Social media has washed over the B2B world in a way reminiscent of Ghandi’s quote: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Social media has more or less won in B2B, but people are still scratching their heads: “Now what?”

In this interview, John Watton shares his rich experience implementing social media tactics in marketing efforts – what seems to work, what doesn’t seem to work.

And note that this is no pie-eyed social media cheerleading; the darling of new B2B channels gets rough treatment in some contexts.

If you want to see a quick one-minute introduction to this B2B marketing masters series, see this mini-segment from Stan.

And we’ve included links to all of the other segments in the series below the video. Enjoy!

B2B Masters interview part one: Talking about the role of the senior marketer today

B2B Masters interview part two: The relationship between B2B sales and marketing

B2B Masters interview part three: How marketing technology levels the playing field

B2B Masters interview part four: How do you make content stand out in a busy market

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

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It took us a while to come around to calling target audiences ‘buyer personas’ but we’ve grudgingly stepped on to the jargon train.

After all, a buyer persona is much more than a simple target audience description — done right, each one should be a rich profile that captures the most important dimensions of a given target audience sector. The result is a powerful guide for writers, designers and content strategists.

As a writer, I rely on a clear buyer persona to give me a specific image of the person I’m writing for. And building a buyer persona development stage into any major content marketing project flushes out any differences within the team about exactly who the target audience is — the kind of differences that can kill a project if exposed too late.

Check out these buyer persona resources

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of our favourite persona-related resources from around the web. I hope it helps you clarify your approach to buyer personas and gives you new ways to capture your target audience dynamics:

The Buyer Persona Institute blog is Adele Revella’s excellent site all about personas. Her Five Rings of Insight — Priority Initiatives, Success Factors, Perceived Barriers, Buying Process, Decision Criteria – really help you nail the dimensions that will guide your content marketing. Jeff Ogden did an excellent interview with Adele on Mad Marketing TV.

Buyer Personas – Where and How to Start – an excellent post from Jeremy Victor of B2B Bloggers. I like this quote: “A buyer persona enables you create marketing content that is for someone and not everyone.” I also like his Buyer Persona Questionnaire on Slideshare .

An interview with Tony Zambito – by Stephanie Tilton of Savvy B2B Marketing. Tony is one of the pioneers of the buyer persona so he’s got a good view. He feels that, “buyer personas have been oversimplified and have lost touch with their original intention….the static snapshot of a single buyer is a key problem with buyer personas today.”

SpotOn Vision’s Persona Marketing slide deck – this is an excellent introduction to buyer personas, with examples and rationale.

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve? – A short, insightful post from Ardath Albee of the Marketing Interactions blog. Including a sweet picture of her dog, Bella.

Four Tips for Improving Web Personalisation – Maria Wasing of EPiServer posts on the always excellent Econsultancy blog about buyer personas specifically for targeting web content.

A nice, simple buyer persona sheet – In this post, Martine Hunter of MLT Creative shares this nice, crisp way of capturing a buyer persona:

Know any other content, posts or insights into B2B buyer personas or target audience descriptions for content marketing? Drop them in the comment box.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B technology marketing, buyer persona, Buyer Personas, online marketing

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Its ‘zoomable user interface’ (ZUI?) with swoopy transitions and infinite drill-downs make it a sexy alternative to boring old slides.

Why should you put Prezi in your B2B content marketing toolbox? Here’s why:

• It’s great for telling linear stories – allowing you to take the viewer by the hand and lead them through your tale.

• It’s still got novelty appeal – not many people use it so it’s a fresh way to engage an audience.

• It’s pretty rich – you can include video files, images and links.

• You can embed it – so anyone can drop it in their blog.

• You can edit and play offline – so you can present from it even if you’re not near WiFi. (A paid-for option).

Downsides?

• It takes a little while to learn – The editing interface is cool but unlike any other software tool you use now, so it takes some getting used to. The editing tool thingy looks like this:

• You don’t get much of a bonus audience from the Prezi site itself – as you do with Slideshare or YouTube.

• It doesn’t give you SEO-juice – the text inside isn’t searchable (I don’t know why they don’t do the transcript trick that Slideshare does). Oh, and it’s not easy to post a Prezi page on Pinterest — the image isn’t accessible to Pinterest (a small thing but a shame as they’re both visual media and ought to be made for each other).

• If you over-use the swooping you can make people feel ill. Which is embarrassing. The first one I ever did will actually cause sea-sickness. You’ve been warned.

• You still have to help people use it. See the sentence starting with “I suggest viewing it…” below.

Our latest B2B content marketing Prezi
Here’s a Prezi we just produced for Salesforce.com taking people through a typical social-powered customer service case, from tweet to resolution.

I suggest viewing it in full screen mode (press play to load it, then click fullscreen under ‘more’ in the player — bottom right). Then just keep hitting the play button to advance:

And here’s one we made a while ago, called the Content Marketing Tutorial. For this one, we kept the story in one plane and confined movements to 45 or 90 degrees. Keeps things simple:

What do you think?
Do you think Prezi has value for B2B content marketing?
Have you made any yourself? (If so, please share them in the comments section).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, Content, Content Marketing, Prezi, Thought Leadership

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When John Watton of Expedia Affiliate Network and Stan get on the topic of content (and what makes the difference between forgettable content and memorable content), opinions really start to fly. And why? Because it’s clearly something they care about, and something that matters.

Amongst the little gems from the chat:

The world is littered with B2B data sheets and white papers that are just so dull…Marketers need to remember that humans are going to read this stuff, not just robots.

A crime among B2B marketers is simply thinking that anyone really gives a damn about what you’re talking about.

We think too much about how to stand out against our 3-4 competitors, when we should really be thinking about how we get through amongst hundreds of competing signals.

If you want to know what some of the leading B2B and content marketers in the field think about content today, this is a clip to watch. And if you’re missing the context for this interview and want a quick intro, see Stan’s quickie intro.

Also, after the video, see links to all of the previous clips released from this B2B Masters interview.

B2B Masters interview part one: Talking about the role of the senior marketer today

B2B Masters interview part two: The relationship between B2B sales and marketing

B2B Masters interview part three: How marketing technology levels the playing field

B2B Masters interview part four: B2B social media for better or worse

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content Marketing

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The perfect B2B Content Marketing Team

Great B2B content marketing is teamwork.

But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so you need to put together a multi-disciplinary project team. The team may stay together for the long haul (which would be great) or assemble, disperse and reassemble for each new project or piece like Arnie Schwarzenegger in The Terminator (and every other movie he’s done).

But to make your content marketing initiatives a success, somebody needs to be wearing these hats. The roles may not each live in a dedicated body — they may all be inside one person – but you need them on the team:

The Content Strategist

• The Big-Picture dude
• Understands the business inside out
• Bang up-to-date on content marketing
• Communicates well with stakeholders
• Good facility with all media
• Student of Sun Tzu

The Expertise Harvester

• A journalist/analyst type
• Knows where the goodies are in the company
• Great at ferreting out knowledge and stories
• And packaging them up into briefs
• Student of James Spangler

The Writer

• Bastard love-child of journalist and copywriter
• Master of all formats and media
• Turns unstructured gobbledy-gook into clear, compelling stories
• Does it fast
• Student of George Orwell’s essays

The Designer

• An information salesperson
• Master of all media & formats
• Great at structure & hierarchy
• Message first, design awards third
• Student of Edward Tufte

The Geek

• Lives in the analytics
• Great at turning data into insight
• And insight into firm recommendations
• Great at setting up stuff to track
• And convincing people to tag their links
• Student of Richard Feynman

The Process Wonk

• Project manager
• Complete/Finisher
• Firm but fair but friendly
• Loves them spreadsheets and project plans and editorial calendars
• Actually believes deadlines are deadlines
• Student of Henry Gantt

The Friendly Sales Dude

• Meets with marketers to define a sales-ready lead
• Understands the role of content through the buying cycle
• Says thank you when real leads are dumped in lap
• Happy to attribute that sale to a content-generated lead
• Buys Bruichladdich Ten for marketing team annually
• Student of Dale Carnegie

The Socialiser

• Knows how to share content so others share it too
• Fluent in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Slideshare…
• Has a gazillion (relevant) followers
• And a reputation for sharing good stuff
• And helping others
• Student of Tina Brown

The Paid Media Planner

• Knows the difference between CPM, CPA and ROI
• Great at pay-per-click — in search engines and social media
• Will try anything – a natural experimenter
• Great relationship with the Data Geek
• Proves the return on every dollar invested
• Student of Warren Buffett

The Nurturer

• Lives and breathes Revenue Performance Management
• Drives marketing automation like a BMW
• Speaks Salesforce (or other CRM)
• Knows how to model attributions
• Owns the funnel: content in, money out
• Student of Florence Nightingale

The Search Bunny

• Keen eye for the keyphrase gap
• Good at optimising without killing copy
• Keeps on top of Google’s latest whim (Pandas, Penguins, Potato-heads)
• Never buys a link
• Owns no black hats
• Student of Pythia

So okay — how many of these do you have on your team?

Do you think we left anyone out?  Do comment….

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership

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Watton argues convincingly and forcefully for the power of new web 2.0 tools in marketing to level the playing field between large and small companies. He describes how small companies can now achieve the same things for hundreds of dollars a month investment, what giants had been paying Siebel hundreds of thousands of dollars to do.

To put this chat in context, Stan and John had been discussing Watton’s role as CMO at ShipServ (an emarketplace play in the shipping industry) prior to the start of this video segment.

For the full introduction to this series of interviews, see Stan’s quickie intro.

Too see other videos from the series after this segment, see the links below the video…

See other parts of this series:

Part 1: The changing role of the senior marketer
Part 2: The relationship between B2B marketing and B2B sales
Part 4: How do you make content stand out in a busy market
Part 4: B2B social media for better or worse

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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The Future of Digital Marketing event (FODM) is a highlight of the digital marketing calendar and one of Econsultancy’s longest-standing events.

So we were thrilled when Laura Wall asked us to do the main print promotional piece for the 2012 event.  We gave it to Luke Donaghey to design –– he did last year’s bright, red poster, so we couldn’t exactly take this one away from him. (Though Jim did the stunning logo).

Here it is. A black uncoated cover with black foil blocking. Opening up to the letters from the FODM logo blown up in red on tracing paper.

Not a lot of copy. Just enough to make the point: it’s big, it’s back and it’s very cool (if you haven’t been to FODM… book it before it sells out).

Here’s some more eye candy (in case you weren’t elite enough to get it in the post). Pardon the unretouched iPhone shots — sometime life moves too fast for Photoshop:

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B design, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Content, design, Identity

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He tells this B2B content marketing case story so well, I won’t try to re-tell it here.  Just wanted to share my favourite graphic from it:

Says it all — the sweet spot for all B2B marketing is where content, search and social overlap. And that’s why the Social Success site is getting so much traction.

Kieran’s post covers things like Personas, Themes, Topics, Process, Resources and Metrics — plus the different content types developed and the ways Salesforce promoted them.

Do read this excellent summary of this project — we’ve loved being a part of it (lots more to come) and Kieran was great to share it so openly.

(Oh and we blogged about it here too, in this B2B content marketing case story blog post.)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B social media, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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At Velocity, we never let a bandwagon rattle past without at least making a token effort towards hopping on board. So when Pinterest started to pick up steam, we registered without a moment’s hesitation. Our excuse? We need to learn about this stuff even if it’s not exactly suited to our business.

As soon as we joined, we saw that Econsultancy, the digital marketing community (and Velocity clients and friends) are doing quite a good job at Pinterest — here’s the Econsultancy Pinterest board (or collection of boards or whatever). They’ve got boards for infographics, events, reports, posts about Pinterest, SEO, mobile marketing… all the kinds of things you’d hope to see from them. And it looks like they’re getting lots of re-pins.

Emboldened, we dove in. I give you The VelocityB2B Content Marketing Pinterest page.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far
In a few months playing around, we’ve learned these things about the social juggernaut-du-jour:

• Pinterest is a visual medium – great pictures get shared. Bad ones don’t.

• But that doesn’t mean text isn’t important – the descriptions play an important part in findability and shareability

• Yes, it’s great for fashion – and other pretty-centric industries

• But that doesn’t mean it’s not good for B2B – turns out, it kind of is

• Boards make it easy to set up sub-blogs – so each topic you want to pin about gets its own board

• It’s an SEO booster – The links in Pinterest aren’t no-follow links like Twitter ones

• It’s fun! – kind of like the scrap books we had as kids

What do we think Pinterest may be good for?
Well, it’s another channel to be discovered in — but like all social channels, it does take time, energy and attention (three scarce commodities).

We’ve heard reports of Pinterest generating more web traffic than other social channels, so we’ll watch with interest to see if that;’s true.

And we’ll see if there’s any impact on our search rankings — though that may be tricky to determine.

What would we do if we were you?

• We’d start playing in Pinterest. Give it a couple hours.
• Get the ‘Pin It’ button for your browser – makes it way easier
• And the app for your iPhone – de rigeur
• And create a few relevant boards – like we did
• And follow other people’s boards – like we will
• And track your progress – looking at 3 metrics:  re-pins, likes and web traffic
• And put a P icon on your site – so people can follow you (we’ll do this on our new website

The Velocity Pinterest boards

So far, we’ve got a board on B2B Content Marketing:

And one on our B2B Content Marketing eBooks:

And a board on our B2B Videos:

And a board on recent Velocity Websites that we’ve produced:

And one on B2B Infographics that we’ve produced (we’ll do a board on ones we like that we didn’t produce, too):

And B2B Marketing Books we like:

And here’s one on some Velocity Clients and their smiling faces:

And finally (for now), one on the other social media channels where you can find Velocity — including LinkedIn links for Stan, Neil, Ryan, Martha and I:

So that’s where we’ve started out on Pinterest.

What happens next?

To be honest, I have absolutely no idea. We’ll keep playing around with it and monitoring the re-pins and web traffic.  And we’ll let you know how it goes.

Some  Pinterest links

There’s a cool Pinterest infographic here, from Maximyser.

And an A-Z of brands doing interesting things on Pinterest, from Econsultancy.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B social media, Content Marketing, Pinterest, Social Media

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There’s a saying in Scotland (where I’m from) that “many a mickle makes a muckle”.

It’s really just a cooler, alliterative way of saying lots of small things turn into something big.

It’s fair to say that most B2B marketers (and I’m no exception) like to work on the biggest campaigns with the widest impacts. But it’s just as fair to say that the people who truly succeed – whether content marketers or Olympic champions – are the ones who milk every possible advantage until that elusive muckle appears.

It’s realistic to improve 100 things by 1%: it’s unrealistic to improve one thing by 100%.

Cross Promotion
We love cross promotion because it’s brimming with mickles. We link between our own content and (sometimes) strike deals with clients, partners and friends to do the same.

Yet we often see content (videos, ebooks, white papers) hitting the market that don’t reference any other content. This is a mistake: something my granny would describe as a mickle left on the table. She’d be furious at the wasted opportunity to:

Work people down (or up) your sales funnel
Expand their understanding of your company and offer
Cement your reputation as a purveyor of fine content
Understand content performance outside your own site

The first points are obvious (though usually overlooked for reasons I’ll explain later) but the last point is very important but little understood.

Most analytics set-ups will tell you what happens to content on your site. But does your content have a life outside of your site? Do prospects email it one another? Does it actually bring traffic and conversions to your site? With a little bit of smart thinking you can start to get a real handle on whether your message has wings.

Google Multi-Channel Funnels
Using Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels, we can see the role cross-promotion plays in future conversions. And, crucially, we can see how many future marketing prospects arrived at our site for the first time ever as a result of cross-promotion.

Do these two mickles add up to one big conversion muckle? You bet they do.

In the last 12 months cross promotion between our content has been involved in the conversion path of almost one in four conversions. Usually, that means a prospect comes to our site, downloads some content and then links through to download another. Do click the images if you’d like a clearer view.

But that’s only the beginning. If I ask the report to only show cross promotion as the first step of a conversion path then you can see the prospects that only arrived after they read our stuff. The content came before the site visit. This content mickle alone is worth an extra 140 prospects a year.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, can tell me this isn’t a major sign of content marketing impact.

Mickles on the Table
So why are mickles, like cross promotion, lost in the content production process? It happens because:

Creating great content is hard and corners are cut as fatigue kicks in
Content lifecycles are seen in weeks instead of years
Nobody understood their value in the first place
Point content still dominates library content and that’s a mistake
Content production has no central engine to bring it together
Measurement is still under-employed

How It’s Done
If you want to use Google Multi-Channel Funnels to measure your cross promotion then you need to make sure you are using:

1.Tags: The first thing we need to do is tag the links back to our site so Google Analytics understands where it comes from. The following link tag gives all the information we need to track it’s source, media and campaign:
2.Multi-Channel Funnels: We can then use these tags to create custom channel grouping path in the Top Conversion Path tabs.

In this case we simply used our tags to identify our cross promotion traffic and then set up a rule to make it work. It’s simple but hugely effective.

Whoops! Almost forgot: Download this ebook. And all the others you find in it.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Content Marketing Cross Promotion

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