Back in the 19th 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 20th 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.
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.
Search engine optimizers are no longer the superstars of B2B marketing. Find out how SEO is being reinvented from a content to a people challenge.
Check out this great TED Talk by Simon Sinek on the power of beliefs in marketing. Great leaders and great companies start with beliefs not facts, policies, products or services. People don’t buy WHAT you do they buy WHY you do it.
We’ve just completed a big project for Calnetix, a company that turn waste heat from industrial processes into energy. It’s green, clean, and it saves money. What’s not to like?…
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…
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…
Ok, fine; maybe not as much fun as driving a speedboat up the Thames, but it can be extremely handy and oddly satisfying –if you get it right, that is.…
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…
I’ve spent countless hours debating just who is the greatest sportsperson of all time.
There’s an impressive list of candidates: Muhammed Ali, Martina Navratilova, Lance Armstrong, Pele, Eric Liddel, Nadia Comaneci,…
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…
We want your body. And your brain. We’re looking for talented copywriters, designers and project managers, so if you’re looking for a job in B2B marketing, come and talk to…
People think a love of analytics is a bit weird; but they’ve clearly never left a web content planning meeting thinking they may just have lost the will to live…
B2B Marketing’s Virtuous Circle: Spin Cycle
Let’s imagine two marketing managers responsible for creating B2B content marketing materials for a technology company; one is called Hector, the other Socrates.
They’ve both been…
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…
If you’re marketing fabric softener, beer or perfume, you’re in the business of manipulation. You win if you make someone feel a certain way.
If you’re marketing security software or network infrastructure…
Ice the champagne: our ‘Margin Killers’ campaign for IBS has been shortlisted for the Best International Campaign category in this year’s B2B Marketing Awards.
IBS is a leading provider of distribution…
Image credit: Deborah Leigh
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Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes…
My week of work experience here at Velocity has flown by, but I feel it has been very useful and enjoyable. I arrived as just a 16 year old student…
Ashley Friedlein of Econsultancy just turned us on to this excellent TED Talk (TED is a fantastic series on ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’). It’s by Simon Sinek, author of Start With…
So broadly, there are four kinds of B2B copywriting and they fall into the neat little quadrants formed when two important axes intersect: Clarity and Authenticity.
Clarity is probably the most…
The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries.
Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and…
That about sums it up.
B2B is a lot simpler than the gurus would have you believe. After all the e-tomes and blog posts and webinars it really all boils down…
Answer: Econsultancy. Let me explain…
Econsultancy have a brilliant new event called JUMP (which we helped launch a few months ago). It’s the most exclusive “online meets offline marketing” event of…
Here’s an eBook we’ve written and designed for our friends SmallWorlders, the people who create fun and social intranets for marketing teams.
Smallworlders needed to show that boring intranets might just…
We’re Velocity, we’re growing fast and we’re looking for a few geniuses (copywriters, designers, planners…).
But we’re not just hiring anyone who walks past the door and we don’t just fill…
Gesu Baroova, Velocity account manager, has had a pretty good weekend. Got her MBA from Cranfield and bought a bright red Mini Cooper to go with…
Ok fine, the iPad is better than this.
Photo credit: Phil Campbell
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Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived…
The old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been around forever so there must be some truth to it. But only a certain kind of obsessive compulsive…
We love infographics here at Velocity and are big fans of Edward Tufte and Information is Beautiful and Data Flow and stuff like that. But we just had to share…
We’re always talking about how important a story is in marketing — but now someone has finally proven it with an ingenious experiment.
As summarised in a recent DoubleThink post, the…
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…
Everyone’s always talking about ‘customer engagement’ and we can see why: fully engaged customers — the ones who comment on your blog posts, join your Facebook group, reteweet your tweets,…
Roger Warner, online PR maestro, sent us a link to this Doug Richard video. It’s a two-minute extract from one of his start-up seminars, this one on the relationship between…
I love an election. It’s the way people – not the robots programmed for power – make decisions as polling day looms.
One week a person sits on the fence in…
We just did a guest post for the excellent B2BBloggers on how we’re all becoming content brands now — and some tips for how to build a strong B2B content…
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Girls on film (actually Lego men)
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My oh my have we been having fun over here recently! Long-term Velocity client and all-round legend John Watton from ShipServ asked us to…
I got my hands on the ITSMA Social Media Survey last week and the findings are consistent with day-to-day experience.
It’s good news if you’re looking for evidence of social…
In B2B as in life, there’s a whole genre of pains-in-the-arse that nobody ever talks about: things that are really annoying but not quite annoying enough to actually force you…
A lot of our consultancy engagements involve helping companies structure a product portfolio that makes sense. Usually that means organising a long list of products or services into a few…
There’s a lot of crap talked about the power of social media and how it’s transforming marketing. It’s frequently exhausting (and annoying) to read the idiotic ramblings and unqualified pontifications…
We’ve been working with a great company called Nativ, who offer a digital video content management and distribution platform and service.
Basically, if you own video content in any form…
I have to confess to having no real reason for this, except that it’s spring and I always think of these lines from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales…
The general consensus out there seems to be that French Connection’s new ad campaign is a right royal triumph. If you’ve been living under a stone for the past few…
Sometimes I launch TweetDeck to find a new blog sweeping through a B2B community faster than a Vancouver curling stone.
The micro-gasps of “awesome content” or “exhaustive summary” that accompany every…
As you’ll know if you got our newsletter we’re big fans of infographics over here. We got inspired by all of these and decided to have a go ourselves. This is…
We didn’t mention this? We’ve been working with IBS, the wholesale distribution software experts, to produce a content series on the five big success drivers in wholesale distribution.
To kick…
The buying process is long and complex in B2B tech markets. Usually, the bigger the company, the more people are involved and the longer it takes. So where can a…
Ganguro girl, Tokyo. Photo credit: Alex de Carvalho
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Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about: the analogous relationship between B2B and haute couture. In fact, fashion in general. And marketing in…
There are literally thousands of blog posts, slideshares, eBooks and articles called, “The 24 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing”. But no one ever bothers to list the really…
Is it just me or is typical B2B marketing utterly joyless? Why is that? Why do people who are passionate about carp fishing and bicycling and the Beatles become robots…
We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in…
Just came across an excellent post by Matt West of Connected Marketer called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer. It’s based on a study done together…
We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.
Tacit knowledge, first conceptualised…
Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb:
http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101
Oh how I sniggered. What fool uses this kind of…
So Gesu was wondering aloud the other day whether negative or positive headlines are more effective. By negative and positive we mean, respectively, the ones that say things like: ‘Ten…
The sales team owns the sales funnel.
But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel.
So you own your company’s revenue pipe.
The success or failure…
As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers. The…
I just stumbled over a piece from Canada’s Marketing Magazine called “ Here’s to 2010: Industry experts share predictions for the year ahead” and read this, among other forecasts. Thought I’d…
Birth of a thought leadership website
dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet…
Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies…
No search returns!
By that I mean the empty returns so many B2B websites deliver to their users. They’re actually gold dust. They allow us to extract value from exactly nothing. …
We just learned that our client EPiserver is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.
The company offers the best Microsoft .Net CMS on the planet (running nearly 10,000…
Content Marketing is rivaling social media marketing in the hype stakes — and for good reason. It may not be particularly new, but in the age of the informed buyer…
When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale…
ClickPredictions 2010
View more documents from Ambal Balakrishnan.
There she is. The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s…
We have a lot of international clients. Most of them are European or American, but occasionally they’re based further afield. This generates an interesting issue: how do you accommodate international…
The debate rages on: is it better to ask people to fill out a form to download your content (chasing shy people away) or maximise downloads and go without a…
Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are the new year’s resolutions from the…
We’ve been working with a great company called SmallWorlders. They produce smart, sociable intranets for marketing types. Their Sandbox™ platform, hosted model and marketing-savvy service teams combine to deliver the…
As this quick showreel demonstrates, we’ve been doing more and more video for our B2B marketing clients. Why? because it’s a great way to get even the most complex ideas…
We love these Google Features videos on YouTube. Most tech demonstration videos are all high-tech flash with little icon men and screen shots and slick animations. These are the opposite:…
My favourite quote from Ogilvy On Advertising:
“When Aeshines spoke, they said, ‘How well he speaks’. When Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march!’”
Unfortunately, when the typical B2B copywriter speaks, they…
Content Marketing is like publishing — you need an editorial calendar and a bit of discipline. This guest post on Junta42 by Russell Sparkman of Fusionspark Media talks about how…
Deer… headlights…
Woke up in a haze on a strange sofa in an unknown flat. Looked down: dinner jacket. Weird purple stain on shirt. Ah — it wasn’t a dream then:…
I spent a fun and productive day at Econsultancy’s heavily moustachioed Marketing Masterclass #OMN last week.
I thought conversion experts Craig Sullivan (in particular), Markus Shilling and Louise Mullock stole…
We did a fascinating interview with IT industry evangelist and FT.com columnist Ade McCormack yesterday (watch this space) and he shared some controversial ideas about CIOs and IT departments being…
The birth of every every new communications medium is followed by a period during which the underlying technology actually cramps the communication it’s supposed to be enabling. When it comes…
Most B2B marketing doesn’t just fail – it actively repels the people it’s trying to attract. In other words, most B2B marketing would deliver better results if it didn’t exist…
We were recently asked where we thought B2B marketing would go in 2010. Made us think. So here are some predictions for the next year:
THE KIND-OF-OBVIOUS PREDICTIONS:
Content Marketing will…
According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of tweets are generated by just 10% of Twitter users. Apparently this is a higher concentration than for Wikipedia and much, much higher…
I’ve always found Heresy fun.
By that I don’t mean the historical variety – the prospect of burning agonisingly at the stake is deathly serious. I’m talking about the Radio 4…
Selling to B2B customers has been changed forever by the Internet. A truism maybe, but it’s surprising how many B2B marketing organisations are still structured as they were in the…
We spend a lot of time looking for ways to differentiate our clients based on what they do. Sometimes – surprisingly often – it’s really hard to do because the…
The B2B Journey Planner
We’ve always loved Harry Beck’s legendary design for the London Underground Tube Map, so thought we’d do our own version mapping out the B2B marketing landscape. Kind…
Pet peeve: signs that desperately need a sub-editor.
This one uses nine words where… none would do (the number 30 when posted on the roadside pretty much says it all).
…
Gotta love Twitter…
It’s been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we’d report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It…
Oh. My. God.
We’ve given Microsoft’s marketing a hard time in this blog before and we’ve also had some nice words to say about them. But this one takes the cake:…
An illustrious panel
Stan Woods will be taking part in what’s shaping up to be an excellent webinar on Innovation in Demand Generation and we thought you, as a loyal Velocity…
Let’s face it: these days, if you don’t have a blog on your website you’re admitting that you have nothing to say about your market, your customers, their problems and…
There’s a debate in the blogosphere about whether it’s right for a blog to be ghost-written, particularly one advertised as being written by a particular author. Rather than get exercised…
Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine. ShipServ, piloted by CMO John…
In 1992 Sky won, after a cheque signing competition, the rights to show live English Premiership football matches. The deal changed the game and, arguably, British culture forever.
Football tittle-tattle is…
We’re often asked s for creative ideas that target ‘the C-suite’ – CEO, COO, CFO, CIO and so on. It’s natural because these guys are usually the ones to sign…
We came across a great new e-book from Jonathan Franz, a great copywriter based in Massachusetts, yesterday on the emerging discipline of e-books. Called the eBook Ebook, it’s really well…
It’s a perennial debate: give your content away with no registration (web form), or force people to give you their details to get the goodies. Both arguments are compelling.
We tend…
Reading the report into teenage media consumption by Morgan Stanley intern Matthew Robson, aged 15 and a half, didn’t just leave me in two minds. It made me feel like…
It’s not B2B but we just had to share this one. The Nike-sponsored Livestrong Chalkbot is driving the Tour de France about 8 hours in front of the riders, spraying…
We’re pleased as Punch to have been shortlisted for a B2B Marketing Magazine Award for our recent work with ShipServ. It’s hard to come over all surprised about it –…
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…
A few weeks ago we decided, and we hope you all agreed, that independent B2B bloggers have a significant and growing industry influence.
But it’s only a part of the influence…
At a webinar I presented the other day I said that while white papers were still the staple of content marketing, they’re getting really stale as a communications vehicle for B2B.…
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…
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…
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…
Traditional, interruption-based marketing is dead (or dying fast). The new B2B marketing is Content Marketing. And while a lot of marketers think that’s what they’re doing when they crank out…
Websites that present a portfolio or list of creative work are always a design challenge. They have to be easy to navigate, and present visual ideas without overwhelming the viewer.…
I received this excellent spam the other day:
Penis enlargement spam with a twist – it made me double-take and earned a giggle.
Just a little creativity gets you noticed.
…
We’ve just learned (and are delighted) that our recent content and social media engagement work work with ShipServ has been shortlisted for the Best Business-to-Business Campaign category at this New…
Nothing – not even a finger buffet served on two separate tables – splits a room of B2B communication professionals down the middle like the issue of bloggers and influence.
We…
In the marketing world, agencies are supposed to be the ‘creative’ ones and clients are supposed to be the dullards who are grateful for a fresh source of ideas. In…
We swelled with pride yesterday when our client ShipServ won First Tuesday‘s prestigious ‘Most promising Internet Company in the UK 2009‘ award.
We’ve been working with the company and its CMO…
Like most good digital agencies, we’ve been exploring web personas for a while and we’ve found them to be a critical aid to great site design.
If you do them thoroughly,…
We never tire of building websites. The sheer pace of technology change means we constantly push the barriers back. No two projects are ever the same.
But the excitement is tempered…
Positioning is one of the essentials of B2B marketing but it’s very rare to see it done well. It’s a simple idea: as a marketer, you should explicitly manage the…
We’ve recently worked with a handful of companies that offer clean technologies or green technologies (or both if SEO is important to you) and we’ve noticed some issues that they…
It’s an exciting time to be in the communications business. It’s not just that there are so many new ways to reach people. It’s also that we get to watch…
Just came across an excellent presentation by Philippe Botteri and Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners called the ‘Ten Laws of Being SaaSy‘ . It summarises the key principles of…
In the last few months, Twitter has shot from being a cult web app to a full-blown global fad. Celebrities are doing it (Stephen Fry has 361,225 followers as of…
We just completed a new e-Book for our client dotMobi on mobile content discovery. Called ‘Don’t get lost on the mobile Web’, you can find it at www.mobithinking.com, the online…
There is so much written about the black art of marketing and even more written about digital marketing (or internet marketing). Zillions of blog posts. Millions of white papers, books,…
Saw a fabulous YouTube video the other day, where a Southwest airlines attendant delivered the pre-take-off welcome and safety instructions via an entertaining rap. See it here.
It’s a wonderful example…
One of our clients is talking to us about spending budget on creating online buzz. Naturally, she’s thinking hard about how to justify what is effectively a new cost line…
Every recession is a reckoning. Seemingly untouchable business empires crumble and disappear practically overnight. New ones, perhaps Richmond based, rise out the rubble.
This recession is no different. The financial industry’s…
Social media is a whirling tornado of content and comment. Throw a new white paper into it and, if you’re lucky, it gets tossed around in the vortex, throwing bits…
Web marketing used to be all about driving traffic to your website. Now, it’s also about driving your content out into the wider web to see who trips over it,…
B2B marketing has become almost synonymous with digital marketing. If you’re not getting your story out on the web, you’re probably not getting your story out at all. Now,…
I always keep an eye on what my friend Laurence Green’s company Fallon is doing (disclosure: our elder daughters have known each other since they were about three weeks old…
B2B Marketing Magazine just published an article we wrote on what every B2B marketer should be thinking about the mobile web. These are clearly still early days for the mobile…
Alan Kitching is a bit of a hero. A master of letterpress design and printing, he’s done some wonderful, iconic work for all kinds of clients and cultural institutions from…
Recent research from Spurious has proven that every piece of thought leadership content in the world now has to have a number in the headline or it just won’t get…
We’ve given Microsoft some bad reviews here — especially for the “I’m a PC” ad campaign, so it feels only fair to give them some credit when they get it…
Time was, you generated a piece of thought leadership content, stuck it on your website and eNewsletter, then sat back counting the hits. Today, whenever we produce a new piece…
I stumbled across a great blog today that attempted to categorise advertising strategies. Based on an analysis of The Advertising Concept Book by Pete Barry, it’s a really useful list…
Presidents are all the rage. Obama and Nixon, in their own ways, are the toast of the Hollywood glitterati. And Ronald Reagan has emerged as a genuine internet pioneer.
Okay, okay. …
Google has dis-intermediated the content business.
You don’t have to hire a PR agency to kiss the arses of the editors any more.
You just have to generate content that people really…
We’re exploring how to use Twitter for B2B marketing right now (you can follow us at http://twitter.com/dougkessler and we just started http://twitter.com/velocitytweets for tweeting blog posts like this one). As…
In B2B marketing, content marketing is what works. It’s all about generating content that the target audience will value, then driving that content into the market and out over the…
A good interview on ScobleizerTV with Joshua Reynolds who oversees Hill and Knowlton’s global technology practice. Traditional PR firms get a lot of stick lately about being slow to pick…
We were just having a really thought-provoking conversation about content marketing with Andrew Findlater and Hooman Bassirian from Reed Business and they told us about Slugwatch, a service for UK…
Apparently it’s only 6500 days or so since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. At Christmas in 1990 he initiated the first successful communication between a web client and…
I recently received this letter, offering me a personalised number plate with my last name on it:
The author, one Ray Kessler, needs to get rid of his vanity plate fast. …
I’ve been a member of emusic, a great music download service, for a few years now (I had an argument with iTunes and vowed never to use them again, but…
We’re always telling clients that everything you do contributes to your positioning.
A great example from a drop-down menu in a Royal Opera House web form:
That’s just a small sample. Check…
Roger , our web wonderwall, posted a terrific article on the essentials of Online PR. The central metaphor: the web is a party — work the room instead of stumbling…
That’s right, deck the halls – it’s that giving time of year….
In our bumper edition Xmas newsletter, you’ll find:
A super-shiny new White Paper, ‘The Hierarchy of Benefits‘, which identifies one of…
Max Bleyleben’s excellent Technofile Europe blog recently posted this Survival Kit for Growth Companies, suggesting a strategy (or at least a list of tactics) for surviving the crunch. It ranges…
Marketing used to be all about the upside. You fired off a message; some people responded; others didn’t. Net gain.
In the digital world, there’s a downside that’s as painful as…
Saw a fantastic video online today that I thought I’d share.
It’s a presentation by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the US online retailer famous for shoes. He talks about…
Andrew Findlater from Reed Business Information recently turned us on to an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review (back in 2006 but still daisy-fresh):
Its called Customer Value Propositions in…
The CEO is stalking the corridors, blood dripping from his Budget Axe — and he’s on his way to the marketing department. Your department.
How will you defend your marketing plan? “That…
B2B tech companies are often run by engineers. Engineers are great at talking about technology, but not so great at translating the technology into business benefits that people actually believe.
Being…
Are you a spammer? I’m sure you’re not. But I’ll cheerfully wager that some of you have, at one point, been confused for one.
According to the BBC, undercover US researchers,…
All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about. White papers, blog posts,…
We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter…
As a marketing company, we spend a lot of time trying to get attention for our clients’ latest gizmos.
Just getting prospects to look at your new ad or pick up…
Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals. They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their…
Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies?
We all could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great, if…
A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding just sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday. He’s…
Marketing is communication.
B2B marketing is bad communication.
That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.
Their expectations couldn’t be lower.
They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web…
Will we ever learn?
The hilarious spoof of Microsoft’s attempt to re-label the iPod packaging appears to focus on a modern marketing issue. But Plato, the pick of Greece’s golden generation…
Social networks are extremely interesting things. They give an online home to folks with common interests and hobbies – like staying in touch with one another or following Metallica.
They’ve actually…
Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day…
James Pearce and his mobiForge blog turned us on to Wordle, the online toy that turns any text into a word cloud.
We pointed it at the Velocity blog and this…
Despite living in a ‘creative’ world, most agencies are pretty linear. They take the brief, then they do the creative.
Velocity is a bit different. When we do consulting engagements –…
It’s funny, but oftentimes we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’. In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful press…
A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to…
I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb.
As I do this…
We blogged a while back about the idea of guerrilla video for B2B websites — foregoing expensive video productions to just go out and get the footage you need to…
Don’t know about you, but it’s Friday evening and we’re offski. Peroni awaits. We’re celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.
This is our latest and greatest…
My old boss Steve Trygg (a great copywriter) used to talk about the role of marketing in business decision-making by breaking down every purchase decision into four steps — the…
…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but…
We’ve been beavering away over the past few weeks on an important new campaign for one of our shiny new clients in the mobile internet space.
It’s a fascinating area –…
We used to do short films for clients that took weeks to plan, weeks to shoot and edit and never came in for less than £30k. Now we’re experimenting with …
The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to…
We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness…
Here’s an experment for you to try.
Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I…
Velocity is in hiring mode again….
Love getting to grips with new clients, new markets & new ideas?
Love writing about technology and business?
We’re a fast-growing, insanely ambitious B2B…
OK, Listen Up
Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.
Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as…
Intrepid Velocipedes Doug Kessler and Stuart Rothwell attended the first ever D&AD Pecha-Kucha night last night. Nine creative supremos (mostly digital marketers), each delivering their first Pecha-Kucha presentation to a…
We’re proud to say that shipserv.com launched successfuly this morning. May all who sail in her find reasonably priced shipping supplies from a broad (and competitive) selection of maritime vendors….
ShipServ…
Hey!
We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment.
Here’s a snippet:
If your goal is to generate…
Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and…
Anyone can claim anything they like about their product or service. Claims are empty. Your job as a B2B marketer is to get believed.
But credibility is a funny thing. It’s…
I just returned from a great week away in the Inner Hebrides – the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather…
Our friend and client John Watton, Marketing Director of ShipServ, recently shared with us a Business Week article that dissects and analyses Steve Jobs’s latest keynote at Macworld (the one…
Most B2B technology companies have a clear set of competitors they’re battling. But for some (usually early stage) tech companies, there are no other companies to fight: they’re inventing a…
We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why – to…
Early stage tech companies would do anything for those first few big wins — especially from blue-chip companies. But we’ve seen more than a few companies who were steered off…
I don’t know how else to put this: nobody gives a shit about you. Your software or service or widget may be the center of your world but the people…
There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling notion of a ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed (see: Is the Tipping Point Toast?)
The conclusion…
Tweakonomics is what you should be using to pay for your marketing services – it’s what we advocate for all our clients.
Let me explain….
This post hereby announces the death of…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between B2B versus B2C marketing. Thought maybe I’d write a white paper on it. Then I came across this cartoon in the…
Every marketing communication has two parts:
• The Signal – your message; the thing you want people to take away
• The Noise – everything else; the things that distract, delay and get…
As we seek to build our business and capture the ‘big Mo’ (the winning momentum that every US Presidential candidate is droning on about at a town hall meeting near…
We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So it pays to look at how other professional persuaders ply their trades. I started with a little…
UPDATE: this post has been kindly featured on BtoB Magazine’s ‘Blogs of the Week’. (Thanks guys!)
I’ve been mulling on this one for a while: how does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging,…
We’ve been experimenting with ‘guerrilla video’ as a promotional tactic for our clients and thought we should taste our own medicine. So here’s a rough draft video case story about…
If you’re marketing fabric softener, beer or perfume, you’re in the business of manipulation. You win if you make someone feel a certain way. If you’re marketing security software or…
Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms.
You built v2 or v3 of your site last year.…
They’ve already bought something from you. You’ve already jumped nine of the ten hurdles on the way to a sale (or however many there are these days). Wouldn’t it make…
Whilst blogs are no longer the sexiest subject on the block, the ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B – and nowhere more so than here at Velocity.
Like many of…
Had to share this one. I was just doing a spot of browser testing on an old PC. Got the following error pop-up from a security app deep in the…
Recently we’ve been talking a lot at Velocity about the importance of social media to our client heartland, B2B tech. In tandem, as we build our new company, I’ve been…
I was just uploading some images to our Flickr stream when I caught sight of the one of the most useless, intrusive banners of all time.
See the ad to the…
Normally the idea of an unconventional navigation scheme makes my skin crawl, but this is outstanding because it’s so slick and central to the tool…
Check it out: the Flickr Tag…
You know the scene. You or your boss thought it’d be great idea to build a new web site and it’s the first planning meeting. Across the table someone shouts:…
Aside from tinsel and cheap booze offers, it’s that planning time of year again. A special place where you need to create futurama fireworks out of Powerpoint.
Co-incidently, it’s also time…
In literature, there are novels, short stories, poems and — the ultimate distillation of thought and emotion — haiku. Three lines. Seventeen syllables. In marketing, there are white papers, brochures,…
Today’s ‘Widgety Goodness’ conference in Brighton brought together some in-the-know folks and some much-needed clarity to the hoopla that is social media and widgets.
Organised by the good folk at Snipperoo…
Yes, we’re a living lab, practising what we preach and telling you all about it.
12 days ago I blogged about our (re)birth as a presence on Google. Today, we’re #2…
The National Venture Capital Association (US) reports that Clean Technology is the hottest thing on Sand Hill Road. During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into…
B2B sales happen in four broad steps. Interestingly, only two of them are driven by rational decision-making. The other two are largely influenced by the buyer’s irrational side — and…
Anil Raj, mobile industry heavy-hitter (and a new client in an exciting venture) hates the term B2B. He’s sold at the highest levels of the mobile industry (as Head of…
What’s the point of Powerpoint?
A crutch to help you through an uncomfortable challenge (public speaking)?
A useful visual aid to convey stories?
A pain in the butt, killed to death, hackneyed, eyesore,…
Lots of tech marketers want a snappy strapline for their brand. Something taut and twinkly to tuck under the logo. We enjoy doing them and have come up with some…
The answer of course is 57. There’s the SEO guys, the branding guys, the PR guys, the viral guys, the advertising guys, and so on…
The fact that there are simply…
Do you remember the time when you didn’t exist? Nope, me neither. But today is a big day for us because we kind of experienced re-birth…
…web re-birth that is.
As you…
To celebrate the launch of a whole new Velocity, Doug (our Creative Director) has put pen to paper to get a bunch of important stuff off his chest…
His new missive…
As a technology vendor, you’ve got two major assets that your customers and prospects value highly. Your job is to harvest them and put them to work for you…
We’ve been keeping an eye on virtual worlds like Second Life for a while, waiting for the killer app for business.
Collaboration just might be the one.
We were recently involved in…
We just got an email shot from Savvion, a company that does a good job in its marketing…
The headline: “Just Make ERP Work! How BPM Bridges the ERP and…
We’ve seen a bunch of companies try to take generic software into specific vertical markets.
They succeed to the degree they can achieve authenticity.
So instead of looking, feeling and sounding like,…
Everybody in technology companies thinks they’re ‘customer-centric’. In our experience, few really are, in the sense that they start almost every process with the customer.
In the marketing department, starting with…
Pecha-kucha is the only way powerpoint should ever be used.
Twenty slides, twenty seconds each. Done.
Invented by a pair of architects in Tokyo. Pecha-kucha is pronounced to (almost) rhyme with tchotchke.…
I was doing some long overdue filing this morning and came across the following letter….a response to a misguided mass mailer that inadvertently invited Mr Al Fayed of Harrods to…
Could there be anything cooler on the web than Mechanical Turks?
People who need stuff done post tasks. Other people do them for micro-payments using Amazon.com accounts.
I’d love to hear from…
Search matters.
The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa reported the following:
That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em:
Just unpacked my new Apple MacBook Pro.
A great example of a whole product: the hardware, operating system, bundled applications (about 30), utilities, web & phone support, set-up wizards, web-based services…
Just posted a short film we did for BT Counterpane in the US on to YouTube. It’s an interview with Bruce Schneier, security guru.
YouTube is fast, cheap (as in free)…
We just produced a powerful piece of high-end direct mail for BT Counterpane.
The piece was sent to 150 select prospects — CIOs and CSOs of Fortune 500 companies in the…
See here another list of domain naming snafu’s. Note to all – before you book that domain name, write it down on a piece of paper and scan it real…
iinnovate is an intelligent video blog on entrepreneurship produced by some students at Stanford.
The latest post is an interview with Tim Westergren, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Pandora the…
I’ve just read an interesting piece in this month’s Wired magazine on the subject of blogging.
I’ve written elsewhere about the various benefits of blogs as early product conversations, focus groups…
Tech company names are usually pretty bad.
All those coined words ending in ‘a’ — Plectra, Placenta, Adeptra, Conceptra, Integra, Concentra…
But I’ve always loved the name Fair Isaac.
Stands right out. Sounds…
Yugo Nakamura does some of the best things on the web.
Check out his yugop.com.
Full of fantastic, interactive, imaginative explorations of the web medium.
A favourite:
Clockblock.
Worth a visit. Promise.
…
Another great post from the “Permission Marketing” guru, Seth Godin. Basic rules for email relationships with customers/prospects – don’t go too quickly, but do try harder (than the next guy).
…
Pet Peeve:
I HATE when a website asks me to register for something, takes all my details, validates my email, makes me jump through hoops, THEN tells me the service is…
Originality, originality, originality!!!
See “No One Belongs Here More than You”, a promotional site for Miranda July’s book.
Now, I know its SEO will suck because it’s all images and no text,…
Every few years, they come back.
The ad campaigns that depict the advertiser’s customers (or their own staff) as lovable morons.
IBM is doing it now in the UK with its gormless…
Few logos have stood the test of time better than the IBM logo.
Created by Paul Rand in 1972, it hasn’t changed much in, what, 34 years.
Still strong. Still fresh. And…
Check out this piece from Peter Rip, of Crosslink Capital, a VC firm from Silicon Valley. It’s a nice summary of what legs the ‘web 2.0′ movement now has left….…
We’re helping Validis develop a website to sell their hosted application — a powerful app that checks any set of accounts for errors.
In exploring the simplest, friendliest, most compelling ways…
True. Linden Labs has rolled out NetSuite, financial and accounting software to help users manage their Linden dollars and real-world money (an increasingly blurred boundary).
They’ve even got a virtual CEO…
Just finished an excellent primer on digital security: ‘Secrets & Lies’ by Bruce Schneier, the god of security.
Published in ’04 but still super-relevant.
Schneier cuts through a lot of the nonsense,…
It’s usually best to think these things through – in this instance by writing a url string down on paper before getting hitched to it.
God knows, the penny MUST have…
Content Marketing is probably the single most important weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. This eBook takes you through velocity’s approach to the art. Download it and see what you think…
Content Marketing is probably the single most important weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. This eBook takes you through velocity’s approach to the art. Download it and see what you think…
You’ve just published a great piece of content. Don’t just stick it on your website. Use social media to drive people to it (and vice versa). Here’s a one-page checklist to help you socialize your content, driving traffic and downloads…
