We were thrilled to have been a Finalist for the Best B2B Campaign in the New Media Age Effectiveness Awards, celebrated the other night at the Grosvenor House Hotel. We thought our work with ShipServ kind of deserved it, to be honest. But we didn’t bloody win. Microsoft did. Which kind of sucks.
Bloggers eh! No schedules, no calendars, no contact number. They just don’t play by the rules. So how can you get on their elusive radar? Our top ten tips pave the way to success.
I presented a webinar the other day where I stated that while white papers are still the staple of content marketing, they’re getting really stale as a communications vehicle for B2B. A few people were so incensed they contacted me to say I was talking nonsense. So click here to find out whether they changed my mind…
It’s here. The book of the webinar of the movie: The Velocity B2B Content Marketing Workbook. Over 45 breezy pages of good, solid advice about thought leadership and content marketing for B2B marketers like you. Come and get it!
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…
