green figures that compare data with the benchmark period:
Online PR
Using the Content Marketing Workbook launch as a benchmark we found.
Increase visits from Online PR by 50%
Ace! It’s an increase of 194% on our benchmark period.
Increase Online PR conversions by 100%
Whoosh! Increased by over 5000%. Almost certainly too good to be true**
Improve our time on site and bounce rates
Mixed bag. A 13% drop in time plays a 17% better bounce rate.
The Seven Cs of Strategic Analytics
So that’s the project in numbers. We’re delighted, relieved and more than a little bit wiser. It got us thinking about the role analytics play in helping B2B marketers create better campaigns. Your analytics deliver more when they’re:
1. Commercially-Focused
The first thing is to make sure you work out the impact on sales and revenue. Imagine you can prove that your work brings in the revenue (and the profits); then imagine your next review; now ask yourself why marketing analytics are so important.
2. Campaign-Driven
You can’t measure everything. And measuring the odd random statistic is pointless. That’s why campaigns with clear budgets, costs, timelines and outcomes are a great marketing focus. What’s not to measure?
3. Conversion-Based
Getting people to your site one thing, but the goal has to be to make them do things: download, play, contact, buy. These action-orientated behaviors are signs of funnel movement. And that’s what we’re paid to do.
4. Consistent (Part 1)
We’re all (most of us anyway) programmed to act consistently. The chances of us doing something increase exponentially when we publicly declare we’re going to do it. The act of writing Open Kimono significantly increased the likelihood of its success. The main point: the best analytics shape your future, they don’t just report on the past.
5. Consistent (Part 2)
And there’s the other kind of consistency. You need to stay focused from start line to finish line. We’ve tried to be consistent and report on the things we identified at the start. Sure business directions change, but shifting the project goal posts too far simply leaves you with data that makes no sense.
* We included internal links in our initial analysis. We shouldn’t have done that.
** The data looks great but reflects better goal organisation and management in our analytics more than actual performance.
6. Comparative
Only by benchmarking results against your own past projects or competitors (using tools like compete.com) can you really determine success. It’s not about how things are: it’s about how much better you can make them.
7. Continuous
This project is over, but it’s just one of a number we’ve got running at any one time. A commitment to great analytics is a commitment to great marketing. You don’t stop one if you want to carry on doing the other.
Summing Up
So it’s time to close the Kimono and get on to our next ideas. The entire exercise has been hugely rewarding, enlightening and just plain fun. We put our money where our mouths used to be. We set out our targets, metrics and performance for all to see. And we’re really glad we did.
Campaigns for our clients have already benefited from the things we learned in this project, with measurable results. So watch this space.
Thanks for staying with us – do catch up with the rest of the project if you’ve not done it before – and don’t be shy to leave a comment below. We’d love to know what you think of this exercise.
Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)
Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)
Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)
Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)
Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)
Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)
Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)
Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)
Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)
Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)
Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter
Project Open Kimono Part 12 – the one about re-purposing and atomising your content
Project Open Kimono Part 13 – the one with an early peek at the outcomes
Project Open Kimono 12: Re-purposing and atomising your content
April 5th, 2011 <...by Doug Kessler
This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more work.
Here’s an example. Our B2B Marketing Manifesto has had a great run (Neil will summarise just how great in an upcoming post) but traffic and downloads have started to settle down. Similarly, our Content Marketing Workbook went gangbusters for a while and is now a steady earner rather than start performer.
So here’s where the re-purposing comes in.
The Manifesto ends with the Six Staples of B2B Marketing (seven actually, there’s a bonus staple thrown in). So now the plan is to turn each of these into a short piece where we can drill down a bit more than we could in the Manifesto itself.
The first effort is The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial, a highly visual, interactive guide to a best-practice content marketing workflow. We did it as a Prezi to vary the media a bit (it would be great to do all seven in seven different media — if we can come up with seven). Take a look — but make sure you view it in fullscreen mode and use the play button to advance.
We hope The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial is more than an excerpt or simply a reshaping of existing content (you’d all get bored with that pretty quickly). Instead, it’s a new spin on a smaller topic within a larger piece: in this case, a guide to the HOW part of content marketing instead of the WHAT and WHY covered elsewhere.
Here are some principles of content re-purposing:
Zoom in – take a single chapter or topic from your big eBook and make it the whole subject of the next, shorter piece.
Complement – the Manifesto was strategic, so the Tutorial is tactical and practical.
Morph – change formats to keep things interesting. We’ve turned eBooks into checklists into videos into webinars into slideshows…
Connect – make an explicit connection between the pieces. Make them feel like a family. The Tutorial is in the Manifesto ‘spray paint stencil’ style. (It’s also connected to the Content Marketing Workbook, but we changed styles since doing that one).
Atomise – the Tutorial is on our site and the Prezi site, too. If it was, say, a deck, we’d put it on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc, too. If a video on YouTube, Vimeo and beyond.
Cross-promote – the Tutorial promotes the Manifesto and CM Workbook. And we’ll update those pieces to promote the Tutorial. Makes sense. Of course, we’ll also blog about it (like, um, now) and tweet about it and post it in LinkedIn groups and bookmark it and send it out to our e-newsletter subscribers (sign up using the form on the right)…
Open the gate – the Manifesto had a short form for data capture. The Tutorial doesn’t. We discuss that here.
Measure – this is essential on of any list of B2B principles. All links in the Tutorial are tagged for analytics and for Marketo, so we can watch our honoured audience as they poke and prod around our soft bits. (Ooh. That tickles.)
It’s early days — we only just posted the thing – but we’re getting lots of hits, some really good comments – and downloads of the Content Marketing Workbook and B2B Marketing Manifesto are spiking again. It’s like B2B Viagra.
Don’t just relegate your latest content piece to the dusty digital shelf. Give it a new spin, a quick squeeze and a zotz of energy.
More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:
Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)
Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)
Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)
Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)
Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)
Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)
Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)
Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)
Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)
Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)
Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter
Are B2B marketers wimps? Project Open Kimono part 6
October 19th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
As part of our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign, we asked a single, simple question in the download form. Tucked under the boxes for name, email and company name is the optional question: “The hardest part of B2B marketing is____”.
To be honest, we threw this question in as an afterthought but it’s proven to be one of the most interesting things we’ve done in the Manifesto campaign, so we’d like to share it here in our ‘living case study’, Project Open Kimono.
Let’s admit right out front that this ‘micro-survey’ isn’t particularly scientific. It’s not a random sample of B2B marketers (just the kind who download things like B2B manifestos) and the question itself is open to many different interpretations (like what do we mean by ‘hardest’ anyway?).
But the results are even better than rigorous: they’re interesting. And they really do make me think a bit differently about B2B. Because what it shows is a kind of snapshot of the state of mind of B2B marketers today. Not a detailed analysis of our priorities but a peek into how we think about our work. The fact that this was a top-of-the-head question rather than a ‘sit down and take a survey’ kind of experience might even make it more valuable as a mindset indicator. The Wordle of all the responses (above) reads like a CAT scan of any B2B marketer’s brain.
Here are the top five answers, shown as a percent of total answers (clients and agency/suppliers are all lumped together in this one):
A Bombshell: the enemy within
One rather shocking result jumped out of this little exercise: the number one obstacle B2B marketers identify has nothing to do with actually getting through to prospective buyers, winning their attention, convincing them to engage or getting them to buy. The number one obstacle isn’t about creating great content, generating high-quality leads or proving ROI (though all of these showed up in the top five).
The hardest part of B2B marketing turns out to be convincing other people within the company to do the right things. It’s worth saying it again in the boldest face WordPress will allow:
The hardest part of B2B marketing is fighting internal battles.
Think about this. Of all the incredibly challenging things we all have to struggle with, we’re most daunted by getting our bosses or boards or other departments to value us, listen to us and take our advice (these are the kinds of words people used — they’re masked by our aggregated term “Convincing internal people”).
I don’t know about you but seeing this in the cold light of Excel kind of gave me a kick in the head.
But when I thought about it a bit, it not only makes sense, it explains a lot of what I’ve experienced in my 25 years in the business. Here’s what I think this curious little crumb of data actually means:
B2B marketers are not very powerful
We’re not highly valued inside our companies
Our expertise is suspect
Why would this be so? I hate to say it but it’s probably because the doubters are absolutely right: B2B marketers have not earned the respect of our peers and our bosses because we have not delivered clear, undeniable value to our businesses.
Ouch.
Part of this may be that B2B businesses are less likely to be ‘marketing driven’ than consumer marketing companies are (I could be wrong but I’d be amazed if B2C marketers were as concerned by internal obstacles). In Nike and Coca-Cola, marketing is the most powerful department not one of the least. Rightly or wrongly, B2B companies are often more sales-driven or engineering-driven. You don’t find many consumer brands that aren’t all about the marketing.
A client-side issue
Our first reaction to the topline data was to ask, “Was the focus on internal obstacles skewed by agency-side whingers?” We thought it must be but the data says quite the opposite. Here’s how client-side marketers differ from agency/supplier side:
As you can see, the agency side didn’t really rate the internal problems highly at all. They did, however consider things like “Proving value to prospects” and “getting C-level buy-in” as the hardest part of their jobs — far higher than their client-side peers.
So it seems safe to say that many B2B marketers within companies are struggling in their efforts to be heard, valued, respected and left alone to do what they know is right for the business.
What can we do about it?
The B2B Marketing Manifesto is really all about this challenge: how marketers can thrive in The Land of Accountability” — and prove our value as we do it.
So the first action is to read the damn thing and see if it inspires a new way of thinking about your job.
Then, it feels like it’s time for some soul-searching: How much value are you really adding to your business? Can you prove it? Have you shown the evidence to the important stakeholders?
If the answer is ‘no’ to any of these questions, here’s a follow-up: Why not?
B2B marketers of the world: rise up! We have nothing to lose but the poor opinion of our peers…
What do you think? We’d love to hear your views on this.
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Want the full Open Kimono picture?
Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)
Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)
Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)
Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)
Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)
Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)
Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)
Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)
Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)
Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)
A kind of Quasi–Methodology
The data above represents the first 254 responses to the open-ended question, “The hardest part of B2B marketing is___”. Of these, 189 were client-side and 65 were agency or supplier-side (including marketing tools vendors).
There was a wide variety of answers, which we grouped into 35 different buckets. If someone gave two or three answers, we counted them all. Someone else looking at the raw data might put a few responses into different buckets than we did, but the numbers are big enough to feel our results are worth noting.
The B2B Marketing Manifesto: hot off the press
September 21st, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
“This is without a doubt the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer. It’s also the scariest.” That’s how our new eBook, The B2B Marketing Manifesto begins. It’s a lunatic rant, a call to arms and a plea for ambition in B2B marketing — with eleven specific recommendations for rising to the new challenges we all face.
The eBook is our attempt to make sense of a whole range of disruptions to the once-cozy world of B2B. Clearly, we’re no longer in the business of making brochures and exhibition graphics. We’re now in the business of filling sales funnels and we’re more accountable for it than ever before. Which is either a really, really good thing (if you’re confident and ambitious) or a really, really bad thing (if you just want a quiet life).
Now here’s what we’d love you to do: download the eBook; read it; then come back and comment, ideally on the landing page (though you can use the comment form below if you prefer). The end of the Manifesto makes clear why we’re asking. So thank you in advance for that.
We’ll be blogging about the progress of our new baby in a living case study called ‘Project Open Kimono’ over the coming weeks and months, including sharing our goals, the tactics we’re using and the results (warts, winces and all), based on Neil’s ace analytics. So do come back.
We’re also happy to guest blog, speak or contribute to webinars on the topics raised in the Manifesto. Just ask!
Anatomy of a project: Calnetix
August 16th, 2010 <...by Lucy LonghurstThe power of beliefs in B2B marketing
July 2nd, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
Ashley Friedlein of Econsultancy just turned us on to this excellent TED Talk (TED is a fantastic series on ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’). It’s by Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, and it’s all about the power of beliefs in marketing. Great leaders and great companies start with beliefs not facts, policies, products or services. He cites Apple, Martin Luther King and the Wright brothers among others but the idea is just as powerful for any company and any B2B marketer.
The essence of Simon’s talk: People don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.
He bases this on brain research that shows that the neocortex, which is responsible for our rational processes (and language) is not the part of the brain that drives decisions. Decisions (and feelings) are controlled by the limbic system. In other words, when we throw features and functions at people, we can’t change their behaviour. But when we start with beliefs, we talk directly to the part of the brain that drives decisions and behaviour. Then people can rationalise their feelings of trust and loyalty with the feature/function stuff.
For Velocity, this plays right into our own belief that B2B buyers are human beings first and engineers or IT Directors second. People buy from people they like and trust. Our first job on behalf of our clients is to earn that trust by communicating the client’s beliefs and passions.
That’s why something that might seem a bit silly (like a stop-motion Lego Man film for a vertical search product) does so much to bring prospects closer and pave the way to a sale. Or why a pair of hugging salt & pepper shakers can boost registration to an exclusive conference.
Two questions:
Do you really know what your company believes?
You know WHAT you do but do you know WHY you do it?
Are you sharing those beliefs with your customers and prospects?
How are you explicitly communicating your beliefs and how are you demonstrating them?
If Simon Sinek is right (and we think he is), these could be the most important questions of your career..
Velocity is hiring geniuses – B2B marketing jobs London
June 16th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
We’re Velocity, we’re growing fast and we’re looking for a few geniuses (copywriters, designers, planners…).
But we’re not just hiring anyone who walks past the door and we don’t just fill slots with CVs. We aim a bit higher than that: geniuses with souls, manners and senses of humour.
To us, a genius is not someone with a high IQ, it’s someone who is more than usually passionate about what they do. Almost unhealthily passionate.
If you love marketing and business and technology and creativity, we think this is the single best place in the world to spend a career.
We’ll never be the biggest B2B agency in the world. Our goal is a lot less Gordon Gekko and a bit more Richard Feynman. We aim to be the most interesting B2B agency in the world. Which may not be as lucrative but is a hell of a lot more fun.
If you’re wondering whether business-to-business (and specifically technology) marketing can ever be as rewarding as consumer marketing, there’s a very short answer: it’s more rewarding. Here’s why:
Why B2B is the place to be
- Because business can change the world and technology is changing it.
While Diet Coke will only ever be sugar water without the sugar.
- Because it’s hard.
You have to really understand this stuff to sell it. There’s no coasting. And hard things are always more rewarding.
- Because it’s exciting.
Our clients are innovators and entrepreneurs. Brilliant people inspire.
- Because it’s grown-up.
We don’t condescend to the target audience and we don’t manipulate his or her insecurities. We build compelling arguments, back them up with air-tight evidence and incite action. And you don’t have to shower after doing that.
- Because it’s incredibly dynamic.
Digital, analytics, video, lead nurturing… this is the steepest learning curve you’ll ever be on. Ask any snowboarder: that’s the best part.
- Because it’s cutting edge.
Some of the new B2B tools are much more sophisticated than their consumer versions. They have to be when a sale can mean a million.
- Because it’s important.
For every bottle bought of Katie Price’s Sensation (or whatever), there are a hundred business-to-business transactions behind the scenes. In economic terms, she’s the tip, we’re the iceberg.
If anyone tells you that B2B is a marketing backwater, thank them for their insight and find someone more interesting (and less fashionable) to share a drink with.
This is where the action is and Velocity is smack in the middle of it.
If you’d like to be a part of it, get in touch.
Try to contain your excitement
May 24th, 2010 <...by Lucy Longhurst
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 good, the bad, and the just plain baffling, it charts the meandering and sometimes hiccupping progress of social media marketing.
Take, for example, the bizarre decision to promote Skittles by posting a load of ker-razy videos and ask people to share them. Unlike their previous Twitter-based campaign, this was a campaign that deserved to have a loud raspberry blown at it. So, there it is in a virtual glass case, preserved for posterity.
We decided to interview the esteemed Professor Warner, to see if he had any pearls of wisdom to impart about the development of social media marketing.
Where did you get the idea for the museum? Why did you start gathering the stories together?
It’s a ‘keeping perspective’ thing. What’s going on today is very similar to what happened 10 years ago… Social Media, like the first promise of the Interweb, has become near-mythical. Having lived through round one, I’m keen to keep a scrapbook this time. When I look back, discussions about bricks vs clicks were almost irrelevant. The real winners were the ones who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in – and we need to remember this right now.
Grand concepts and frameworks didn’t work well (e.g. Boo.com); whilst more randomly organised, iterative services did (eBay, Flickr, etc…). This is very close to my heart. I run a new(ish) Social/Online agency and I’m building a services business around doing pragmatic stuff now. So having a museum means I can put the futurology that bugs me (and also all the great stuff) into a box and keep it close by for future reference. As such, it’s a pet project.
Why do you think even big brands with such a lot of marketing clout get it wrong?
Often they’re taken in by the glamour of it all and get blinded. A common request is ‘I’d like to do a Twitter campaign.’ This is bit mad. Brands have to ask themselves ‘why?’. If they don’t have a very concrete answer then they should have a lie down and/or read up a bit on some history.
In other words, it should never be about the Social Media-ness of it all. My feeling is some brands get so lathered up that they lose context. They just get strung out on the *possibilities* and the *concepts*.
Today, the world needs to understand that just because YouTube lets us upload video, this doesn’t mean a million people want to create mini feature films for brands in exchange for a gong.
Social-for-Social’s-sake campaigns fail because they ignore the basics. And it’s not Social’s fault… it’s more to do with human nature and the way we use things. We *really* need to remember the lessons of the past and to keep reading our little blue book of effective marketing. The psychology of DM still applies. Good old content is even more critical. And Google is still huge, huge, huge.
Social Media changes *how* these things are important… but they certainly don’t go away. Also, a little research never hurt anyone. We should all do more of it before we get excited.
Do you think we’re now entering a more egalitarian age of marketing, where the consumers can get involved?
We ought to be asking: can Social fulfill the promise of a mega conversation with all of the marketplace? Probably not, unless more Twitter-friendly sales people are employed. There’s a fundamental tension that we need to figure out. Generally, marketing is about NOT TALKING TO PEOPLE in the physical sense. Talking is the job of sales. Good marketing reduces the amount spent on sales people and processes. In this context, the promise of Social gets a little messy…
We need to de-focus on the promises, concepts and the channels and start thinking about the core value of it all. Right now, lots of marketing departments see Social as a must-have. Near term this may not be the case – unless they can prove that it helps marketing to do better marketing.
Marketing has changed for good I think. Today, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re conversational pieces, support things, widgets and whatnot. Gone are the days of Ridley Scott TV spot blockbusters. Brands need to be helpful, memorable and available and figure out how their customers are using Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc in this context.
Any particular favourites?
I love Converse’s domination campaign. It’s not particularly Social, but it’s so pragmatic and smart it hurts. I wish we’d done it.
A stop-motion movie for ShipServ
May 7th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler-
Girls on film (actually Lego men)
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My oh my have we been having fun over here recently! Long-term Velocity client and all-round legend John Watton from ShipServ asked us to produce a video to promote Pages, the maritime ‘Find Engine’. And since we fancy ourselves as Richmond’s answer to Martin Scorsese we were more than happy to oblige.
We wrote a script and a plot outline following our hero, Rex, owner of RexStar and supplier of spare parts to the shipping industry. He’s trying to grow his business, but he’s struggling to get his voice heard. We won’t tell you what happens next, you’ll have to watch the video and see.
Then we roped in Guy Hocking as our producer. We couldn’t have picked a better man for the task – he’s surpassed himself this time. Having stolen his kids’ Lego men and set up a studio in his spare bedroom, Guy produced a brilliant stop-motion film to fit our script. After that we signed up Paul Ridley to do the voiceover, and the end result is what you see above.
Go on. Put the popcorn and watch it.
When was the last time you flossed?
April 27th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
In B2B as in life, there’s a whole genre of pains-in-the-arse that nobody ever talks about: things that are really annoying but not quite annoying enough to actually force you to do anything about. This class of arse-pain needs a name. I hereby suggest ‘Plaque’.
Plaque clogs up your life, degrading its quality without ever actually demanding your full attention. Like barnacles on a hull, plaque slows you down but never stops you dead in the water.
A smashed windscreen is an emergency. A slightly cracked windscreen is plaque.
A gushing pipe is a call to action. A dripping tap is plaque.
Some people have a low plaque threshold and spring into action the moment something happens to make their toaster or doorknob or light switch sub-par. I happen to have a very high plaque threshold. I can ignore almost anything until it’s a genuine emergency — except I’m not really ignoring it at all, I’m registering it, logging it, making that tooth-suck sound about it and regretting the hell out of it. (I tell myself that this is because I ‘have a life’ but really it’s because I just can’t be arsed.) (Is an American allowed to use the word ‘arse’ twice in one blog post without some kind of UK tax kicking in?) (What about three times?).
Anyhoo: here’s where I segue towards some semblance of relevance for B2B marketers like you: every B2B marketing department suffers from an accumulation of plaque.
The About Us page on your website doesn’t reflect what you do any more. The last press release in the News section was dated 1987. The logo on the powerpoint template is WAY too intrusive. The list goes on and on. And, here’s why all this kind of matters: while no single bit of plaque will seriously undermine your performance or cripple your KPIs, Gartner estimates (or surely will one day estimate) that, taken together, accumulated plaque can suck away 10-20 hard-earned Brand Mojo points. Fact.
So here’s a Velocity Two-Step Action Plan™ for your own personal War Against Plaque:
1) Every time you notice a bit of plaque, write it down on a whiteboard, flip chart or wiki page for all to see.
2) On the 3rd Friday of every month, spend one hour removing plaque – you can call it Floss Friday if you really want to.
Are you with me? I hope so — because I visited your website recently and there are some howlers on there. No offense.
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Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by kate*
Cleaning up your B2B product portfolio
April 26th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
A lot of our consultancy engagements involve helping companies structure a product portfolio that makes sense. Usually that means organising a long list of products or services into a few sensible buckets. It can be kind of tricky and isn’t always intuitive but putting in the time to get it right is well worth it.
A well-considered portfolio makes your company look cohesive and focused. A messy portfolio structure makes it look like you just kind of accreted new products and services on a drunken bar-crawl (“For all your fish and bicycle needs.”).
The goal is simple: make it quick and easy for prospects to find solutions to their problems as they describe them. Of course, you don’t want to leave any product or service out and you don’t want too many buckets (people won’t wade in, they’ll just waddle off). A few tips:
- Use the buyer’s perspective not yours – you may like to organise your life and your products by department or line of business; they don’t care about that. They come to you with problems in their head. Organise around that.
- But don’t forget the spiders – your product page and its copy, URLs, tags, headings and subheads should generate major search mojo. Make sure you integrate this important web section into your overall SEO strategy.
- Don’t hide your hot products – the more specific a product, the more relevant it’s likely to be. Don’t bury your discrete offers far below the top line categories. If one of your popular products logically lives beneath the surface, bend your logic and get it on top for all to see.
- If you do have to bury a hot product, compensate – by promoting it in feature boxes, sidebars and web banners
- Make your labels descriptive – cryptic, cool or evocative labels may sound good but if it isn’t instantly clear what’s inside, you’re losing eyeballs (and the eyeball-bone’s connected to the wallet-bone).
- Keep lists parallel – it’s kind of annoying to have a portfolio consisting of three nouns and a verb, or three vices and a versa. Makes you look tone deaf.
- Don’t be a slave to alliteration – don’t bend over backwards to present ‘The 6 Rs’ if it doesn’t work. Having said that, Velocity is starting to present our services in four buckets that all really do start with C (as does ‘coincidence’): Consulting, Content, Campaigns & Creative.
Unwieldy portfolios are usually a function of a company’s history. Re-organisations, acquisitions, aborted strategies and weed-choked routes to market all leave their mark. If yours is starting to feel clunky, start over with a fresh sheet of paper — or get some advice from people who don’t know (or care) why things evolved the way they did.
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photo credit: flickr creative commons: curiousmess
Five mistakes to avoid in the B2B selling process
March 22nd, 2010 <...by Gesu Baroova
The buying process is long and complex in B2B tech markets. Usually, the bigger the company, the more people are involved and the longer it takes. So where can a B2B salesperson trip up in this drawn out process? We’ve worked with some of the very best B2B sales people in the business and these 5 mistakes often come up in our conversations:
1. Failing to engage all stakeholders: Typically there are a number of people involved in the buying process – those who write the specs, those who control the budget, those who influence the decision, those who actually use the product and finally the ultimate decision makers – usually the CTO or the CEO. You have to identify who these people are in your prospective client and make every effort to meet them and strike a relationship with each one of these influencers. Countless salespeople have failed because they didn’t take the time to meet the people who specified what the product needed to do or managed to engage with everyone involved in the decision. Often your main contact may not want to give you this access — your job is to earn it.
2. Failing to leverage conversations with one stakeholder when talking to other stakeholders: If you’ve learned from the product user why he likes your product over that of the competition, you’d be foolish not to mention it when you’re talking to the buyer. It’s obvious but you’d be surprised how many people fail to leverage every conversation. The sales people we admire most are always listening, assessing and using their conversations to their advantage.
3. Failing to manage internal disagreements within the prospect: The people involved in the buying process are bound to have disagreements about which product or service to go for.. Don’t wait for things to sort themselves out; they probably won’t and you’ll lose the sale. If you’ve spent your time well in the initial phase, getting to know the people involved in the buying process, then that’s your map for managing internal conflicts. Don’t leave this to your ‘champion’.
4. Failing to keep the prospect engaged: Sales cycles are long and slow, so it’s easy to lose focus. Are you allowing too much time to pass by between phone calls or visits? Keeping the momentum even if the prospect is slow to respond to you is important especially if competition is high. Our favourite sales people have a way of keeping the energy up and sounding like it’s a new sales call even if it’s in the ninth month.
5. Failing to make the value argument: If you find yourself haggling on price, you probably haven’t been effective in making the prospect understand your product’s value. Price should be one of the last things to be discussed not the first (as it often is). Good marketing can really help in defining the value proposition and communicating it clearly and simply. Too often tech companies disconnect marketing messages form sales conversations – the fastest way to get dragged into price haggling.
Of course, there are hundreds of ways to lose a B2B sale, but these five seem to lead the pack.
- Photo credit: Tim Green
The F word in B2B marketing
March 9th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
Is it just me or is typical B2B marketing utterly joyless? Why is that? Why do people who are passionate about carp fishing and bicycling and the Beatles become robots when they sit down to tell the world about the thing they do for a living — the thing they spend a THIRD OF THEIR LIVES doing?
Whatever happened to fun? Don’t you prefer to do business with people who enjoy what they do? Don’t you find yourself attracted to companies that look like they’re glad to be doing what they’re doing?
A good friend of mine, Nick, is an accountant. Boring, right? But he’s incredibly successful and his clients love him and recommend him because, to him, accountancy is the furthest thing in the world from boring. Nick loves accountancy. He loves business and the hydrodynamics of finance and the way small, sound decisions can have big, positive impacts on businesses and the people who care about those businesses. There’s nothing boring about that.
You might sell software that helps trucking companies improve their fuel efficiency. Or a service that helps IT departments protect their databases. Or a piece of middleware that improves the way some ERP application interacts with some other ERP application. But if you love what you do; if you really see the value in it; if you enjoy the challenges or the tech problems or the look on a customer’s face when he gets it… why in the world would you want to bury that passion under layers of business-speak and techno-babble?
Maybe it’s time to lighten up. If you can’t muster some enthusiasm for your work, find another job. And if you can, share it with the people who most need to see your passion: your customers and prospects.
How does fun manifest itself in a B2B context without becoming frivolous? Here are a few ways:
- Light, honest, human blog posts – a blog is a great place to have a bit of fun without jeopardising the hallowed brand values.
- Social media – another place to let your hair down and give the world some evidence that your company is not driven by robots.
- Video fun – quick, short videos are a great way to have a ‘play’ with your story and your brand. Stick them on YouTube, embed them on your site, email them to prospects.
- The home page – you might think this real estate is too precious to muck around with. Actually, it’s the perfect place for showing a bit of attitude and energy. You’ll increase time on site and page views by giving people an open, friendly, accessible story. By having fun.
- Data sheet or case study ‘seasoning’ – Even hardworking technical documents can have a bit of fun without detracting from the business at hand. A sidebar, a striking metaphor, a surprising quote…
The list could be endless because the principle applies to everything you do. Before you publish, think “Can this be a bit more fun to read/watch/listen to?”
Of course, done badly, attempts to lighten up can fall flat. That’s probably why B2B marketers tend to shy away from it. The point is not to aim for hilarious. You’ll fail and look silly. Aim for honest and plain-speaking and you’re a lot more likely to hit the target. But for God’s sake have a bit of fun with it!
New B2B buying influences
March 5th, 2010 <...by Doug Kessler
Just came across an excellent post by Matt West of Connected Marketer called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer. It’s based on a study done together with DemandGen Report into the new buying influences in B2B.
The data supports the trends we’re all seeing out there (buyer-driven purchase cycles, the role of content, social media and peer conversations) but it did surprise me how fast things are changing — some of the numbers are a lot higher than I’d have guessed, including:
New Influences in the Buying Process
- 78% of buyers started with informal info gathering
- 59% engaged with peers who addressed the challenge
- 48% followed industry conversations on topic
- 44% conducted anonymous research of a select group of vendors
- 41% followed discussions to learn more about topic
- 37% posted questions on social networking sites looking for suggestions/feedback
- More than 20% connected directly with potential solution providers via social networking channels
Even better: almost 95% of recent purchasers said the solution provider they chose “provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.”
Cancel that six-figure ad budget. Start generating killer content and spreading it across the web.
Exploiting your tacit knowledge
March 2nd, 2010 <...by Gesu Baroova
We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.
Tacit knowledge, first conceptualised by Michael Polanyi, is knowledge that is hard to put into words — the stuff that’s difficult to articulate and transfer to another person.
Companies and individuals accumulate tacit knowledge over time through front-line experience — often they don’t even realise that they have it. In contrast, explicit knowledge can be easily described in words and transferred to another person (think software demo).
Very often it’s the tacit knowledge that gives successful companies their competitive edge – (or ‘sustained competitive advantage’ for jargon lovers).
It can live in a number of places in organisations – but most often with employees who have a way of doing things that works but find it hard to explain exactly how or why.
It’s what goes on in the head of that great salesperson or that unassuming techie who can crack a problem in minutes (but explain how in hours). It can even be dispersed across a group of people doing things a particular way. Like that business unit that consistently outperforms every other– what do they have that the other units don’t?
It’s a knack, its an insight, its in their gut. It comes with experience. The good news is – it can be brought out and shared. It’s hard but not impossible.
That’s where marketing plays an important role. If tacit knowledge is indeed so important to gaining and sustaining that competitive edge, then its marketing’s job to identify what tacit knowledge the company has, where it is, how to bring it out and make it easy to understand – not only to use internally but also to communicate the advantage it brings to customers.
There’s no short cut: marketers need to get up close and personal with these experts. Talk to them about their work, how they go about it day to day, observe them doing it then question them hard (but lovingly). Fall in love with the word “Why”. Find ways to articulate their knowledge. To make the tacit explicit.
This will take time, patience and most of all a genuine interest in finding out your experts’ hidden pearls of wisdom. But one thing is certain – put in the hard work and the results will be worth it.
Image Copyright Zitona
Read this or the world will end
February 18th, 2010 <...by Lucy Longhurst
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’. The first, obviously, grabs you by your insecurities, holds a conceptual gun to your head and threatens total and catastrophic failure if you don’t do what the headline wants. The second tries to be your friend and woos you by offering unsolicited advice/help. But they both boil down to the same thing: fear.
Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice?
Judging by some discussions on LinkedIn’s forums, marketers don’t like the first type of headline. There’s a sense that it’s a) lazy or b) mean. Or both. It’s as though it counts as cheating. Or like someone’s going to call up your parents to tell them you’ve been bullying your audience. But the analytics we’ve done suggest (albeit tentatively) that the scare-mongering titles produce the most click-throughs. We wrote an eBook and alternated between a positive and a negative-tone headline at random. The negative one got the most reads.
This may not be what people want to hear: it would be nice if it was true that lovely positive headlines made people want to read more, and made them think of your product/brand in a lovely positive way. Perhaps it just seems disappointing that people respond more to being scared. But that’s treating people’s response to advertising as being more cerebral than it actually is. It’s much more visceral than that.
People don’t think ‘Aw, how nice. They must be a really good company’. They think ‘Holy Mary Mother of God I need help!’. Then you can reassure them that help is at hand, and in the absence of divine aid your product or service will do the job just as well. Then they’re so glad you can help they’ll listen to you. Being rescued in the nick of time from the Deadly Flesh-eating Serpent of Doom is a better story. That’s why it works.
Hey, we can be nice… sometimes
At Velocity we use both, depending on the tone and the context. If you’re talking to a hard-bitten marketing cynic with his nose spread across his face and a cauliflower ear, the nice approach won’t work. The marble slab where his heart should be just doesn’t want Butlins-style encouragement. Similarly, the sensible guy who just wants to do his job better probably won’t take too kindly to being shouted at. We tend not to threaten people with poisonous serpents*, but you can’t ignore the fact that putting a small firecracker under your audience’s seat does work, so long as you don’t go overboard. Getting too nasty puts people off. But too much nice and you run the risk of being ignored.
*because the last lot escaped and caused havoc on the Underground
Photo credit:
Oabie
In Which The Hero Helps SmallWorlders Sell Intranets To Marketers
January 6th, 2010 <...by Lucy Longhurst
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 few outside the company had any idea. And, as they would probably be the first to admit, their website didn’t shed much light on the matter. But they had a really good offer, so our job was to clarify the company’s positioning and messages, then bring the new story to market, starting with a spanking new website.
The website had to appeal to that most discerning of audiences: brand executives and marketing agencies. So we gave it a cool-as-a-cucumber look, with witty text and quirky graphics, all underpinned by a sleek site architecture. The website had to look enough like a creative agency’s but not so much that SmallWorlders lost their identity. It was about balance.
Here’s what we did:
Tweaked their positioning to focus on marketers –so they weren’t spreading themselves too thin
Recommended packaging up products and service levels – so customers are clear they’re getting what they want
Gave them a new language and terminology – so their products and services sound as exciting as they actually are
Gave them a website that looked and sounded right– so they could walk the walk and talk the talk
Promoted SmallWorlders’ unique approach – through thought leadership pages, laying the groundwork for eBooks, web seminars, white papers, video…
SmallWorlders liked us so much they put us on their Christmas card list:
We love this card
The scribble inside:
‘Stan: Thanks for selling me Velocity’s services…I’m very glad you did!’
–Kevin Cody, MD
Woo hoo! John Watton, B2B Marketer of the Year
November 26th, 2009 <...by Doug Kessler
Deer... headlights...
Woke up in a haze on a strange sofa in an unknown flat. Looked down: dinner jacket. Weird purple stain on shirt. Ah — it wasn’t a dream then: John Watton, our intrepid ShipServ client really did win B2B Marketer of the Year in the B2B Marketing Magazine Awards last night…
It all came rushing back. The ‘gala’ tent pitched somewhere in Moorgate; the Glaswegian comedian abusing the crowd; the backless dress gliding past; the clump of beetroot risotto (see ‘purple stain’ above) propping up a dessicated slab of sea bass; the lights, the music, the envelope please…
When we met John Watton, he didn’t know the difference between PPC and CPM. He thought search marketing involved bloodhounds. Now, he’s reached the pinnacle of his profession. We’re not saying it was easy. We spent countless hours with him, explaining how email really works (Stan wanted to let him go on believing in ‘little digital courier bikes’); why a website is really a good idea in times like these (“Can’t we just have a brochure?” Bless.); what Marketo is and why it’s so powerful (“Those names are called LEADS and, one day, with a little nurturing, they might become SALES” — sheesh).
Okay, when we met him he had done some pretty important marketing jobs for small outfits like Microsoft, Oracle and Ariba. But we’ll always remember the tears of joy that welled up in his eyes when, after long deliberation, we gave him the good news: yes, we saw just a glimmer of something in him (talent: yes; enthusiasm: in spades; but really it was his willingness to learn) and that he had made it on to our client list.
Colonel Tom Parker, once said, “When I met Elvis, he had a million dollars worth of talent. Now he has a million dollars.” (that was a lot then). Well, when we met John Watton, he was a crazy kid with an electric keyboard, a pirated copy of Garage Band and some big ideas. Now, he’s the FUCKING B2B MARKETER OF THE ENTIRE BOLLOCKING YEAR.
This, in a nutshell, is the Velocity Effect. And if you want yourself some of that action, well, take a number*.
[Disclaimer: 99% of the above is false. John came to us fully-formed.]
[Added disclaimer: well, 100%]
As an Agency, we also pulled down a Highly Commended for our snappily-titled “Content and Social Media Marketing Campaign for ShipServ” (hey, it’s how you tell them). If John’s triumph feels like winning an Oscar, our Highly Commended feels like a pat on the head by the neighbourhood wino. (Kidding, judges, we’re thrilled to bits and you look marvelous).
We’d like to say that we created the entry that won John this well-deserved gong (why didn’t we?); but it was Laura Mishima at Marketo, the fast-growing, arse-kicking, lead-scoring giants of Demand Generation. John works Marketo like Jenson Button works a Skoda. The results are now a part of B2B marketing history.
Purple stain aside, we enjoyed ourselves last night and are proud to have played a part in John’s annus (mirabilis).
John Watton reflected in his shiny new gong
*+44 208 940 4099
The Content Marketing Workbook
June 11th, 2009 <...by Doug Kessler
It’s here. The book of the webinar of the movie: The Velocity B2B Content Marketing Workbook. Over 45 breezy pages of good, solid advice about thought leadership and content marketing for B2B marketers like you.
In the era of information overload, Content Marketing is probably the single most important thing a B2B marketer can do. You can have lousy brochures. You can be conspicuously absent from Twitter and the Facebook Widget Group. But if you can get content marketing right, the world (or a highly relevant subset of it) will beat a path to your door.
The Workbook covers topics like these:
- What Content Marketing and Thought Leadership are
- Why you need to get good at them (and fast)
- Why you’re perfectly placed to do it really, really well
- How to pick a topic prospects care about
- How to go beyond the dry, stale white paper
- What we think ‘good’ looks like — lots of examples
It’s free, it’s fun and it’s as fresh as new-baked bread plucked from a hot oven.
Go on and download it. A little bit of insight and inspiration never hurt anyone…
How strong is your B2B positioning?
April 16th, 2009 <...by Doug Kessler 
Positioning is one of the essentials of B2B marketing but it’s very rare to see it done well. It’s a simple idea: as a marketer, you should explicitly manage the place your brand holds in the minds of your target audience so that it’s clearly differentiated from the competition.
The concept gained currency in a series of Ad Age articles in the ’70s by Al Ries and Jack Trout and has kept its place in the marketing lexicon ever since — a sign that there’s something real going on.
A clear, compelling positioning statement is a kind of touchstone for all of your marketing efforts. If everyone in the company knows what you stand for, it’s a lot easier to judge whether a given tactic, headline or video is on-strategy.
We’ve adapted some ideas about positioning from the 1980s work of Bengt Anderson and Steve Trygg, two talented B2B marketers from Sweden, and over time, made them our own. We still use their simple, three-point test that says a positioning has to be:
Relevant –It has to speak to a real need at the front of the prospect’s mind.
Available – No other competitor can ‘own’ the positioning.
Attainable –It has to be credible; you have to be able to deliver on it (and prove you can).
A good positioning passes all three tests. Two out of three is not good enough. Some examples that fail:
“Cures the common cold” – relevant, yes; available, yes; attainable… no.
“The only purple blade server on the market” – available and attainable… but irrelevant.
“The safe car company” – relevant and attainable, but not really available (Volvo built a brand on it and many others chase safety now, too).
And a few examples that have succeeded so well, we don’t even have to tell you who they are:
“CRM without software”
“The computer for the rest of us”
“The open source operating system”
The fact that we struggled to come up with even these three tells you how rare it is for tech companies to create and sustain a clear, compelling positioning.
Sometimes, a positioning can be summed up in a strapline. More often, it takes a bit more than that — and might only have meaning for the target audience (not a bad thing). Here’s a few we prepared earlier:
ip.access is the ‘mobile over IP’ company.
They take mobile network traffic and route it over broadband to cut costs and improve network coverage and capacity.VNL is the microtelecom pioneer.
They’ve re-engineered GSM networks specifically for remote rural communities (just as microfinance did for banking).Psion Teklogix helps companies maximise their Return on Mobility™.
Their rugged mobile computers increase productivity while driving down costs.
We think these ideas pass the triple test for these companies: they’re relevant, available and attainable. And by driving them into the marketplace over and over again, we’re helping carve out a sustainable positioning that, in a world of me-too marketing, is a real competitive advantage.
How clear is your company’s positioning? Can you get it on to a T-shirt?
RSS feedsA client asked for a bit of help in putting together a video strategy for next year’s marketing plan. In writing a reply, we realised that there are so many different ways of using video in B2B content marketing – not just the obvious video demos and viral videos…
A roll-up-your-sleeves guide for marketers
If you’ve read the B2B Marketing Manifesto or the Content Marketing Workbook, you’re already hip to the power of B2B content marketing.
But you need a bit of practical help on the process side of content…
Velocity Partners, the London-based B2B content marketing agency today announced the production and distribution of a new, self-promotional tweet on the popular Twitter micro-blogging and self-aggrandizement service.
Vents, vibes & voodoo
sign up now ...Doug Kessler
Stan Woods
