Velocity at the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards

We were thrilled to have been a Finalist for the Best B2B Campaign in the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards, celebrated the other night at the Grosvenor House Hotel. We thought our work with ShipServ deserved it, to be honest.

But we didn’t bloody win. Microsoft did. Which kind of sucks.

On the bright side, we enjoyed a lovely smoked cherry tomato and caramelised red onion tart served with lime essence and aubergine caviar (we didn’t even know aubergines laid eggs). Followed by a grilled rump of lamb on a bed of lentil ratatouille with cardomom lamb jus (oh, when will I rest my own tired rump for just one night on a bed of lentil ratatouille?).

Are we bitter? You bet your arse we’re bitter. To be beaten is one thing. To be beaten by Microsoft is quite another.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, digital marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

But it’s only a part of the influence debate. Now we must ask how these influencers can be, well, influenced. The absence of an easy answer perhaps explains the lingering reticence to accept blogger power.

Traditional media is easier to get. It’s a relentless story-gathering machine with fixed editorial schedules and an absolute commitment to publish. The BBC won’t send Fiona Bruce home in a taxi just because it’s a slow news day.

Such reliability leads to conventional content tools that help fill editorial space: press releases, feature pitches, case studies, bylined articles etc.

Such tools have little, if any, appeal to rich-media loving bloggers who pay little, if any, attention to convention. If your communication department entirely mirrors the traditional media then it’s time for a change of mindset.

Competition v Community
Publishers and broadcasters are like secret agents looking for a big ‘scoop’. B2B bloggers are more of a knowledge sharing community.

Communicators cannot influence bloggers furtively from the shadows. They need an open ethos to engage the community and publicly win its respect.

Education v Expertise
Correspondents are often a mile wide and an inch deep. The genuinely influential B2B bloggers are invariably the opposite.

Content tools designed to educate rarely provide bloggers with the depth required to analyse products, issues and events as experts.

Lines v Loops
Traditional media operates linear, repeatable processes that mean today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper. B2B bloggers return to the same issues.

Traditional content tools are ‘hit and run’ and fail to satisfy the need for regular returns to the blogger’s world.

Ten Steps To Influence
So here are ten key tips to help you influence key bloggers in the absence of established behaviour and content conventions.

1. Research – Identity the big hitters. You need to know which bloggers carry most weight with their industry peers.

2. Listen – Hold! Don’t hit the pitch button. Establish the prevailing thinking and consider the impact for your business.

3. Engage – Ease in. Get involved in an open, two-way dialogue by responding to posts. Earn your stripes by following the agenda.  That’s different from imposing your own.

4. Gather – Break convention. Open your organisation’s content vaults and identify the arguments and proof points that apply to the key issues.

5. Adapt – Be blogger-friendly. Crystallise responses into visual or aural content packages ripe for expert analysis and sharing: videos, podcasts, schematics, ebooks, diagrams and slides fit the bill.

6. Complement – Stay aligned. Ensure your content complements, but doesn’t simply replicate, what the media relations teams are doing.

7. Share – Populate distribution channels. Make content easy to find, use and share on your own site and YouTube, SlideShare and Twitter.

8. Monitor – Keep watching. Good content spreads quickly across the web and lands in unexpected places. Use dashboards, Twitter and blog aggregators to keep up.

9. Follow-Up – Don’t stop. Bloggers will respond. Make sure you’re there to answer questions or face looking exposed and unengaged.

10. Measure – Prepare metrics. Ensure you can report on KPIs like web traffic, downloads, engagements and meetings arranged.

The Blogger Bounce Effect
Blogger and media relations use different content, but effective synchronisation can deliver spectacular results.

The following graphic, christened “The Blogger Bounce Effect”, illustrates how a synergised approach improves the impact, credibility and longevity of big announcements.

© neilstoneman for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B Bloggers, LinkedIn

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

• 76.3% use white papers for general education on specific technology topic or issue;

• 73.8 % use white papers to investigate possible solutions for the business/technology need;

Putting aside the fact that the research was designed to convince B2B marketers to pay for Information Week’s digital download service, I should probably have qualified my comments about white papers in a couple of ways. In our experience, while B2B marketers say that they write white papers to exert some thought leadership, few really do this.

This is backed up by the Information Week data: almost two thirds of readers believe that the white papers they read are too sales or marketing focussed - and only 17% said that the white papers they read were unbiased. That means more than four out of five people are disappointed in the content of the white papers they have taken the trouble to download.

Surely, great thought leadership is about putting your agenda aside and putting your prospect’s agenda at the heart of your piece? Don’t cram your latest widget into every paragraph. If you overkill on your offer  - like most white papers do - you’ll undermine the value of the piece. (Incredibly 70% of Information Week’s respondees said that a vendor representative contacted them before they had a chance even to evaluate the white paper - talk about putting obstacles in the way of downloads.) 

Readers aren’t stupid: they know you have an agenda, but by setting it aside and showing that you understand their challenges you can earn the right to sell to them at a later date. 

The second qualifier is to do with format. In the early stages of sales cycles in information hungry markets, most prospects don’t care about your vision, your latest product or your technology leadership. It’s safe (even sensible) to act as if your B2B buyers are pretty busy - even if most are under tremendous pressure to learn about how new technologies can help their companies.

In information gathering mode, prospects will gravitate to material that matches their concerns and is easy to consume, providing it’s intelligent. Most don’t want to spend hours ploughing through screeds of  pompously-written, self-serving dreck. If you’ve got some leading thoughts to share, why not recognise that we’re now in a broadband, YouTube world?

You can use video, audio or flash or a combination of all three to get your messages across in a couple of minutes. Interview your technology experts in a white board session (making sure the scene is well lit and we can hear what they’re saying of course). Run a round table with customers and partners and film it, editing it down to five minutes or so of the juiciest material. Get your top salesman to interview your best customer and serve it up as a podcast. Production costs these days for this type of material are pretty low. All you need is good ideas and the confidence to put them into action. 

So are white papers dead? Providing they’re not boring, too long and all about you, absolutely not. But we see them as being most relevant when your prospect has a real project and a real budget and when she’s considering your solution as a candidate for a shortlist.

At that point, tech buyers look for as much technical information on a particular solution as they can find (the only time I read computer magazines, for example, is when I’m about to upgrade my machine). In these circumstances, we still see a place for the traditional, highly technical piece filled to the gunnels with product specs and diagrams on integration and implementation.

We still think you need to keep them short - over 50% of Information Week’s survey said they wanted white papers to be shorter than five pages. And because people want this type of information when they are near to making a purchase decision, you could think about whether you should ask for the prospect’s details before allowing the download.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, white papers

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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.

Download it.

A little bit of insight and inspiration never hurt anyone…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

The eBook is available to download now from the Velocity website: www.velocitypartners.co.uk.

“In the era of information overload, Content Marketing is probably the single most important thing a B2B marketer can do,” says Stan Woods, Velocity MD, ” You can have lousy brochures. You can be a social media luddite. But if you get content marketing right, the world will beat a path to your door — and your sales guys will throw rose petals in your path (it’s embarrassing but feels kind of nice, too.).”

The Content Marketing 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.

“This is the single best overview I’ve yet seen on strategic B2B content marketing”, says David Fideler, B2B marketing strategist and founder of the B2B Lead Nurturing group on Linked In, ” I can’t imagine anyone being disappointed by the ideas and value delivered.”

Download the B2B Content Marketing Workbook here.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Online PR, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Your prospects are being buffeted by a firehose of information. If you’re hoping to win their attention, you’d better be prepared to earn it.

Content Marketing is your way to cut through the noise and hop over the barriers. This short, sharp eBook summarises how we at Velocity approach it, including:

• 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

We don’t usually ask people to fill out a form for our content but we put a lot of work into this one and would really like to know who’s downloading it.

So we hope you don’t mind our asking for a little info (it’s worth it) and we promise not to spam you.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B social media

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Choose your B2B patients wisely

The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates.  But they don’t have the best survival rates because they’re better surgeons.  They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully.

Great surgeons know exactly what variables in the patient’s history correlate to successful outcomes. They then avoid patients who don’t fit the profile and focus their energy on the patients most likely to survive.

To show why this is really relevant to you as a B2B marketer, I’d like to start with how it’s relevant to us as a B2B agency.

At Velocity, we apply the ‘patient screening’ idea when we’re meeting prospective clients for the first time.  Some agencies hoover up every bit of business going. They’ll say whatever they need to say and be whoever they need to be in order to win the business.

To be honest, we’ve been guilty of this in our time.  And it invariably ends in tears (the equivalent of the patient dying). We’ve been seduced by exciting projects that really didn’t play to our strengths and we’ve usually regretted it — even if the client ended up happy.

The fact is, we know exactly what we’re good at. And while it’s okay to go a bit off-piste, we have to recognise that doing so will, over time, lower our hit rate.

More to the point, the time and energy we put into these tangential projects are invested at the expense of projects that are right in our sweet spot. The ones we slam dunk every time.

So we’ve learned over the years to spot real, Velocity-shaped holes in prospect companies. And we’ve learned to spot projects that really don’t need what we do best. When we respectfully decline the latter, we spend more time on the former. So our hit rates go up. Our clients say nice things about us. And we attract more of the projects we love.

The exact same principle applies to all B2B marketing. The idea isn’t to attract every prospect who has a passing interest in what you do.  The idea is to generate sales-ready leads that hit smack in the middle of your sweet-spot; the projects that need exactly the dimensions your products excel at.

To do this, you need to know the precise size and shape of your sweet spot. You need to not only know who you are and why people should care, you need to know how you stack up against competitors and substitutes.

Only then can you isolate the dimensions that set you apart and build your marketing around them.  When you do this, you’ll be generating and nurturing contacts that lead to great sales conversations — instead of meetings where your sales people are bending over backwards to fit a brief that really isn’t suited to your business.

More ‘perfect fit’ projects means more successful projects, more happy customers, more recommendations.  Fewer perfect fits means… the opposite.

Our eBook, The Holy Trinity of Tech Marketing, talks about the three questions that will help you identify your company’s sweet spots. This is where we start when we take on new clients. Because if you get this right, the success rates rise for everything else you do.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Demand Generation, lead nurturing, Sales

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Stan just presented our web seminar with B2B Marketing magazine, called “Content Marketing: Thought Leadership in a Web 2.0 World”.  Seemed to go really well.

Over 130 people attended and the feedback was excellent.  The seminar is based on our imminent Content Marketing Workbook, which you’ll be able to download from this site very, very soon.

If you want to view the archived web seminar, you can do that here.

Unfortunately, the webinar techies set the end time incorrectly so Stan was a bit cut off at the very end.  But other than that, we think you might like it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, Social Media, Thought Leadership, writing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

© Stuart Rothwell for Velocity - the B2B marketing acceleration agency for technology companies, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh