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Ok, I lied. There’s no sex in this post. Adverts, on the other hand, aren’t technically allowed to lie. Back in the 19^th Century, you could make all kinds of wild claims about your Tincture of Gripe Water or Dr Astoundo’s Patented Baldness Liniment. Nobody could sue you if it didn’t do what it said on the tin. That changed in the early 20^th Century, which is all to the good. It means marketers have to be more creative when promoting products or services, and not just resort to bare-faced lies.

But there’s no law against bad spelling, grammar, or inaccurate use of terms. I’m one of those people for whom bad spelling and grammar are akin to the screech of nails down the blackboard of my soul. I spent a good 15 minutes staring at two pieces of bad advertising on the Tube this morning:

1) Nintendo DS’s 100 Classic Books. “100 classic novels… from Jane Eyre to Hamlet”.

Hamlet is not a novel. It’s never been a novel. It’s a bloody play, as anyone with half their wits about them knows.

2) Magnum Temptation. “It’s name? Magnum Temptation”.

This kind of thing puts me in danger of injuring myself, such is my righteous ire. There are talented young people out there busting a gut to get into copywriting, and some smug pillock can’t even be bothered to read through his or her own copy and check for grammatical howlers like this one. And, apparently, neither can anyone else in the agency. It’s an insult to the audience, to people who genuinely care about the quality of their work, and to the whole institution of ice-cream -eating. I will never buy a Magnum again.

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Photo credit: Michael Karshis

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Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Copywriting, writing

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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.

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Post tags: B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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The first generation of search engine optimizers once enjoyed a biblical reputation: seldom seen, holier than thou, and busy working miracles.

But the glamour feels like it’s fading in B2B circles as the discipline makes its way into the mainstream.

Authors like Dave Chaffey and David Viney have poured light into the dark art and tools, such as SEO editing software, often wrapped into user-friendly CMS systems, are automating a lot of formerly arcane processes.

The wizardry has become solid marketing practice, but has it delivered a major change in search engine performance? Well, for many B2B marketing teams, no, not really.

The fact is that you can’t win the SEO war with good optimization; you can only lose it with bad optimization.

Optimize for show
An optimized website is rapidly becoming standard. As Viney tacitly acknowledged in his book “How to get to the top of Google” the optimizing opportunity is closing fast.

“The bottom line is that after you – and your competitors – have used every other piece of optimization available, your domain name selection is perhaps the only area where you can really differentiate yourself.”

B2B marketing teams need to think beyond core content optimization and weave SEO into the fabric of business communication. It’s an organizational, as well as an optimization, task.

Organize for dough
The challenge centres on dynamic content management created by legions of B2B communicators without a thought to keyphrases and backlinks. Here are just four typical examples that spring to mind.

The Heavyweight Blogger – Many organisations are signing up superstar bloggers. They are often technologists, leaders in their field, who enjoy large followings and love to lead debates. They like to decide what their public wants to hear.

The Star Copywriter – Not many superstar copywriters (ours included) like to be told what words to use. And they certainly don’t want to be told to repeat the same words. They like to decide how to enchant their audiences.

The Social Conversationalist – Anyone representing a company on social networks or forums wants to stay in the conversation. They need to speak like responsive humans and they don’t like being given any sort of script.

The PR Guru – PR has a broad definition but it’s fair to say that, even today, the bulk of professionals are media handlers. In other words they work with capricious people working to established conventions. The like to stick to it.

So how can we persuade communicators to optimize and pitch attractive, portable content that delivers Google juice from top quality backlinks laden with anchor-text?

Here are five tips to organize your business to deliver SEO value:

1. Share benefits – People embrace extra work like turkeys embrace Christmas, unless you prove its value.
2. Educate everyone – If you don’t take the time to go on tour and teach, why should they take the time to learn?
3. Offer support – Many content creators don’t have time for SEO discipline. But they might just let you do it for them.
4. Pick up slack – You need to fill gaps. If the PR team won’t go beyond traditional media then the door’s open.
5. Share results – People are inspired by their results (good and bad) so share for ongoing momentum.

Today the case for search engine organization is growing. As optimization reaches saturation you need to combine people management with content management to win SEO wars.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, search engine optimisation, SEO

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

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Let’s face it, most B2B copywriting is not very good.  Here are ten reasons why:

1. Not being clear about what you want your audience to do.
All good writing starts with this and all bad writing doesn’t.

2. Not being clear about why they should do it.
You just need three powerful reasons.

3. Not saying why they should believe you.
Support your reasons with facts and logic.

4. Failing to take a view.
Good writing starts with a clear world view and an opinion about the issues the reader cares about. “The world is like this. That’s why you need our widget.”

5. Not doing your homework.
Lazy writing is bad writing. Research pays dividends.

6. Putting on your ‘writer’s voice’.
This is a killer. Forget your writing voice, use your speaking voice.

7. Failing to structure your ideas.
Good writing takes people on a trip. Structure is the path.

8. Treating your audience like a decision-making robot.
B2B buyers are human beings first. Lighten up.

9. Being too abstract.
Good copy is concrete and specific, uses an active voice and uses the second person (you) a lot.

10. Being a wuss.
Good writing is confident. Bad writing lacks the conviction that it’s worth reading. So it isn’t.

Any other causes of bad B2B copywriting you’d like to share?

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Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: Forbidden Emotions

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Copywriting, persuasion

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Photo credit: Anoldent

Am I normal?

Ask people about bounce rates and they’ll tell you that a high bounce rate is bad. Fair enough, it sounds pretty logical. You don’t want lots of people taking one look at your site and running away screaming. But how do you know what’s a high bounce rate? What is normal?

Trawl the internet for the answer to this and you’ll find everyone and their Auntie Fanny has an opinion on it, especially B2B marketers. Some people say that anywhere between 15-50% is normal, others that 60% is fine. That rather suggests that there’s no such thing as normal (which, fortunately for this office, is true in so many aspects of life).

The fact is that bounce is rate is highly variable, depending on specific circumstances. It’s too particular to your website to be comparable to anyone else’s. That’s not much help when you’re starting out. In that case you have to take the temperature of your bounce rate at the start and then compare with yourself over time.

Bounce rates are a very useful internal benchmark. But it’s just one tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit, it’s not a guaranteed indicator of the health of your website. But, as one forum contributor said: “What should your bounce rate be? Lower than it was yesterday”.

A point to note:

There are occasions when a high bounce rate is a good thing. If you host lots of adverts on your site, you’re likely to get a high bounce rate – especially if the ads are really targeted and relevant. Or similarly if you’re an online publisher you may well get people visiting just one page: an article or a blog post. So the take home message is: stop looking at other people’s bounce rates and don’t panic.

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

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Lots of B2B marketers are fully paid up members of the I ♥ Analytics club, but not everyone’s convinced. One of the reasons for this is that there’s often a surfeit of information that isn’t very informative. B2B marketers drown in too many numbers and statistics, and decide therefore that analytics is a waste of time (thus throwing a very useful baby out with the bathwater).

There are some things you can do to sift the gold nuggets from the river mud:

Don’t just look at the short-term

Short term reporting is quite useful, but you need to keep an eye on long-term trends. As any statistician will tell you, you can’t infer generalizations from snapshots. If you react to some spike in your stream without thinking about its context and the longer view, you’re likely to end up with a knee-jerk reaction that may actually damage your campaign. In fact, the bigger the volume of data, the more accurate your results will be.

Keep it regular

Analytics is like a pint of Guinness – it just can’t be hurried. That means they’ll just have to wait if they want anything approaching accuracy. So don’t grab data at random, even if someone is breathing down your neck about a report they want by yesterday.

Analytics takes a little planning. You need to timetable a regular round of data collection from each stream. This must be done consistently: say, always at 11.30 on a Tuesday morning. That way you’re comparing like with like, as far as possible.

It’s true, analytics can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. But that’s not the fault of the system, it’s the fault of the operator. So if your analytics isn’t playing ball, it’s probably because you’ve done something wrong. As comfortable to admit as a wooden clog up the jaxie, sure, but that’s the way it goes. B2B marketing can be cruel.

Photo credit: Munksynz

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Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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Photo credit: Dan the Man

You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines:

“Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

Apparently DEFRA, the Department of Health, and others, have been resorting to paid search and running up large bills. So far, so what? “Government department squanders cash on pointless marketing” is hardly news. They’ve been doing it for years. Every time someone fancies some new departmental pencils they embark on a rebranding exercise. It’s practically law.

The BBC helpfully tries to explain what paid search is, and gets it wrong: “Organisations can pay search engines to ensure their websites appear at the top of users’ searches. They are often charged for each person who accesses their sites via the link.”

Often? How about “always”? I don’t know a single search engine that doesn’t charge by the click. They certainly don’t do it for free.

But aside from the BBC’s poor research skills, the real scandal here is that government departments are using PPC advertising at all. They don’t need to. All they need is to do some serious SEO work and optimize the bejesus out of their web pages. Then they’ll get to the top of Google without having to resort to expensive PPC. As it is, this is the internet equivalent of dad dancing: the government trying to get down wit’ der kidz by using SEO techniques and getting it wrong.

But what really got my goat, tied it up and did unspeakable things to it was Tory MP Damian Hinds’ reaction to these figures:

“Of course there are times and subjects when getting the information out there is an absolute imperative.

“But in general I don’t see why government departments should spend large sums improving their showing on search engines.

“I would have thought the search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find.”

Pardon? “Search engines themselves should ensure official information is easy to find”? You might have thought that search engines should act as a government mouthpiece Damian, but you would have been wrong.

A search engine is not a library catalogue. They’re a commercial concern, and for all that Google massages its own ego by propounding its fatuous motto “Don’t be evil”, it’s ruled by naked commercialism. Public service doesn’t come into it. If I ring up NHS Direct, I expect to be given impartial advice because it’s a public body. If I ring up GlaxoSmithKline and recount my symptoms to them, I expect to be sold something (or to be hung up on).

Search engines don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts, because they don’t have one (something a politician should relate to). They’re refreshingly amoral: anyone can buy their services, and that applies equally to governments, arms dealers, purveyors of hardcore pornography, and charities. But the operative word in that sentence is “buy”.

Whining that official information should get special treatment goes against the free market nature of the web, and besides, it’s a specious (and slightly alarming) argument. Government propaganda should come first? Henry Elliss made an excellent point about this on Econsultancy’s blog:

If the Government want priority-listing in search engines, what happens when the next election comes along? Do the incumbent party get first dibs on the top results for searches like “Immigration” and “Job losses”?

It’s a short step from automatic priority listing for government information to censorship. Of course, some would argue that it’s for our own good, but personally as a fairly autonomous adult, I’d like to be able to make my own mind up. And it’s my considered opinion that Damian Hinds is a halfwit.

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

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There’s an impressive list of candidates: Muhammed Ali, Martina Navratilova, Lance Armstrong, Pele, Eric Liddel, Nadia Comaneci, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt, Rod Laver…

But, of course, there’s no right answer. Navratilova’s dismount from the asymmetric bars is unlikely to be any better than Comaneci’s running backhand. And you can’t compare across relentless eras of technical and scientific advance.

So why bother? We do it to relive the moments, feel the inspiration and discuss the essence of greatness.

And what makes them great? Are they separated from the also-rans by an iron will-to-win? I doubt it. I believe they are great because they go one stride further – they are prepared to fail and that’s why they (usually) succeed.

There are two example that illustrate the point better than I ever could.

The first comes from “The Great One” himself, Wayne Gretzky: “You miss with 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take”. The risk, you see, is not shooting.

But nothing beats Michael Jordan‘s message as a positive view of failure.

When B2B marketers put risk above reward the quality suffers. I am certain that most B2B marketers would rather avoid a public failure than shoot for success. It’s not enough; we are in the results business: hired to do stuff.

There’s a paradox here. If risk-averse marketing is boring and delivers nothing then surely, surely the greatest threat to a marketer is risk-aversion. You may fail, from time to time, but think of the reward when you hit the moment, inspire your market and find the essence of great marketing.

The simple fact is that if you don’t shoot, don’t ever take a risk, like the sports people who don’t make the shortlist, you’ll always be an also-ran.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency

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Here’s Part II of the post I started on B2B Bloggers, the excellent resource run by Jeremy Victor:

The story so far:

We learned about the importance of cross-promoting your content to the people who have already engaged with you in some way or other. And we saw how using auto-responders, web ‘Thank You’ pages, outbound email and a personal touch can be really effective. Read the whole story here.

Now here are the next five tips and one BONUS TIP as a reward for wading through the other ten:

6) Use your email footers
You’ve got lots of people throughout your company sending out lots of emails to a whole range of stakeholders. I’m always surprised how many companies waste this opportunity or simply use it to broadcast a general message.

Email footers can be as targeted as any other kind of communication and one great use is to cross-promote your back catalog.  Different departments can get different promotional footers that reflect their audiences.

7) Do a Round-Up blog post
Every quarter or so, do a blog post that gives readers a guide to your entire back catalog of content or the pieces you produced since the last round-up.

We all forget how perishable our posts really are. Once they’re in the Archive folder, they rarely see the light of day. Forget the risk of repeating yourself (a risk that most marketers are far too sensitive too) and drag out that great content again.

8 ) Exploit your web forms
Most forms need to be focused on one desired action (see Tip 1). But others are fine for cross-promoting content that is relevant to the form’s purpose.

So a simple tick-box at the bottom saying, “Please also send me the Nine Rules of Rope-Making” can’t hurt can it? And it just might inspire a new generation of rope-makers.

9) Go back and revise your web copy!
I am always amazed how infrequently this is practiced: You publish a great new eBook on The Future of Left-Handed Security Software and you promote the hell out of it.  But you never go back to the nine web pages on your site that talk all about Security Software and Left-Handedness and revise them to cross-promote the new content.

We used to have a term for this back in the ‘hood: ‘Dummy-head’.  Don’t be one.

10) End your webinars with a commercial
Webinars attract your most engaged prospects. And the end of a webinar is where the really committed can be found.  Over 90% of webinars end with a single URL (see Dummy-head above). You should end each webinar with a quick summary of the great pieces of content waiting for your audience to download.

Bonus Tip 11) Cross-promote within your new content.
The best place of all to cross-promote content is inside your latest content. Our Content Marketing Workbook plugs our Holy Trinity of B2B Marketing (as does this sentence).

We end every new eBook or white paper with a Resources section that cross-promotes our other goodies and any other resources we feel are relevant. This is a service to your reader not a crass exercise in pimping (well, maybe a bit of both).

So there you go. Ten tips plus a bonus. You’ve come this far, so now do two things for me: drop some comment love below to share your own thoughts on this arcane art; and start practicing some of the ten tips tomorrow.

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Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: sl-fotografie

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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