Blogging is an anxiety-inducing business. Business blogging even more so.

I don’t think any marketing activity rattles the B2B marketers’ nerves more than the company blog. It should.

If your business doesn’t blog at all, you fear that you’re missing a trick. Whenever somebody mentions a blog or blogging, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before the rationalizations stream forth.

If your business has a blog, you’re tangling with a beast. The dreaded blog monster doesn’t go away no matter how many times you’ve fed it.

Each post’s traffic, or lack thereof, is all too plain to see for anyone with access to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Those “tweet this”, “Like” and “LinkedIn Share” buttons with their overly optimistic counters – so everyone can share our stuff! – display for all to see how much sharing is really going on.

Also blogging lacks that surgical precision you get from tying off a brochure, advertisement, eBook or landing page. The blog’s never done. Never sent to the printers. Never finished.

The longing for the better post always nags. So often the great post you invested so much time and effort on, got so little traffic. Maybe if we did this. Or maybe that. The perfect formula is antagonizingly always out of reach.

Even when you manage to post three new posts to your blog in one week, the week ends with you thinking “and then?” You read a post over the weekend from a famous blogger who says you need to post daily. At least.

Should you blog about Justin Bieber (for the traffic) or follow the strict and serious party line (a “pain points” post that goes into excruciating detail)? How to judge readability, interest level, subject breadth, emotion and level of detail?

And, for all their appearance of ease and prolificacy, blog posts generate more internal critique and heartache than just about anything else. The same guy who says “psssh, it’s just a blog” one day, will berate you for a post the next.

If you, like most B2B marketing executives, choose not to produce or create your blog, but rather just want to manage it, those are only the beginning of your headaches.

For the professional digital marketing manager who wants their business’s blog to run unencumbered, there are countless difficult questions to ask, such as:

• • Do we work out our content plan ourselves, do we outsource the editorial plan, or do we work together with a supplier on it?

• • Do we work with one outfit to produce all of our posts, or many different suppliers, bloggers and/or freelancers? What is best in terms of money, consistency, manageability, quality and experimentation?

• • Do we share our blog’s analytics with the writer or agency, in order to help them improve, or do we hold these numbers for ourselves?

• • To what extent can we combine internally produced blog posts with externally produced blog posts? Will externally produced posts seem unauthentic and detached from the intricate nature of our business?

• • What happens when our CEO is asked about a series of blog posts produced by our agency, and he has no knowledge of them (because he hasn’t read them)?

• • How do we ensure that the knowledge and relationships created via blogging come into our organization, if the blog is produced out-of-house?

• • How much do we really need to pay in order to get quality? And what is must-have quality, versus good-enough quality? What are fair rates for those levels?

Marketers love to sort things out. They see a circular hole, and they seek a circular peg to fill it. Which is why blogging creates such a headache. It’s not a circular hole. It’s not square. Or trapezoidal. It’s not even fixed. It’s amorphous and always changing. How do you sort that out?

This all might lead the average marketer to think “then why do it?!” But if you’re serious about what you’re doing and you’ve learned a thing or two about web marketing, you know the answer to that. You must, and you must get it right. There can be no other way.

I have worked with countless companies on blogs – some here at Velocity and some in an earlier life. And I’ve blogged for over a decade, both here and elsewhere. Plus I’ve talked to, and listened to, countless other marketers bemoan blogging.

So I offer up this little post to say, I understand. I know. But the questions can be answered, and we can stumble along and pretty soon we’ll have something to look back at and say: “There was a there there. And – goddamn it – I think we’re actually getting better at this.”

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Blogging, B2B social media, Blogging, Social Media

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Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to heart, let’s talk first impressions: Landing pages. For many of your potential leads, they’re the first meeting with your company. Either you win enough trust to introduce yourself properly, or they’ll bounce right out.

This 11-slide presentation is all about first impressions: Some of the best product landing pages in the business.*

After the slideshow, look for the list of resources. In the slideshow, either use the arrows at the bottom to navigate or simply press right-arrow on your keyboard.

The Landing Page Resource List

♦ Google tells you how to ensure lightning quick landing pages: How can I improve my landing page’s load time?

♦ Landing pages should have a strong, clear and easy call to action. Check out Smashing Magazine for best practice in design of call to action buttons. For copy, Quora tells you what kind of text works best.

♦ Michael from SAP’s Integrated Marketing tells you how to shorten the B2B buyer cycle with landing pages.

♦ Brendan tells you just how to create a secondary call to action.

♦ Stan and Doug nailed it in the Content Marketing Workbook: You need to make yourself useful. A good landing page screams utility.

♦ Landing pages should be regularly experimented with using A/B testing. Try Google Website Optimizer for an easy way to do this.

♦ Landing pages often make a simple, sharp and absurdly ambitious promise. Many combine imperatives (“go here”, “do this”, “start that”) with a bold claim in the new naive style.

♦ Oli of Unbounce, the landing page specialists, provides a gorgeous 12-part landing page rehab program.

♦ If you like spending money on A/B testing (that is, if you want help to get it right), Visual Website Analyzer is a smart place to put it.

*The landing pages used as examples in this tutorial were pre-selected by the legendary UX (user interaction) community at Quora. The pages were offered as “killer landing pages for products“. As most are B2C, they may need tweaking for B2B purposes, but the principles abide.

What’s your take on the 11 landing pages? Drop a comment.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B lead generation, Demand Generation, design, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Web Marketing

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B2B marketers unite!

You have nothing to lose but your lousy response rates.

There’s never been a more exciting – or a scarier– time to be a B2B marketer.

It’s not about social media, the web, or email. It’s about a completely new mindset, new buyer behaviours and a shiny new set of tools to address it all.

The Manifesto starts with a call to action and a plea for ambition.

We then look at what’s really changed in B2B (it’s not what most people think).

Then we touch on the barriers that stand between you and glory.

Finally, we identify what you can do about it: five imperatives and six B2B staples — the new weapons in your arsenal, waiting to be deployed. Including:

• What a world view is and why you need one
• Why B2B marketing ‘chops’ are essential to your success
• How thinking beyond digital is the future
• Why exposing your beliefs can be a powerful differentiator
• The six things B2B marketing people really need to get good at, now.

This is the new era of B2B marketing: it’s exciting, challenging, scary – and there’s really no going back.

The only question is: what are you going to do about it?

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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Click below to download The New B2B Marketing Manifesto.

You might like one of our other eBooks:

The Holy Trinity of Technology Marketing

Technology marketing is actually quite simple: you need to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly. This eBook tells you what the three questions are and why it’s so important to have good answers to them.
Get it here.

The B2B Content Marketing Workbook

Content Marketing is without doubt the most powerful weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. This, our most popular eBook, helps you get it right, including:
• What Content Marketing and Thought Leadership really mean
• Why you need to get good at them (and fast)
• Why you’re perfectly placed to do it well
Get it here.

And if you’re all eBooked out and just want to get stuck in to some outrageously effective marketing, we’re always here for you. Get in touch.

© Stuart Rothwell for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content marketing is widespread, and companies are spending increasing amount on it. But people aren’t particularly confident about it, and there’s a real need for education. In particular they need help to produce relevant and engaging content. Content marketing is here to stay, but marketers have to get used to it.

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

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

Most use a mixture of around 8 content marketing methods.

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

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

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

Marketers report that content marketing supports multiple business goals:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the whole report here.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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The B2B Marketing Manifesto tackles the choice facing B2B marketers today: either step up to the challenge of marketing in a digital world, or continue using the internet for digital brochureware and serving the sales team with collateral support.

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

Get a world view

Expose your beliefs

Get some chops – and use them

Start thinking and generate relevant ideas

Think beyond digital

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

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

About Velocity

Velocity is the B2B marketing agency for technology companies.

Website: www.velocitypartners.co.uk

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

Twitter: velocitytweets

Contact: Neil@velocitypartners.co.uk

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency

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You might like one or two of our other eBooks:

The Holy Trinity of Technology Marketing

Technology marketing is actually quite simple: you need to be able to answer three questions quickly, clearly and compellingly. This eBook tells you what the three questions are and why it’s so important to have good answers to them.
Get it here.

The B2B Content Marketing Workbook

Content Marketing is without doubt the most powerful weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. This, our most popular eBook, helps you get it right, including:
• What Content Marketing and Thought Leadership really mean
• Why you need to get good at them (and fast)
• Why you’re perfectly placed to do it well
Get it here.

And if you’re all eBooked out and just want to get stuck in to some outrageously effective marketing, we’re always here for you. Get in touch.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

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

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

But our friends at Econsultancy aren’t worried:

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

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

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

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

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

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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Photo credit: Le Scribbler

I’ve never flown Ryanair before. And now I never will again. If I’d wanted to raise my blood pressure, I could have done that for free by reading the comments section of the Daily Mail website. To anyone contemplating a journey with Ryanair, I suggest you shut yourself inside a biscuit tin and ask someone to drop you off the top of a tall building, thus closely simulating the experience of flying with the world’s most hated airline. Although I should say that thanks to the air hostess’s desperation to sell everyone on the flight a packet of smokeless cigarettes, she failed to charge me for the macaroni cheese I ordered. The foot-flavoured rubberized pasta tasted like justice.

On my return to the UK I Googled Ryanair and found www.ihateryanair.co.uk, a site devoted entirely to rants about flying with the said accursed airline. This reminded me of the now-famous United Airlines PR disaster that was the song entitled “United Breaks Guitars”, written by an aggrieved Canadian singer after United broke his guitar and declined to pay compensation. The video of the song went global, the world’s media covered the story, and United’s shareprice dropped 10% four days after the video was posted on YouTube. Similarly, a letter of complaint sent to Richard Branson regarding the poor quality of the food on a flight to India (complete with photos of the offending foodstuffs) has been widely circulated through the internet thanks to the ability to share articles via Digg It, Facebook, and Twitter.

The point is that corporations should be wary of social media. It’s an amazing marketing medium, but this works both ways. Good stuff spreads, but so do the stories you really, really want to hide. This should result in a wariness on the part of corporations to screw over the customer, but in reality corporations are big enough to absorb the bad publicity. Occasionally the underdog has got a company by the short and curlies and you can almost hear a collective cheer go up from across the globe. But usually it doesn’t happen that way.

Of course, there are plenty of things companies who have screwed up can do to get the customer back onside, as Econsultancy’s recent blog post shows. But too often businesses decide that admitting a mistake is suicide. This is so wrong-headed. People respond to a ‘mea culpa’ by backing down a little bit, and they may well have a grudging respect for a company mature enough to take responsibility for its cock-ups without trying to blame former employees/another company/an Icelandic volcano. This holds good for B2B service companies as well as B2C. Sure, companies who’ve been screwed over by other companies are unlikely to start a toxic social media campaign because it just looks unprofessional.* But although they don’t have recourse to that, and rarely sue either, B2B companies are far from immune from bad karma. Word will get out, and when it does, you’ll find you’re about as welcome as a crocodile at a children’s party. There’s no quicker way to become a B2B pariah than by getting a reputation for poor service – it’s the closest thing companies have to halitosis. You’ve been warned. Floss your customer service systems regularly.

*Doug has pointed out that although companies rarely start hate campaigns, individuals within companies certainly do. Hence ihatemicrosoft.com, the ‘I Hate SAP’ group on Facebook, and the fact that Virgin Atlantic sacked 13 members of staff caught insulting customers on Facebook. And as that story shows, your own staff will sabotage you even if your enemies refrain.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Online PR, Social Media

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

Conceived as a repository for the 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.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Message Development, Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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