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The C word: the importance of confidence in B2B marketing

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 every B2B marketer.

But there’s a factor that cuts across all of these and is probably more important than all of them: confidence.

Confidence is the attitude of leaders and winners. Great marketing always has plenty of it and the vast majority of mediocre marketing has little or none.

Used recklessly, confidence turns to arrogance and alienates your audience. But used well, confidence works wonders for any piece of marketing communications you apply it to:

• It gets noticed – jumping out from the background noise.

• It demonstrates your leadership instead of just claiming it.

• It differentiates you from your lacklustre competitors.

• It exposes your passion and your belief in what you do.

• It says you’re having fun – people like that.

• It is fun – turning marketing from a chore into a sport.

• It motivates the company – making people proud to work there.

Confidence really is the secret weapon of B2B marketing (for B2C, it’s not a secret). Even companies locked in commodity markets can leap out of the pack with a little attitude and energy.

As an agency, our best work is our most confident work. It happens when we dare to present something to a client that we know is likely be rejected. It happens when a client recognises that the option that makes them sweat is probably the one to choose.

Confidence has to come from something real or it transmits false bravado. It has to be rooted in conviction. When we do our consulting process for new clients, we’re always looking for the pockets of passion inside the company. The people having the most fun. The people who believe in what they’re doing and aren’t afraid to tell people why it’s great.

We call these the ‘crown jewels’ of any company and our work is all about discovering them and pushing them to the front of the story… with oodles of confidence.

Tags: B2B marketing, Copywriting, Marketing
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Quick Start Pimp Your Content Guide to SEO

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 stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief - around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it - this globbet of content is really, really important - this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky - use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better - your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

Tags: B2B marketing, Content, SEO, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations
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Guerrilla video: VNL thinks beyond B2B

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 tell a story.

All it takes is an idea — and a client with some vision and courage.

Our client VNL has plenty of both. Marketing guru Pär Almqvist and CEO Anil Raj responded to our ideas for bringing their story to life on the small screen with just three words, ‘Let’s do it’. A few weeks later, Pär and I were in Deorhi, a small rural village in Utar Pradesh, armed with two Sony HD camcorders.

VNL is the inventor of microtelecom, the re-engineering of the mobile infrastructure especially for rural markets. That means base stations that are solar-powered, incredibly low-cost and easily assembled by people with no technical expertise.

VNL sells to mobile operators but we wanted to make the promise of rural connectivity come to life by talking directly to the operators’ potential customers: the villagers themselves.

Deorhi was the perfect village for our needs. Two hundred kilometers from Delhi, Deorhi receives what we call ‘accidental mobile coverage’ because of its location near an important road between to larger towns. The people of Deorhi were never targeted for mobile services, but they got them by accident.

Deorhi is also where VNL’s Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Sirohi, grew up (his father founded the first school in Deorhi and served as it’s principal for 42 years).

The idea for the video was simply to go to Deorhi and interview the villagers about their experiences with mobile phones. We then edited the results into a warm, compelling piece that makes the VNL story come to life.

We expected people to like using mobiles — after all, it’s the first connectivity of any kind for Deorhi. But we were really blown away by the impact that mobile services are having on people’s lives — both for personal and business reasons.

The people of Deorhi were incredibly open and generous. As guests of the Sirohi family, we were also guests of the entire village. That made it easy for Pär and I to conduct over thirty interviews with everyone from 6 year-old kids to an 88-year old man.

After just a few interviews, we knew we’d got what we came for: even without professional cameramen, the footage looks great (bright sun and pretty amazing camcorders helped). We used one camera on a tripod and the other as a hand-held for cut-away shots and footage of the village. The stationery camera used a lapel microphone to make the sound as clear as possible (hugely important).

Pär composed and created the soundtrack himself. He’s not just a ‘marketing dude’, he’s also an incredibly talented musician and kick-ass web developer (he designed and coded the entire VNL site, which we wrote).

The footage was edited by Hugh Gormley, our quasi-in-house editor extraordinaire and posted on VNL’s Resource Library, designed and coded by Pär.

It appears alongside an interview with CEO Anil Raj that we shot over a few hours in Delhi (again, using our two camcorders). It’s a long piece so we cut it into chapters for easy navigation.

Looking back, a few lessons from these first forays into guerrilla video:

• Just do it – The costs of this kind of project are so low, you can shoot first and ask questions later. If you don’t like the footage, abort.

• Keep it simple – Start with a simple idea. No actors. No dramatisation. Just one idea executed well.

• Don’t ignore production values – Yes, it’s the YouTube ethic, but problems with sound, lighting, framing or focus will distract from your message.

• Invest in post-production – The film is made in the editing. Get a great editor and let him do his job. (Thanks, Hugh).

• Skip the committees – Pär and Elise Alpen were the only client contacts for both of these films. We checked in on the key decisions but they let us get on with everything else. It helped that Pär could handle a camera and both kinds of keyboard.

• Go for the end customer – B2B markets can be a bit abstract. Think about skipping over your direct customer and talking to the end consumer for some real energy and context.

Maybe we got lucky with these two films. But the point of guerrilla video is to keep costs low enough to be able to switch to Plan B or kill the project if it isn’t shaping up the way you want.

It isn’t just a video thing: this ’shoot from the hip’ marketing is on the rise as companies harness the power of blogs, forums, wikis, social media, pay-per-click and email.

As our name implies, we LIKE this kind of marketing. It’s fast. It’s fun. And it makes a real impact in the time it takes traditional marketing to arrange a conference call.

We’ve got more videos in the works for VNL and for clients like dotMobi – and we’re hatching a few new case study ideas for ourselves. Don’t touch that dial.

Tags: B2B, B2B marketing, guerrilla video, Marketing, Technology Marketing, technology marketing services, video, VNL
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A Different Kind of Growth Equity Investor Needs a Different Kind of Web Presence

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 project on Wordpress. Those super smart investment guys at Kennet - whose funds assist great tech firms such as Clearswift (also a Velocity client), Kapow and Daptiv - asked us earlier this year to help them revamp their corporate positioning and give their web site a lick of paint.

Well, here she is: a totally new web presence for a totally different technology Venture Capital fund. We like to think we nailed this one - in fact we’re super proud. Although it’s a small site, it’s deeply layered with some luscious design and content touches that set it apart from the competition as a thinking man’s investment firm.

In fact, we can vouch for this first hand. We’ve worked real close with Kennet’s senior team over the past few months to get it off the ground. So, big thanks to Max Bleyleben (check his blog on the European VC scene here) and the crew for being so clued up and game for trying something a little different.

Credits:

Strategy, words, direction and project management: Velocity
Design: Tourist
Development and implementation: Two Thirty

Warm glows all round.

Tags: B2B marketing, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing
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The 4 steps to a B2B sale: rational meets irrational

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 four things buyers do before they buy:

1) Identify a need
This is mostly a rational process and largely buyer-initiated. The FD knows when she needs new accounting software and she knows why.

2) Draw up a shortlist
This is usually an irrational process. People draw up a list of vendors to investigate by asking around, thinking of past experiences, following a gut feel. Google may have changed this somewhat, but it’s still largely an intuitive exercise.

3) Evaluate proposals
Mostly rational again. Buyers look at price, terms, delivery and specs. They compare competitors side-by-side. Marketing is present here, but at this point, it’s largely down to the offer (product + price).

4) Buy
Weirdly, this last step has a big irrational component. Buyers often do not choose the vendor that wins on paper. They choose the one they feel best about. The one they trust. The one they feel will get them to the goal in the least stressful way. If there’s a salesperson involved, this is their moment.

Where does marketing fit in with all this?
If you think of B2B marketing as the delivery of pure business information, its role is mainly influential during stages 1 and 3. Helping buyers identify a need and helping them evaluate options.

If you think of marketing as creating a brand, the job focuses on steps 2 and 4 — the largely irrational steps — drawing up a shortlist and making the final decision.

Let’s look at the four steps again with this in mind:

1) Identify a need
Marketing can help here by showing someone that the way they do things now is flawed (’selling the problem’). Or by convincing them that one of their perennial problems can now be taken away. Or showing them that their competitors are jumping ahead of them in some way.

All this falls under a banner they used to call ‘creating a need’. In reality, marketing can’t create needs. It can only address them. Doing this is all about getting noticed, then making a rational case for change. The ‘business information’ side of the B2B marketing equation.

2) Draw up a shortlist
Good marketing shines here. It gets companies on shortlists by raising awareness and by associating the vendor with the critical issues that relate to the problem (positioning and thought leadership).

On the warm, fuzzy side, marketing works here by building a brand that people feel good about. Engineers tease us about this part but it may be the single most important thing we do. As our client Anil Raj likes to say, there’s no such thing as business-to-business, there’s only person-to-person.

Clearly, the salesperson is the most important element here. But a great brand works with the salesperson to tip the scales. People like working with companies they feel good about. They feel good about companies that demonstrate they understand their problems, speak frankly and intelligently about them and show conviction, confidence and passion in everything they do.

3) Evaluate proposals
The salesperson’s work is the main agent here. But the ‘business information’ side of B2B marketing can contribute enormously by providing the information the buyer needs to make the decision (and convince others); as well as by helping frame the issues in a way that tilts the decision the right way.

4) Buy
It’s down to two or three credible products and vendors. All look like they can do the job or they wouldn’t have made it this far. Now, the ‘brand’ side of B2B marketing kicks in again. Buyers will choose the company they feel best about. The one they want to spend more time with. The one they respect and trust.

A great salesperson will overcome all but the worst marketing in stages 2 and 4. But great marketing will give your company the best possible chance of walking right up the four steps, contract in hand.

Tags: B2B, Brand, Marketing, Sales
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Marketers everywhere - get a little mobiThinking

…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 not as you know it.)

We’re so proud about this one that we’ve issued a hard-hitting press release that explains what it’s all about in full.

The short story: it’s the first part of a new Velocity campaign for dotMobi, which is designed to help make “.mobi” the domain of choice for all mobile web sites.

It’s a great brief, working with a really great organisation. Watch this space…

Project credits: design and content - Velocity; development and implementation - dotMobi.

Tags: B2B marketing, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Mobile Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing
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Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

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 - full of over-hype and under-delivery a few years ago; now ripe and ready for prime time.

Looking at the guts of the technical environment, it’s clear that much has happened since the heady days of BT advertising ’surf the mobile web’ with a dodgy GSM connection and a two-tone, LED-like WAP browser. Now we have 3G, in-home Femtocells for maximum coverage, and a mini super-duper iPhone in our hands. As a result, the mobile web is now ready to be used as a killer marketing platform.

But where to start?

This is one of the most interesting questions in ‘new media’ marketing right now. Nobody’s really developed the killer app or the definitive campaign yet. And it looks like in many ways we’re also recreating many marketing mistakes of the past.

Just like the desktop web took a bunch of successfully established marketing activities and deliverables and ‘transcoded’ them online into brochureware web sites, Flash microsites and the like, the mobile web seems to chock full of broken e-commerce sites for ringtones, poorly formatted mapping services and mind-numbingly frustrating directory listings.

The view from here is that we really need to stop and start again when it comes to building successful marketing experiences on the mobile web.

Here’s some obvious - but often forgotten - points to take into account:

• Phones screens are small (less content is more)
• Usage patterns have different restraints: time, location, etc (think running from tube to bus into town for a meeting and trying to check up on some facts)
• Speed is important. Not in terms of speed of connection (although this obviously helps), but in getting to the point as quickly as possible. Fewer clicks to action, easier to search and find, that sort of thing.
• Development standards and processes are different. See ready.Mobi for an example of how different by running your url through their free page and site checker. It’ll show you how your site looks on a Nokia (or a Motorola, or a Samsung…)

That’s a lot of difference - but, if you can build this kind of thinking into your creative plans at source they ought to present a bunch of great marketing and communications opportunies.

For example, how about a mobile version of your site that serves mobile-centric content only….? Like creating a stripped down ‘About’ and ‘Products’ section, but a top line presentation of those important white paper pdfs in an iPhone browser-friendly format so that - instead of playing Sudoku - executive types can read them on their long train ride home?

Mobile-thinking seems to be the future of the mobile web. What do you think?

Tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Web Marketing
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Guerrilla video for B2B companies like yours

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  ‘guerrilla video’ — planning and shooting in a few days, editing in a few more and getting it straight on to the web.

Instead of a 5-6 person, two camera crew, we’re sending out a camcorder and a lavalier (lapel) microphone for interviews — it’s amazing how much better a video ‘looks’ if its sound is strong and clear (something the mic on the camera can never give you).

The point of guerrilla video is to shoot first and ask questions later.  If the footage is disappointing or the experiment is a failure, you’ve lost very little.  If you get good footage, you’re ready to edit.

With broadband now ubiquitous, it’s easy to justify video content for B2B websites.  If you’ve got a story to tell, a product to demonstrate or an idea to evangelise… talk to us about getting it on screen quickly and cost-effectively.

And talk to Roger about using this video content for boosting SEO by spreading the love beyond your own site.

While we’re at it… a big shout out to the folks at VNL – Pär Almqvist, Anil Raj and Elise Alpen – for the courage and spirit to dive in where traditional marketers fear to tread.  Watch this space.

Tags: Video SEO content
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New Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter Available!

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 make your marketing activity really drive new sales.

Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

Tags: Content, Copywriting, Marketing, Newsletters, PPC, Sales, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Relations
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The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

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 levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing
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B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win

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 mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

Tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing
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Love Writing? Love Tech? Love Marketing?

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 agency specialising in technology markets. We need a copywriter who can turn dry technology into compelling stories.

Whether it’s a white paper, an e-book, a data sheet, brochure, website or video script, you’ll sink your teeth in, learn the business inside-out, and build a powerful case.

Frankly, we’re not sure if you’re a junior or a middleweight or somewhere in-between. As long as you’ve got talent, ambition and a hunger to learn new things.

You’ll also have plenty of direct client contact so you need to be good at listening, getting the brief and taking direction.

Interested? We’d like to hear from you…

Send us some samples of your work, a CV and your salary expectations via this here simple web form…

(No recruitment agencies please.)

cforms contact form by delicious:days

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Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

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 a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

Tags: , B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Facebook, Lead Generation, Marketing, Online PR, pico branding, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Relations
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Velocity at Pecha-Kucha night

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 packed house of 400-ish trendy digirati.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a Pecha-Kucha night yet:

• It’s a fast, fun, freaky new medium from Tokyo
• Speakers get just 20 powerpoint slides, each on screen for 20-seconds
• So the whole thing lasts six minutes and 40 seconds
• It’s pronounced kind of like p’CHOK-cha and it means ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese

We went because we were curious about PKs (we call them 20/20s in-house) and have done one of our own to introduce Velocity to new prospects.  We’re also experimenting with doing some of these for clients, so they can boil their stories down to under 7 minutes (we do a lot of boiling down  at Velocity — hence the industrial extractor fan).

The potted review?  An entertaining and thought-provoking evening, though the thoughts provoked were mainly about the appropriateness, artificiality and advantages of Pecha-Kucha for the world of B2B.  It is certainly an artificial constraint, but a lot of good can come from constraints.

The evening wasn’t as diverse as expected, but given that it was essentially a parade of like-minded, hip, creative narcissists, we probably shouldn’t have expected diversity.

Watch this space… we’ll publish our next Pecha-Kucha soon.

Tags: communication, Copywriting, pecha-kucha
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ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

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 is the shipping industry’s #1 e-marketplace, and, as of today it’s also winner of the Red Herring 100 Award for European innovation.

It’s a very cool company.

Eight years ago the shipping industry was awash with e-marketplaces making bold promises of new beans for the ‘new economy.’ Today, only ShipServ flourishes (the others are toast). They got in touch with us towards the end of last year to see how we could help revamp their brand and their online presence.

Here’s what we did.

We took them from this:

…to this:

Along the way we’ve worked hand in glove with ShipServ’s VP of Marketing John Watton, and CEO Paul Østergaard to redefine their core positioning and messages, turbo-charge their corporate pitches and plan their next brave moves into the world of web 4.7.

So, we’re thrilled that the new site is now up and sailing.

Thanks to John and Paul for giving us the space and direction to do work that we’re really proud of.

Big thanks also to the extremely talented Ben at Jackfruit for his superior web development skills (Ben’s the guy who did the physical build); and thanks to Rob and the team at RMA for their work on another top drawer piece of design (they’re the guys who created the site templates).

…And watch this space - because there’s more to come.

Tags: B2B, Branding, Clients, Identity, Innovation, Marketing, Petri Dish, Sites We Like, Web Design, Web Marketing
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New White Paper Available: How to PPC in B2B

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 leads and to contribute in a tangible way to the sales process, then PPC can be the ultimate tool in a B2B marketer’s armory.

At a basic level, B2B lead generation with PPC is not rocket surgery. It’s an old school tactic involving an ad, an offer, a coupon and a reward. And when executed well, the payoff is twofold: concrete sales leads and the healthy (and obvious) byproduct of increased traffic and raised awareness.

To get great results, we suggest you follow these five rules:

1) Set appropriate goals
2) Set appropriate conversion points
3) Set appropriate metrics
4) Set appropriate offers
5) Create appropriate landing pages

To learn more about it you can download the whole paper here…

Tags: Adwords, Google, Lead Generation, Marketing, Pay-per-click, PPC, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, SEO, traffic acquisition, Web Marketing
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The power of “You”: the 2nd person singular in B2B copywriting

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 you’re going to enjoy it.”

Boring copy is all the same:

It uses the passive voice
“The interaction is further enabled by automated screen-scrape optimization technology…”

It’s jargon-soaked
“…utilizing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines traditional Business Process Management (BPM) with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) into a seamless, scalable Blah-De-Blah (BDB).

It’s abstract instead of concrete
“…enabling better processes through systematic automation of yadda-yadda-yadda.”

It’s all in the 3rd person
“The software helps financial services companies better manage their customer-facing…”

This last point is rarely talked about but is especially crippling. Pick up your last data sheet. Now go through it and change the third person phrasing into second person singular: the subject is “You” (the reader).

You’ll have to rewrite the copy to make it sound right. And once you do, you will have made it better. More engaging. More down to earth. More personal.

I’m not suggesting you only use the 2nd person. That would be weird. But try using it and see if it doesn’t help you focus on a specific reader or listener — and help them focus on your message.

Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the first half of this post is written in the third person. The second half is written in the second person singular. And it’s just that extra notch more engaging. Don’t you think?

Tags: B2B, B2B marketing, communication, Copywriting, Marketing, persuasion
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17 credibility builders that make your claims believable

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 hard to pin down exactly what makes us believe one person and not another; or believe one claim while remaining suspicious about a very similar claim made by someone else.

To make sure your message is believed, you can’t have too many credibility-builders (though spending too high a proportion of your reader’s attention on credibility issues might backfire by making you appear desperate). In general, more credibility is better.

Let’s look at the top cred-builders:

• Statistics - ideally independently generated
• Awards – the fairy dust of the credibility business
• Accreditations – sometimes essential, other times a hygiene issue
• Analyst attention and endorsement – can go a long way for some customers in some markets
• Media attention and endorsement – the better the source, the more it adds to your cred
• Lists of customers – if you’ve got ‘em, flaunt ‘em
• Testimonials – more credible than you’d think; the good ones have a ring of truth
• Case studies – often boring and ignored; if you can get them read, they’re worth their weight in gold
• Your resources and assets – just being big and solid and here to stay builds credibility
• The credentials of your team – hard to get this into every conversation, but never hurts
• Other successful products – winners breed winners
• Your company’s commercial success – the trick is to not to focus on the growth but the reasons behind it

Softer signals that indicate credibility:

• Your reputation – the only way to control it is to execute brilliantly in every department
• The way you speak – a straight, open, honest tone of voice does wonders for credibility
• The way you look – clean, inviting design says clear thinking and user-friendliness
• The way you behave – personal interactions can wipe away all of the above or double it

The last credibility builder is probably more important than the first sixteen but is usually undervalued: good, solid logic.

If your argument makes sense and is built on premises that the audience accepts, they will believe you. If it’s built on shaky foundations or makes little leaps of faith, they won’t.

At Velocity, we often break down our clients’ stories into a diagram that shows the steps to a sale — the things people have to believe in order to progress to ‘Yes’. Sometimes the path shows four easy steps separated by simple logic. Other times, it’s seven or eight steps, some separated by yawning chasms — the zones where we’ll have to work extra hard to get prospects to the next step.

The sixteen credibility-builders are all important. But without the seventeenth – a good, strong case – you’re supporting a false front. Spend some time analysing your own steps to a sale. Make sure you’re not asking people to take leaps of faith. Build an argument that earns every step and you’re more than half the way home.

Tags: B2B marketing, credibility, logic, persuasion, selling
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Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation

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 bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’

Convention has it that you build up an arsenal of banner content - white papers, research reports, etc - and then hide them away unless visitors supply you with their names, email addresses and inside leg measurements.

But how does this play out in practice? I think I have an answer for you by way of a rambling analogy…

At the end of my stay, on the way back to Glasgow airport, my rental car wobbled to a halt alongside the mighty Castle Minard on the A83. A callout to the RAC breakdown service was in order.

Castle Minard is a stunning place on the banks of Loch Fyne, half a mile off the main road at the end of a dirt track. It’s a hotel. A three star establishment, apparently - a bit rusty and crumbling around the edges. If you weren’t looking for it, or if you hadn’t broken down in the area, then you’d probably miss it.

Anyway, I parked up. The castle lights were off, so I knocked. No answer. I made my call to the RAC and sat down to admire the view. 45 minutes later (and bang on estimate), a big orange and white van trundled into view. ‘Och-Aye’ said Steve the mechanic.

‘Och-Aye indeed!’ bellowed a voice from nowhere.

Like a troll, the castle’s owner had pounced upon us from his impressive lair. A mutated cross between The Simpsons’ Mr Burns and a miniature Bobby Charlton, he hit us with the following barrage:

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE UP TO?
…ETC, ETC

Golly - I jumped!

Composure regained, I reassured him that we meant no harm, we came in peace and that we were really quite happy (and lucky) to have broken down in such magnificent surroundings.

Privately, however, I’d decided that I really, really hated him. I was a long way from home in the middle of nowhere, I had a baby on the back seat wailing, a wife with a busted arm (seriously) and a car that patently didn’t work. I was really in need of some help.

At the same time, the accusation of trespassing seemed ludicrous against the backdrop of a once magnificent, but now empty and crumbling hotel. What was with this guy? As the proprietor, shouldn’t he be welcoming us?!

At this point, he turned and made a dash for the door. Steve the mechanic and I were expecting a musket in our noses. Instead, he reappeared brandishing business cards and a reassurance that “we have great guests rooms” and that “you can look us up on the web!”

We decided not to stick around. We fixed the car at the top of the track and shared a joke between us. This man was a sham, worse than Basil Fawlty. He seemed to revel in our twisted little exchange. But it all seemed so misguided and back to front. A grilling to greet us and a business card to say goodbye? No wonder his place was empty! My wife and I (and Steve) vowed never, ever to return.

Which, by the way, is what the majority of your web site users do when they’re presented with a web-to-lead form.

Think about it…. When you squirrel your content away and ask people to give you their email address before you’ve even said hello, you’re behaving exactly like Mr Burns. Is this any way to treat a valued prospect?

Here’s the context… I’ve worked so hard to find you: I have a problem to address; I Googled for ‘widgets’; I searched you out amongst a thicket of competitive pages; I see you might just have a white paper that interests me. Great! But then….

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT’S YOUR NAME?
THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY!
YOU NEED MY PERMISSION TO BE HERE!
…ETC, ETC

Well sorry. Screw you! My life’s too short and I’m off to check out another site instead. Shouldn’t you be welcoming me on to your site? Isn’t life hard enough selling widgets without giving me the third degree?

It’s kind of insane really. Unless you’re giving a stack of cash away for free, then you’re making the following fatal assumptions with your jazzy ‘web-to-lead’ form:

• I need your stuff more than you need me
• I can’t find similar (or as good) stuff for free elsewhere

Which isn’t going to be true in most cases. So, why do it in the first place?

Here’s some questions to ask yourself…

• When was the last time a web to lead form clinched a sale?
• When was the last time a web to lead form ‘tipped’ a prospect into a customer?
• Can you afford for me to consider - even for a microsecond - that life would be easier (and more hospitable) on some other site?
• Is ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ really an appropriate question to ask me at this early stage of our relationship?
• If you were running a hotel, would you treat me in the same way?

Where content giveaways are concerned, please just ditch your web to lead forms right now - or those valued guests-to-be may decide to never, ever return.

Next up: “The value of free content: why giving it all away is good for your prospects and great for Google…”

Tags: Content, Lead Generation, Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations
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How Steve Jobs (and Dick Hardt) wows the crowds

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 where he launched the MacBook Air).

The author, Carmine Gallo, refers to the Jobs approach as a ‘ten point framework’. Really it’s just a list of ten tips, but they’re excellent tips. If you follow them, your presentations will be much better — and many of the tips apply to written communication, too.

Lately, we’ve been exploring ways to deliver really powerful web seminars and these tips will all come in handy. I won’t paraphrase them but I do recommend the article.

And since writing the draft of this post, John’s CEO, Paul Ostergaard, sent a link to this terrific presentation on Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip Identity. It’s an entertaining, funny introduction to a concept that Sxip is evangelising and an excellent example of how to sell a technical, abstract story without being technical or abstract.

Tags: B2B, Content, Marketing, persuasion, presentation, selling, writing
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Fighting Inertia: the toughest competitor of them all.

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 market. The only competitor is the inertia of the target audience. At first glance, it sounds like a great position to be in. Never facing a head-to-head competitor. Being free from the never-ending features arms race. But in reality, these can be the toughest marketing challenges of them all…

Think about it: if ‘do nothing’ is even an option for the prospective buyer, you’ve probably got an uphill battle… and a sales cycle that could resemble Napoleon’s march into Russia.

Overcoming inertia means selling someone a problem before you can sell them a solution. Convincing them that the way they’re doing things now is doomed to failure. But no one I know is actually in the market for problems. We’ve all got enough, thanks.

It’s like walking into someone’s office and saying, “See that rock in that corner? Well, there are little monsters under that rock and they’re going to come out and get you one day. The good news is, I’m going to turn over that rock and kill those monsters.”

To which most sane people would reply, ‘Don’t touch that rock!’

The pioneering technology faces exactly this resistance. The prospect has been happily doing nothing for a long time, despite what you claim is a serious enough problem to demand attention now. That can only be because of one of a few reasons:

• They recognise the pain but find it endurable
  Your need to show them that a pain-free life is easy to achieve

• They recognise the pain but see it as someone else’s
  You need to find that other person.

• They don’t feel it as pain at all
  You have to prove that it is pain, and that it’s a symptom of more serious risks.

• They know that all their competitors have the same pain
  Your need to show that this is no longer true: their competitors are now gaining an advantage.

• Their job depends on this pain existing and persisting
  You need to reach their boss.

Clearly, these are all difficult attitudes to overcome. In many ways, it’s easier to duke it out with a direct competitor.

Often, what the competitor-free pioneer is doing is aggregating low-level pains that attack different departments and job titles. If the pain were already in one place, there would probably be some competing solutions (direct competitors or viable substitutes) trying to solve it.

The choice is either to get those different influencers to think like a team so they can also aggregate some budget; or to find the person they all report to and show how all those little headaches are really one big headache and it’s their head.

Another strategy is to break down your solution into smaller apps suitable for the specific pain points, selling each for less but selling to one person at a time. That means faster sales cycles and more entry points to upsell the whole solution.

So inertia just might be the most formidable competitor you’ll ever meet. For market pioneers, traditional competition should be welcomed. It validates the market. It tells buyers that there really is something going on here. And it gives you something to position yourself against.

Thankfully, inertia works both ways. A body at rest may tend to stay at rest but a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Get the market moving and you could be riding a big snowball down an even bigger hill (at which point a host of new competitors will come running out to play).

Tags: B2B, Brand, Competition, Inertia, Marketing, Sales, Technology Marketing
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Keywords: how to build an effective strategy in B2B

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 explain what separates a good keyword strategy from a stinker. I thought I’d share a bit of the thinking with you…

Your goal for SEO: to generate ‘high value’ prospective customer traffic.

‘High value’ means visitors who are engaged with your product / services set and are actively looking for help.

‘Prospective’ means visitors who are new, or relatively new to you / your site and are looking to you as a potential vendor and solutions partner.

Broadly speaking, you need to capture the interest of people who are researching solutions to problems that you can solve, and to divert their attention to strategic points within your web site.

How? Well, one big thing to consider is your KEYWORDS. (There’s more to SEO than this, but we’ll just concentrate on keyword principles for now…)

Your aim is to structure your on- and off-site content using the words that your audience is using to search the web - so that you improve your chances of featuring on the first couple of pages of Google in relation to a given search query.

For example, if you’re in the business of IPTV and your audience is searching around your backyard using phrases like ‘IPTV content management software,’ then you need to align the language you use to describe yourself with these terms.

At the same time, you need to be aligning yourself with a set of keywords in a ‘win-able’ arena amongst competitors: some keywords will have no competition, others will be red hot.

In simple terms, this last point creates a ‘keyword index.’ You need to place a calculated bet on where you want to play. Your choice should be calibrated by the following formula:

Volume of daily searchers on any given key word

(…divided by)

Volume of other web pages that are optimised around those keywords

Clearly you want to engage with as many people as possible that are using search terms related to your products / services. At the same time, you want to position yourself where you can compete, given the resources you have to hand.

The challenge is best illustrated by a quick experiement….

If you’re in the business of software apps for sales support, you might choose to optimise around the term ‘CRM.’ This would currently give you an audience of 563 searchers per day on Google. Unfortunately, it would also put you in direct competition with 129 million other web pages that are optimised on that term. Alternatively, if you were to focus your keywords around the concept of ’sales management software’ you’d have a total audience of around 50 searchers a day; and using this route, you’d be up against approximately 150,000 other pages.

Clearly the chances of capturing the attention of a ‘CRM’ searcher are more remote than for a ’sales management software’ searcher…. and this ought to give you plenty of food for thought, because conventional branding wisdom becomes a little cloudy in the face of hard data.

But choosing keywords is not just a question of running the numbers. Those branding considerations are absolutely essential to a successful SEO strategy.

For example, you need to consider the following things…

You brand equity – what’s does your overall investment in non-web language mean to this work? What about your sales patter and your product naming conventions? Do these things fit with your keyword findings?

Market maturity – does your current searching public really reflect where the market is at? Are you leading them or following them? What stage is your market in terms of possessing a common body of language to describe its problems and requirements?

Influential people – are industry analysts setting the market terms? Or are they just spinning far-fetched yarns? Do you need to follow or ignore them? What influence do they have on your customers? Will this influence matter tomorrow? Has it already had an impact?

Your resources – can you afford to compete in hotly competed areas? If you have a mega-budget, why not just nuke it out? If your resources are small, can you find smarter keyword arenas to play in?

The quality of the data sample – if you’re playing in niche territories, are you willing to bet a keyword / naming convention on a sample of 10 searchers per day? Once your product category matures, how are the trends going to change?

The state of the nation – can you afford not to play in competitive fields?

The above questions should create an interesting debate where branding ideas meet public perceptions of you and your products and services.

Ultimately, your SEO choices will be determined by your guts and your resources.

Some words of warning…

Be warned, branding babies should never be thrown out with the bath water.

Competition is also a key factor. To nuke it or to duck it is not always clear cut.

As ever, you’ll make plenty of branding compromises and web concessions along the way… The best advice we can give is to treat your keywords strategy as a journey - experiment, tweak and try again. The path to SEO nirvana wasn’t built in a day…

Tags: B2B, Keywords, Marketing, Petri Dish, PPC, SEO, Technology, web analytics, Web Marketing
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Champions and the Siren Effect: how early wins can mislead

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 course by these early wins. The early ‘champions’ were dream customers. They bought into the vision. They loved the product. They ‘got it’. How can that be bad?

The only problem is that these champions turned out to be extremely rare people. Like any early adopter (thanks Geoffrey Moore), they’re generally innovators and visionaries; they’re confident; they trust their own gut feel and are willing to work with young companies and unproven products. If these early champions didn’t exist, neither would the tech industry. But they can fatally mislead early stage tech companies.

Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is all about making the transition from these early adopter clients to a more mainstream audience who need different things and are moved by different messages. But we’ve worked with a handful of cases where the first one or two wins were the only wins in sight. In each case, the company, convinced by early success that they’ve got everything right, found it extremely hard to re-focus on the more common buyers: risk-averse people who need a lot more hand-holding and an easier-to-buy product

Also in each case, the vision itself was the problem. Not that it was wrong (usually it was simply ahead of its time) but that most buyers don’t want exciting new visions. They want specific problems solved. The early champions validated the entire vision, so that’s what the company continued to sell. They then waited forever for the next big win, getting bogged down in two-year sales cycles with prospects who look just like the early wins, but are fundamentally different.

Often, the answer is to downplay the vision a bit and break the product up into bite-sized applications. It’s painful, but it can spell the difference between getting customers to fund growth instead of needing lots of early stage investment capital (and the dilution it brings).

Early on, getting twenty $10k wins may actually be better than bagging that $200k elephant. They don’t trample your product development roadmap to suit their specific needs; the sales cycles are shorter; and the sales model is more replicable and scalable — it’s a foundation you can build a business on. One client, Sarah Haskell at Portrait Software liked to call these ‘pointy apps’ to differentiate them from the big, platform sell.

The right balance is to have a vision that underpins the smaller applications and puts them in context. And a set of apps that validate the vision.

No one would say you should turn down the big early wins. Just beware of being lured into the rocks by expecting more buyers to be just like the early ones.

Tags: B2B, Sales, Technology
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Empathy and foreplay in B2B Marketing

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 you’re selling to have better things to think about. Once you accept this simple fact, your marketing will get a lot better – because you’ll realise that your first and toughest job is to stop people in their tracks and offer you a small flake of their most precious, scarcest resource: their attention.

This post is about the most important part of every marketing communication: the opening. The come-on. The headline, subhead and first paragraph. If you’re reading this sentence, it’s only because I’ve passed one of the trickiest obstacle courses in marketing. I’ve got you to stop, read one line, read the next and decide to continue.

I accomplished this through a bit of craft and trickery (including a naughty word) but mostly through an incredibly powerful thing called empathy.
Empathy is at the heart of every great communication, from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (among the most moving 700 words ever spoken) to classic ad lines that boil down entire marketing briefs into five words (like “Buy more beef, you bastards.” from the Australian Beef Commission).

Empathy demands that you stop being you and start being your target audience. If you can do that, you’re more than halfway to an effective piece of communication. If you can’t do it, you need to do more homework or find someone who can.

Starting from empathy does all sorts of good things for your marketing. For one, it forces you to create punchy, relevant, intriguing openings. Short, sharp headlines; subheads with a bit of context; introductions that speak plain English and tell the reader this is about them not just about you.

Remember, you’re not you. You’re a very busy person who knows nothing about your product, who has a toothache and whose boss is being a total jerk. Even putting your lousy ad, website, brochure or video in front of him is an affront akin to Oliver Twist asking his captors for ‘more’. How very dare you.

Since you’ve already interrupted your audience, the least you can do is to reward their attention by being clear, open, relevant and, if possible, just a wee bit entertaining. Let’s take these one at a time:

Be clear – For God’s sake spit it out. Save the business-speak for… on second thought, bin the business-speak altogether. The voice you’re looking for is the one that comes out of your mouth, not your pen or keyboard.

Be open – Most marketing acts as if it’s got a dirty little secret; a hidden sales agenda. Well guess what, it’s not a secret, it’s not especially dirty and your agenda is actually standing naked on the desk with a bird of paradise in its mouth. Just do your job and sell me stuff.

Be relevant – This is about me isn’t it? Well prove it. Start being about me right from the beginning. Start with an interesting way of looking at my world and my problems. Then maybe I’ll hang around.

Be entertaining – Like it or not, marketing is show-biz. There needs to be a spring in your step. You need to be enjoying yourself not getting a tooth extracted. If you think what you do is boring, I guarantee you that I will too. This doesn’t mean you have to be funny. Trying to be funny and falling even a tiny bit short is a very sad and embarrassing thing. Just be comfortable on stage, in the spotlight.

I’ll write specifically about headlines in another post, but these four points should help guide your openings (and, frankly, the middles and endings as well).

For an example of what I’m talking about, scroll up. You’ve just read this entire post so one thing you know is that this opening worked.

Send me one of your headlines and opening paragraphs and I’ll see if I can do a make-over to show what I mean (look ma, no brief!).

Tags: B2B, Content, empathy, Marketing, persuasion, selling, writing
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Whose Tipping Point is it Anyway? A B2B Perspective…

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 is yes, kinda… and it’s no doubt sent Gladwell’s afro into a tight spin, as well as the rest of the globe’s marketing mavens

So, all those billions of marketing dollars that are spent on locating and ‘tipping’ a market’s influencers may be misguided?

If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a quick synopsis:

• Web/network guru who knows lots about network effects releases research that undermines the value of the ‘maven’ in turning ideas into marketing epidemics
• He looks deeply into some long-standing common wisdom about networked-ness, such as the six degrees of separation theory, runs new tests and concludes that the results were unrepresentative …that normal people are just as important at spreading stuff as ‘influential’ types
• Further, he does a number of other interesting studies to suggest that it may be impossible for us to gauge at any one time why a given idea/product/pop band is able to ‘break out’ from the pack and go big time

The guru in question is Duncan Watts, author of ‘Six Degrees: The New Science of Networks‘ and senior researcher at Yahoo (a big network). He knows his onions. What’s interesting about his research is that it takes Gladwell’s ideas and zooms out on them to create a far wider field of enquiry.

For example, Gladwell picks Hush Puppies as the memorable breakout brand of the mid-nineties NYC hipster scene. Watts asks why didn’t other stuff that they were wearing fare equally as well?

We think this is a really neat question to ask.

What’s at stake here? As the Fast Company piece says, the idea of influencers and tipping points lends itself really well to the world of marketing, where data is in short supply but pixie dust isn’t. Bigwig execs at agencies become arbiters of taste, identify a group and persuade brands to spend a bunch of cash dreaming up clever schemes of ‘brand advocacy’ that they hope will spread. Does it work? Well, sure it does in some circles, but in others definitely not.

What if the original idea is a bad one? What if the context is wrong? What about the bigger picture? Those guys in NYC may also have been wearing ski goggles in June, but their inability to ‘tip’ the eyewear - perhaps a failure of ‘brand empathy’ or just their general lack of ‘stick-ability’ - isn’t in question.

Here’s our take on the whole thing:

Influence is critical, but if the basic story is wrong, or if the marketplace isn’t ready then you’re destined to fail if you’re trying to create a buzz. Further, these three elements need to be aligned - cosmic style - for things to ‘tip.’

Taking them in reverse order, finding a receptive marketplace can be a research game or a ‘go with the gut’ game. Either one will do, but one should recognise that out of everything, getting this bit right is the most important thing.

Story is a creative game. It’s all about how you tell them. Good content and great execution really counts.

Influence is an interesting one right now. ‘Tipping’ and ‘brand advocacy’ in the physical world involves spending time, money and tea-leaves on finding the right people to help spread an idea. Online, however, this can be a relatively scientific exercise. Tools like