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Velocity: The B2B Marketing Blog - A Joyride Through The Mean Streets of B2B

Recent posts

Social Success: a new content site for Salesforce.com

We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was…

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| February 2nd, 2012 | no comments

What would lean startup marketing look like?

An effort to banish massive marketing campaign misses, by missing earlier, and more often

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| January 30th, 2012 | 3 comments

Talking to B2B Marketing Masters: John Watton

Stan Woods talks to John Watton about B2B marketing and anything else he can think of. Come see on Thursday 2 February.

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| January 27th, 2012 | no comments

Featured post

Social Success: a new content site for Salesforce.com

We’re inordinately proud to announce the launch of a new microsite by Salesforce UK that Velocity helped with. The site is called Social Success and it’s all about helping businesses harness the power of social media. Our job was…

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| February 2nd, 2012 | no comments

January 2012

Should we still be talking about the B2B marketing funnel?

I’m thinking we should give up on the funnel. But what would life post-funnel look like?

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| January 23rd, 2012 | 5 comments

Friday post: B2B AWESOME!!!

This is a Friday Velocity post. That means all bets are off, and this is totally NSFW. But fuck it. I think it’ll make you feel awesome.

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| January 20th, 2012 | 4 comments

Get to terms with Content Curation: Pro’s and con’s and 6 principles

Is it the blessing bestowed on every marketing manager starving for content, or is it a fig leaf parading like thought leadership?

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| January 18th, 2012 | one comment

Witamy (und Willkommen, Bienvenida, Bienvenue, Welkom) to Martha Rzeppa

Martha Rzeppa joins Velocity (the Rz in Rzeppa is pronounced like the je in 'je ne sais quoi').

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| January 16th, 2012 | one comment

We’re live and unfiltered on Facebook. Join us!

Perhaps a little less polished but a little more rounded, we're now on Facebook.

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| January 9th, 2012 | no comments

December 2011

For 2012 never a better time to be in B2B technology

Three significant pieces of news suggest that the B2B technology space is going to blow up in a big way, and most players aren't ready for it.

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| December 28th, 2011 | no comments

Velocity’s B2B content marketing research trip to Paris

To stay at the cutting edge of B2B content marketing you can’t just sit in your office. So Velocity decided to get out of London and discover how B2B content…

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| December 19th, 2011 | 3 comments

Highlights from Econsultancy’s social data briefing

If there are two bulls barging through the marketing tea party, they’re social media and data analytics. Econsultancy’s latest digital intelligence briefing charts the damage when the two meet.

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| December 13th, 2011 | no comments

Unethical persuasion in B2B content marketing: a call to all ‘compliance practitioners’

Persuasion victim after viewing the cover of 'Influence'

I finally got around to reading, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini, Ph.D. It’s a summary of the secret…

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| December 6th, 2011 | no comments

November 2011

Moneyball: Why Oakland Analytics will change our world

Every B2B marketer should watch Moneyball. It's another sign that science will change every world. It's time to adapt or die.

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| November 29th, 2011 | 6 comments

B2B content marketing: when target audiences clash

Marketers are instinctively inclusive. Our default is to set our crop-sprayer on the widest possible setting, covering the largest possible audience for everything we do.

But content marketing is different.…

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| November 23rd, 2011 | 2 comments

Billboard boycott – let’s start with B2B billboard ads

Having spent my entire career in marketing, I’m hardly an anti-capitalist. But there is one form of advertising that I’d happily see banned tomorrow: billboards.

The multi-billion dollar outdoor…

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| November 21st, 2011 | 10 comments

The Unbearable Anxiety of Business Blogging

Blogging is an anxiety-inducing business. Business blogging even more so.

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| November 18th, 2011 | no comments

The Marketo Revenue Rockstar Tour Review

I just got back to the desk the day after Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar event in London so I thought I’d file a quick report on it.

The event was…

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| November 17th, 2011 | 2 comments

Heavenly B2B Content Marketing: The Ave Maria Moment

Getting it right. How some of our clients are starting to produce content that's just ripe for promotion from day one.

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| November 14th, 2011 | no comments

ZMOT, and what it means to B2B marketers

The way we buy things has changed fundamentally, and B2B marketers need to account for ZMOT. Here’s how you can get started.

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| November 10th, 2011 | one comment

October 2011

Content Development: Nine Tips for B2B marketers

Content marketing has hit the tipping point for B2B marketers. At Velocity, we used to have to evangelise the concept of content marketing , then spend lots of time…

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| October 31st, 2011 | 6 comments

Now THAT’s an infographic (most B2B infographics aren’t)

We’ve been huge fans of information graphics at Velocity ever since Edward Tufte self-published his brilliant ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information‘ book. But as the B2B marketing world…

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| October 26th, 2011 | no comments

Content Marketing in an Age of (Faulty) Analytics

Science now pervades digital marketing (or it should). But how do you manage the prospect of bad science?

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| October 21st, 2011 | no comments

Excellent IBM CMO study interviews 1,700+ CMOs

It’s the closest thing you can get to “the state of the marketing union”, including new technology, social media, analytics and digital-driven change. Some highlights.

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| October 19th, 2011 | no comments

The “Get Your Stuff Read” blog post

Please. On your website, address the reader's needs obviously and directly. Even bluntly. They'll appreciate it.

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| October 15th, 2011 | one comment

Content Development using Inbound Writer

Ryan came across a blog post by Jay Baer on a tool called Inbound Writer which is designed to help writers create better B2B content marketing pieces. Jay was so…

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| October 12th, 2011 | 4 comments

Hackgate Technique: The Content Marketing Skill Part 2

A simple how-to of a powerful content marketing technique. Share thought leadership and boost online reputation management in a few a few quick steps.

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| October 12th, 2011 | no comments

Are you coming to FUNNEL?

FUNNEL is a great idea (well, we did help develop it). It’s a B2B marketing event that covers the entire sales/marketing pipeline.

It happens on 1 November at the…

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| October 5th, 2011 | one comment

The Hackgate technique: Giftwrap that content!

Categorizing and packaging content smartly around topics of vital interest to your business or industry pays back in pure audience interest, SEO and social links.

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| October 4th, 2011 | no comments

September 2011

The Devil wants Pravda (and he wants it now)

Find out happens when creative ideas get sidelined in the B2B content marketing process. It's not clever, it's not fun and it's certainly not pretty...

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| September 30th, 2011 | one comment

Why you should give away the very thing you sell

As content marketing gains momentum, we find that we’re not having to work quite as hard explaining the principles to prospective clients. But one objection does keep popping up…

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| September 22nd, 2011 | 2 comments

Content marketing & marketing automation webinar

In case you missed last week’s Content Marketing & Marketing Automatation webinar put on by DemandGen’s John Sweeney, here’s a link to the archived talk with slides.

In it,…

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| September 19th, 2011 | no comments

The A/B and Multivariate Testing Resource Map

We’re always surprised by how infrequently B2B marketers actually test their web pages, emails, banner ads and content offers.

That’s why A/B and Multivariate Testing is one of the Six…

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| September 14th, 2011 | 6 comments

Two important B2B marketing events in London

You can learn a lot about the new B2B marketing from a few day’s worth of Google trawling. But to get up to speed fast, there’s nothing like a really…

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| September 12th, 2011 | one comment

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

If you’re not burned out by the 9/11 media festival, here’s one small, short film shot and edited in the three weeks after the towers fell. I say ‘small film’…

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| September 12th, 2011 | one comment

Are you the bore in the corner?

When he was working for a big B2B company, Andrew Walker did a brave thing. He audited every piece of communication that his company put out, with a cold,…

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| September 6th, 2011 | 2 comments

Five B2B marketing posts we think you’ll like

We know you like the backs of our hands. You’re a B2B marketer who’s always looking for new ideas, strategies, tactics and technologies. (See? Nailed you in one sentence). With…

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| September 6th, 2011 | no comments

B2B Marketing Webinar: B2B Content Marketing and Automation

Content Marketing and Marketing Automation are the two new pillars of B2B. We’re taking part in an upcoming DemandGen webinar that brings the two topics together. It’s on 15 September…

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| September 5th, 2011 | no comments

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about

You’re a marketer, we’re marketers. It’s good to share the things we like.

Here are nine companies you ought to know about. They all help marketers make more money…

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| September 1st, 2011 | 2 comments

August 2011

How do the wheels fall off a website?

A colorful - if painful - story of how a big website can crash and burn. And an eBook on how to save them...

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| August 15th, 2011 | no comments

Internet Marketing Strategy: a meaty new briefing for all marketers

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the change taking place in digital marketing – and all the blogs, eBooks, videos and research reports that try to explain it all…

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| August 2nd, 2011 | no comments

July 2011

How to write FAQs – an FAQ for B2B

We're big believers in the power of a great FAQ section on a B2B website -- not just for customer support but for marketing. So here's our FAQ on FAQs:

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| July 8th, 2011 | no comments

In case you missed these B2B marketing guest posts

We’re big believers in doing guest posts on other marketing sites. It reaches new audiences, builds backlinks and boosts our page rank and overall search rankings.

The only bad…

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| July 8th, 2011 | no comments

June 2011

Closing The Kimono: Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign

Project Open Kimono is over. It's been fun, but has it led us to marketing heaven or straight to hell? Get the final judgement in our definitive wrap up post.

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| June 20th, 2011 | 3 comments

Three content marketing vital signs

Does your site have a pulse? Here are three content marketing vital signs you should look at. Stat. The Dead Cat Toss. The Hourglass Figure. And the Jesus Pizza.

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| June 7th, 2011 | no comments

May 2011

An Agile Approach to Digital Marketing

How many times have marketing projects stranded, or launched late (and lame) because life intervened after the project's execution? Many marketing projects would benefit from a concept borrowed from web development: Agile project management.

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| May 31st, 2011 | one comment

12 Lessons from the Manifesto Campaign – Project Open Kimono 13

We’ll be wrapping up the results of the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign soon, but here’s a quick tour of some of the lessons learned as we brought the Manifesto to…

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| May 26th, 2011 | no comments

Just buy the f**king product

Inspired by the story of the new best-selling children’s book sensation “Go the f**k to sleep”, we bring you the story of a CEO* brought to the edge of desperation as he copes with digital marketing.

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| May 24th, 2011 | 3 comments

Velocity in panel on lead nurturing on BrightTALK

Velocity is speaking on May 25 at a BrightTALK Lead Nurturing Seminar with other B2B marketing experts. Register for free.

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| May 19th, 2011 | no comments

Company blog as B2B skunkworks

How making your business's blog into a testing ground for new ideas can drive innovation, and provide proof of concept for radical changes.

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| May 17th, 2011 | no comments

The Shape of Play-For-Pay in B2B Marketing

What would it look like if creatives and content were rewarded only for the traffic and revenue they generated? Read on.

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| May 13th, 2011 | no comments

Rationality or emotion: which is the engine of B2B marketing?

Most people believe that B2B marketing is all about making rational arguments that lead ineluctably to a sale, compared to the much more emotional appeal required by companies selling cornflakes, running shoes or sugar water. Should B2B marketers eschew the emotional appeal to their prospects?

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| May 10th, 2011 | 6 comments

I ♥ Jellyvision

Interactive user design on a site has to be something more than click-through. Here's how smoove user experiences are evolving.

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| May 5th, 2011 | one comment

‘Au revoir’ marketing scientist

After three-and-a-half years, one of our favourite B2B marketers, top clients and all-round great egg, John Watton is moving on from his job as CMO at ShipServ, the leading ship supplies e-marketplace. Elected B2B Marketer of the year in 2009, he has transformed ShipServ's fortunes on a limited budget over that period. Velocity has worked with him since 2007 and thought we'd interview to him to get the inside skinny on what's hot in B2B marketing land.

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| May 3rd, 2011 | 3 comments

April 2011

Hasta la vista Stuart Rothwell

Stuart Rothwell, stalwart designer and Liverpool FC supporter (though less die-hard than when he joined for obvious reasons) who ambled into our hallowed portals for the first time on April…

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| April 28th, 2011 | one comment

B2B chalk talk videos: capturing your best experts

Even the smallest company has at least one guy who can tell its story really, really well. He’s the guy you always want to bring to important sales calls…

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| April 12th, 2011 | no comments

First Impressions: On landing pages and landing in general

I’m the new guy, freshly landed at Velocity Partners, and this is the new guy post. Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression”…

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| April 11th, 2011 | one comment

Do the British prefer ‘muddling through’ to evidence-based B2B marketing?

I was at a meeting the other day with the CMO of a leading cloud-based software vendor. Why, he asked, was it so difficult to get the lead machine working here in the UK. Three reasons sprang to mind.

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| April 6th, 2011 | 4 comments

Project Open Kimono 12: Re-purposing and atomising your content

This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece.…

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| April 5th, 2011 | no comments

March 2011

A Long-Ass Landing Page goes live

Check out this new landing page for Econsultancy, the digital marketing publisher, community, analyst house, training company and event organiser (whew). We’re students of landing pages and, when there’s a…

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| March 30th, 2011 | 17 comments

B2B content marketing around buying triggers

There are lots of ways to build your content marketing strategy -- around personas, products, organisational structure... We'd like to suggest a new way to go: build your content around your most important buying triggers.

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| March 10th, 2011 | 4 comments

What B2B marketers can learn from Charlie Sheen

Charlie Sheen on Good Morning America earlier this week

Charlie Sheen has shown himself to be a new class of braying moron: the braying moron who thinks that a…

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| March 4th, 2011 | one comment

February 2011

Post-Digital Marketing: The Rise of Meatspace

Marketing is entering the post-digital era.  It’s not that digital is going away, just that it’s being dissolved into everything we do.  This means we can also stop the digital…

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| February 23rd, 2011 | no comments

Project Open Kimono 11: Do Twitter Auto DMs work?

One of the experiments we've run as part of Project Open Kimono was to set up an automated Direct Message to everyone who follows me on Twitter. Check out the results...

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| February 15th, 2011 | no comments

We’re Hiring: Digital Marketing Analyst

Are you ready for the Land of Accountability? If you're a B2B marketer with a thirst for measurement then find out why we might be your next assignment.

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| February 14th, 2011 | no comments

Time for B2B Marketers to Rename AdWords

Google Adwords? Better your own AdWords. Customize your settings or watch the cash flow down the sink.

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| February 10th, 2011 | 3 comments

LinkedIn Maps: your network visualised

We’re big infographics fans so when LinkedIn launched their new LinkedIn Maps tool, we were first in the virtual queue to have a play. The tool generates a colourful,…

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| February 3rd, 2011 | no comments

January 2011

A nice bit of visual B2B personalisation

LinkedIn just sent me a nice piece of highly personalized B2B email.

I’ve never seen ‘visual persoanlization’ in an out-bound email before but it’s pretty compelling to see the faces…

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| January 17th, 2011 | 2 comments

December 2010

Mel’s Christmas Posters

Mel Bartheidel, ace designer from the Velocity stable (yes, we keep them in a stable) designed some very cool posters for the Somerset House Super Christmas Market.

The background was…

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| December 22nd, 2010 | no comments

What B2B marketers can learn from Viagra Spam

Viagra spammers have a tough challenge. They know that if they can get their message to a few billion people, a few thousand morons will place an order. But…

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| December 20th, 2010 | one comment

Project Open Kimono 10 – The Form Conclusion

We cursed the web form. But warned it might fight back. Has the form risen, Phoenix like from the Velocity flames, in the latest installment of Project Open Kimono?

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| December 1st, 2010 | 9 comments

November 2010

Project Open Kimono 9: The Lead Nurturing Effect.

Project Open Kimono shows how you can use lead nurturing to transform your email returns in just one week. It's like magic.

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| November 12th, 2010 | no comments

How to inject urgency into your B2B marketing

We talk a lot about the Battle for Attention in B2B and about Buyer Attention Deficit Disorder and the relentless Mississippi of info-dreck that gushes through us all every…

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| November 10th, 2010 | 2 comments

Project Open Kimono 8: email follow-up and promotional defense barriers

One of the experiments we ran in our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign was to send a simple, quirky text email as a follow-up to our sexy HTML email announcing…

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| November 5th, 2010 | 2 comments

B2B Mobile Marketing: the distant thunder grows louder

We’ve been spending a lot of time in Google Analytics lately thanks to Project Open Kimono (our ‘living case study’). On one lunchtime drill-down, we came across something that…

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| November 3rd, 2010 | 2 comments

October 2010

Project Open Kimono 7 – Can analytics find the world’s best B2B marketers?

We want great B2B marketing clients. But where can we find the people who share our view of the marketing world. Find out how we used our analytics to narrow down our search for the world's best B2B marketers.

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| October 27th, 2010 | 2 comments

The B2B Marketing Manifesto Explained

Doug talks to John Sweeney about the frustrations and hope that inspired the B2B Marketing Manifesto.

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| October 26th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Marketing Agency campaign in a scribble

We were mapping out the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign on a sheet of A4 lined paper and this is what was left behind on the meeting table. Pretty much all there.

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| October 22nd, 2010 | 4 comments

Twitter and the tyranny of the new

Is it just me or have you noticed how Twitter buries the best under a blizzard of blah-blah-blah? Feels like it's a medium that favours newness over quality and that has implications for humans and for marketers...

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| October 22nd, 2010 | 2 comments

Are B2B marketers wimps? Project Open Kimono part 6

Our recent micro-survey generated some disturbing data: B2B marketers are wimps. Not a pretty result but maybe it's time to face up to it...

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| October 19th, 2010 | 11 comments

B2B Analytics – Project Open Kimono – Part 5

A digital curtain has descended on B2B marketing content. The next installment of Project Open Kimono looks at the forms that increasingly guard the door to our resource sections.

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| October 15th, 2010 | no comments

Five things I’ve learned in B2B marketing

Well, I’m moving on to work for Thomson Reuters (the siren call of being able to walk to work proved to be too strong to resist), and I thought I’d get all reflective and try to sum up some of the (many) things I’ve learned at Velocity.

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| October 15th, 2010 | no comments

Top B2B bloggers: we have favourites and we’re not ashamed of it

We’ve been fishing around and come up with a digest of recent blog posts and B2B resources that we think are pretty cracking. Have a look and see if you agree.

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| October 14th, 2010 | no comments

A B2B viral video gets contagious

B2B marketers  often question the value of the kind of video people often call ‘viral’: the quirky, witty ones that demonstrate the human side of a business. It can be…

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| October 8th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Analytics, old school

A Velocity B2B Real-Time Segmentation Dynamics™ Report

Sometimes, when you forget your Google Analytics password and just need a quick look at the source of your downloads, it’s time…

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| October 6th, 2010 | no comments

Cross-Promoting B2B Content: Project Open Kimono Part 4

It’s time to talk about cross-promoting content as we approach week three of Project Open Kimono, the real-life, almost-real-time, warts-bunions-and-all case study of our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.  The…

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| October 4th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Marketing Analytics – Project Open Kimono Part 3

Two weeks in and the analytics Kimono is wide open. Take a look and see what you can learn from our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.

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| October 1st, 2010 | no comments

September 2010

B2B Content Marketing Trends and Spends

Marketing Profs and Junta 42 haven’t half been busy lately. They’ve produced a report into content marketing, surveying skills, resources, and trends. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive report of…

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| September 28th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Case Study Live – Project Open Kimono – part 2

B2B Case Study live: Project Open Kimono Part 2, in which Velocity, the B2B Marketing Agency shares it's experiences in promoting the B2B Marketing Manifesto.

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| September 24th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Marketing Analytics: Project Open Kimono

You might call us brave. You might call us stupid. But I like to think we're honest. Project Open Kimono is a warts and all look at how we plan our content marketing strategy for ourselves and, of course, for our clients.

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| September 22nd, 2010 | no comments

The B2B Marketing Manifesto: hot off the press

“This is without a doubt the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer. It’s also the scariest.” That’s how our new eBook, The B2B Marketing Manifesto…

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| September 21st, 2010 | 4 comments

Copywriting: the unsung hero of B2B

We bang on a lot about the importance of copywriting in B2B but we don’t often see good data to support our case. I found some while listening to an…

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| September 21st, 2010 | 4 comments

Sales and Marketing: the same hymn sheet

Our friend Stephanie Tilton (one of the Savvy B2B Marketers) and the folks at AG Salesworks have just published an excellent eBook on the subject: Gear Up For Success: 8 Steps to Get Sales & Marketing Cranking in Unison:

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| September 20th, 2010 | no comments

Conversion Conference Coming – fancy a discount?

Velocity B2B marketing is offering a 15% discount for you, our readers, on conference passes for the Conversion Conference. The Conference runs from 1-2 November in London.

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| September 17th, 2010 | no comments

The Banksy of B2B Marketing

I came back to the office today to find Stuart, our senor designer, all covered in spray paint. In this age of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, it's great to see a designer actually get out the scissors, card and spray cans once in a while.

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| September 9th, 2010 | no comments

Sex, Lies, and Advertising

Back in the 19th Century, you could make all kinds of wild claims about your Tincture of Gripe Water or Dr Astoundo’s Patented Baldness Liniment. Nobody could sue you if it didn’t do what it said on the tin. That changed in the early 20th Century, which is all to the good. It means marketers have to be more creative when promoting products or services, and not just resort to bare-faced lies.

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| September 1st, 2010 | no comments

August 2010

Are walled gardens the end of the party for web analytics?

No man is an island, entire of itself, especially not on Facebook (that’s the point of it, after all). But increasingly it’s becoming an island to analytics. It’s not alone, either.

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| August 25th, 2010 | no comments

Modern SEO: optimize for show, organize for dough

Search engine optimizers are no longer the superstars of B2B marketing. Find out how SEO is being reinvented from a content to a people challenge.

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| August 17th, 2010 | no comments

Anatomy of a project: Calnetix

We've just completed a big project for Calnetix, a company that turn waste heat from industrial processes into energy. It's green, clean, and it saves money. What's not to like? Watch the Prezi to find out what we did.

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| August 16th, 2010 | no comments

Ten ways that B2B marketing copy goes wrong

Let's face it, most B2B copywriting is not very good. There are many reasons, but here are our top ten. Is your latest B2B marketing copy guilty of any of them?

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| August 16th, 2010 | 4 comments

Why bounce rate envy doesn’t help anyone, not even marketers

Ask people about bounce rates and they’ll tell you that a high bounce rate is bad. Fair enough, it sounds pretty logical. But how do you know what’s a high bounce rate?

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| August 11th, 2010 | no comments

Analytics can be fun, honestly.

Ok, fine; maybe not as much fun as driving a speedboat up the Thames, but it can be extremely handy and oddly satisfying –if you get it right, that is. If you get it wrong, it’s less “fun” and more “total bloody nightmare”.

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| August 10th, 2010 | no comments

Why government and SEO don’t mix

You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines: “Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

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| August 6th, 2010 | no comments

Why great B2B marketers must (sometimes) fail

To achieve greatness you must be prepared to fail. What's true in sport is true in B2B marketing. It's time to accept the power of failure in a glorious career.

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| August 3rd, 2010 | one comment

Ten Tips for Cross-Promoting your Content, Part II

As B2B marketing content libraries start to grow, we all need to think about how we cross-promote our content to people who have already engaged with us.

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| August 2nd, 2010 | no comments

July 2010

B2B marketing jobs in London

We want your body. And your brain. We're looking for talented copywriters, designers and project managers, so if you're looking for a job in B2B marketing, come and talk to us.

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| July 29th, 2010 | no comments

Why KPIs underpin your B2B content marketing cycle?

To love your customers is to love your analytics. Find out why B2B content marketing campaigns need KPIs for measured success.

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| July 27th, 2010 | no comments

B2B marketing’s virtuous digital circle: Spin Cycle

At Velocity we believe in making our content work harder than we do. Find out how just a little bit of joined up thinking can make you the toast of your management team in just three months and still have spare time to enjoy the sunshine.

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| July 22nd, 2010 | one comment

Bite me, Michael O’Leary

Photo credit: Le Scribbler

I’ve never flown Ryanair before. And now I never will again. If I’d wanted to raise my blood pressure, I could have done that for…

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| July 19th, 2010 | no comments

How to structure a B2B argument

B2B marketing always comes down to building an argument; telling a story that leads to an inescapable conclusion: ‘You need to buy this, now.’ If your argument isn’t solid, the creativity of Björk and the budget of Nike will not move your business.

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| July 16th, 2010 | no comments

IBS campaign shortlisted for B2B Marketing Awards 2010

Ice the champagne: our ‘Margin Killers’ campaign for IBS has been shortlisted for the Best International Campaign category in this year’s B2B Marketing Awards.

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| July 14th, 2010 | no comments

Real women don’t sell

Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes bras to also make outer garments. Hopefully the dresses will be designed with the logistics of bra-wearing in mind...

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| July 14th, 2010 | no comments

B2B Marketing Internship: My Week

We've been advertising for geniuses at Velocity recently. And we've had one in the making with us for the past week in the shape of Surbiton High's Fleur Kenny!! Read her blog charting her week with us and you'll see why we all think she's going places.

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| July 9th, 2010 | no comments

The power of beliefs in B2B marketing

Check out this great TED Talk by Simon Sinek on the power of beliefs in marketing. Great leaders and great companies start with beliefs not facts, policies, products or services. People don't buy WHAT you do they buy WHY you do it.

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| July 2nd, 2010 | no comments

June 2010

B2B Copywriting: hitting the sweet spot

There are four kinds of B2B copywriting and they fall into the neat little quadrants formed when two important axes intersect: Clarity and Authenticity. If you can get both in your writing, you're in the Sweet Spot and wonderful things will begin to happen to you...

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| June 30th, 2010 | 2 comments

Calnetix Power Solutions gets a dose of Velocity

The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries.

Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers…

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| June 25th, 2010 | 2 comments

B2B summed up in two words: the writing’s on the road

B2B is a lot simpler than the gurus would have you believe. After all the e-tomes and blog posts and webinars it really all boils down to two words -- and you can see them painted on almost urban street road in the land. When in doubt: look down.

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| June 24th, 2010 | no comments

What hugging cruets and joined-up marketing have in common

Answer: Econsultancy. Let me explain…

Econsultancy have a brilliant new event called JUMP (which we helped launch a few months ago). It’s the most exclusive “online meets offline marketing” event…

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| June 22nd, 2010 | 6 comments

Avoid marketing intranet pitfalls

Here’s an eBook we’ve written and designed for our friends SmallWorlders, the people who create fun and social intranets for marketing teams. Since it's been up on the SmallWorlders website they've seen traffic increase 10 to 20 times the usual, which is pretty damn impressive.

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| June 22nd, 2010 | no comments

Velocity is hiring geniuses – B2B marketing jobs London

B2B marketing job openings London: we're Velocity and we're hiring. But we're not just hiring anyone. We're hiring geniuses with souls, manners and senses of humour. If you like marketing and business and technology and creativity, we think this is the single best place in the world to spend a career.

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| June 16th, 2010 | 5 comments

Gesu gets her MBA (and red Mini)

The Chancellor gestures towards Gesu

Gesu Baroova, Velocity account manager, has had a pretty good weekend. Got her MBA from Cranfield and bought a bright red Mini Cooper…

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| June 14th, 2010 | no comments

Join the iClan

Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived to fill the void in your life that you didn’t know you had.

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| June 11th, 2010 | no comments

Turns out a picture is worth at least 2,380 words

The old cliché “a picture is worth a thousand words” has been around forever so there must be some truth to it. But only a certain kind of obsessive…

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| June 6th, 2010 | 2 comments

An infographic with sound

We love infographics here at Velocity and are big fans of Edward Tufte and Information is Beautiful and Data Flow and stuff like that. But we just had to…

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| June 1st, 2010 | no comments

May 2010

The value of story? About 2,776%

We’re always talking about how important a story is in marketing — but now someone has finally proven it with an ingenious experiment.

As summarised in a recent DoubleThink…

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| May 28th, 2010 | 4 comments

Try to contain your excitement

Roger Warner, friend of Velocity and all-round PR guru, has flung open the doors to the Museum of Social Media. Before you all start planning an office field trip…

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| May 24th, 2010 | no comments

Free B2B Hugs: 25 ways to reward your most engaged customers

Everyone's always talking about 'customer engagement' and we can see why: fully engaged customers -- the ones who comment on your blog posts, join your Facebook group, reteweet your tweets, eat all your content, give you testimonial quotes, participate in case studies and attend your events – add tremendous value to your business and your brand.

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| May 20th, 2010 | no comments

Making the sales team irrelevant

Roger Warner, online PR maestro, sent us a link to this Doug Richard video.  It’s a two-minute extract from one of his start-up seminars, this one on the relationship…

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| May 17th, 2010 | 2 comments

Notes from a General Election: the power of decisions

B2B marketers are always looking to influence decisions. But the recent General Election shows how every customer decision can change the dynamic of your relationship.

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| May 12th, 2010 | no comments

We’re all B2B content brands now

We just did a guest post for the excellent B2BBloggers on how we’re all becoming content brands now — and some tips for how to build a strong B2B content…

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| May 10th, 2010 | 2 comments

A stop-motion movie for ShipServ

My oh my have we been having fun over here recently! Long-term Velocity client and all-round legend John Watton from ShipServ asked us to produce a video to promote Pages, the maritime ‘Find Engine’.

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| May 7th, 2010 | 3 comments

B2B Content Marketing: Mobilise Your Home Front

Anyone else hate time, resources and expertise? I know I do. Find out how you can stop B2B marketing's ancestral enemies from wrecking your social media programmes now.

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| May 5th, 2010 | no comments

April 2010

When was the last time you flossed?

In B2B as in life, there's a whole genre of pains-in-the-arse that nobody ever talks about: things that are really annoying but not quite annoying enough to actually force you to do anything about. This class of arse-pain needs a name. I hereby suggest 'Plaque'.

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| April 27th, 2010 | one comment

Cleaning up your B2B product portfolio

A lot of our consultancy engagements involve helping companies structure a product portfolio that makes sense. Usually that means organising a long list of products or services into a few sensible buckets. It can be kind of tricky and isn't always intuitive but putting in the time to get it right is well worth it.

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| April 26th, 2010 | no comments

An antidote to all the hype

There's a lot of crap talked about the power of social media and how it's transforming marketing. Check the Ad Contrarian blog for a bracing, acerbic and amusing antidote to all the hype.

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| April 20th, 2010 | 2 comments

Nativ gets its mojo on

We’ve been working with a great company called Nativ, who offer a digital video content management and distribution platform and service.

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| April 19th, 2010 | no comments

Velocity gets medieval

I have to confess to having no real reason for this, except that it's spring and I always think of these lines from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales whenever it's April and it's sunny.

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| April 13th, 2010 | no comments

It’s not what you said, it’s the way you said it

The general consensus out there seems to be that French Connection’s new ad campaign is a right royal triumph. If you’ve been living under a stone for the…

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| April 1st, 2010 | no comments

March 2010

7 reasons B2B buyers share content without looking

Find out how you can get people to share your work before they've even taken a look.

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| March 26th, 2010 | no comments

We explain ourselves – in infographics

As you’ll know if you got our newsletter we’re big fans of infographics over here. We got inspired by all of these and decided to have a go ourselves. This is…

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| March 26th, 2010 | one comment

‘Margin Killers’ eBook reaches 600 downloads

We didn’t mention this? We’ve been working with IBS, the wholesale distribution software experts, to produce a content series on the five big success drivers in wholesale distribution.…

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| March 25th, 2010 | no comments

Five mistakes to avoid in the B2B selling process

The buying process is long and complex in B2B tech markets. Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when planning and executing your B2B sales.

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| March 22nd, 2010 | no comments

What fashion and marketing have in common

Here’s something I hadn’t really thought about: the analogous relationship between B2B and haute couture. In fact, fashion in general. And marketing in general.

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| March 17th, 2010 | no comments

7 Incredibly Rare Mistakes in Social Media Marketing

There are literally thousands of blog posts, eBooks and articles called, "The 24 Most Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing". But no one ever covers the really rare mistakes in social media marketing -- the ones almost nobody ever seems to make.

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| March 10th, 2010 | 2 comments

The F word in B2B marketing

Is it just me or is typical B2B marketing utterly joyless?  Why is that?  Why do people who are passionate about carp fishing and bicycling and the Beatles become…

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| March 9th, 2010 | 2 comments

Marketo’s new Definitive Guide gets some Velocity

We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in the series of Definitive Guides (you can read the first one on Lead Nurturing here).

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| March 8th, 2010 | 3 comments

New B2B buying influences

Just came across an excellent post by Matt West of Connected Marketer called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of the New B2B Buyer. It's based on a study done together with DemandGen Report into the new buying influences in B2B.

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| March 5th, 2010 | no comments

Exploiting your tacit knowledge

We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.

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| March 2nd, 2010 | 5 comments

February 2010

The Cliché and The Copywriter

Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb: http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101 Oh how I sniggered.

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| February 26th, 2010 | no comments

Read this or the world will end

So Gesu was wondering aloud the other day whether negative or positive headlines are more effective. By negative and positive we mean, respectively, the ones that say things like: ‘Ten things you’re doing wrong in your life’ or ‘How to be even more lovely than you are already’. They both boil down to the same thing: fear.

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| February 18th, 2010 | no comments

The power of B2B Lead Nurturing

The sales team owns the sales funnel. But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel. So you own your company’s revenue…

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| February 17th, 2010 | 5 comments

B2B web marketing: the platform battle

As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers. The three combatants: CRM, CMS and marketing automation vendors.

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| February 8th, 2010 | 8 comments

Why clients hate marketing agency folk

I just stumbled over a piece from Canada's Marketing Magazine called " Here's to 2010: Industry experts share predictions for the year ahead" and read this, among other forecasts.

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| February 4th, 2010 | no comments

Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

Birth of a thought leadership website dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

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| February 2nd, 2010 | no comments

You can have it done right, cheap, or quick. Pick two

Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

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| February 1st, 2010 | no comments

January 2010

What’s white, invisible, invaluable and online now?

No internal search returns! Find out how your own site's search results can turn you into a better informed marketer in minutes.

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| January 29th, 2010 | no comments

EPiServer uses market momentum to go public

We just learned that our client EPiserver is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The company offers the best Micorosft .Net CMS on the planet and has delivered some really impressive numbers over the last few years.

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| January 27th, 2010 | no comments

The rise and rise of B2B content marketing

Content Marketing is rivaling social media marketing in the hype stakes -- and for good reason. It may not be particularly new, but in the age of the informed buyer and zero-cost distribution (the Internet), it's what works in B2B marketing. The 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey by Junta 42 confirms the trend (though anyone with a passing acquaintance with Twitter, LinkedIn or any B2B marketing blog won't need it confirmed)...

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| January 26th, 2010 | no comments

IBS injects Velocity into turnaround

When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

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| January 22nd, 2010 | no comments

2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions

Drumroll please... Introducing The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions -- a crowdsourced effort by "39 of the world's top B2B marketers, e-mail marketers and social media gurus" (including, erm, me). Ambal Balakrishnan, the tireless ClickDocuments founder, asked each of us a straightforward question, “What are key marketing trends and predictions for 2010?”

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| January 22nd, 2010 | no comments

You say tomato… copywriting for international audiences

We have a lot of international clients. Most of them are European or American, but occasionally they’re based further afield. This generates an interesting issue: how do you accommodate international English speakers in your copy?

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| January 20th, 2010 | 3 comments

Should free B2B content hide behind a form?

The debate rages on: is it better to ask people to fill out a form to download your content (chasing shy people away) or maximise downloads and go without…

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| January 18th, 2010 | no comments

Our New Year’s B2B Marketing Resolutions

Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are…

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| January 8th, 2010 | 3 comments

In Which The Hero Helps SmallWorlders Sell Intranets To Marketers

We’ve been working with a great company called SmallWorlders. They produce smart, sociable intranets for marketing types. Their Sandbox™ platform, hosted model and marketing-savvy service teams combine…

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| January 6th, 2010 | no comments

December 2009

Velocity Does Video: Nine kinds of B2B web video

As this quick showreel demonstrates, we've been doing more and more video for our B2B marketing clients. Why? because it's a great way to get even the most complex ideas across in a clear, compelling way.

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| December 18th, 2009 | 5 comments

Low-tech videos for a high tech product

We love these Google Features videos on YouTube. Most tech demonstration videos are all high-tech flash with little icon men and screen shots and slick animations.  These are the…

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| December 18th, 2009 | no comments

Let us march!

My favourite quote from Ogilvy On Advertising is, "When Aeshines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks'. When Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march!'"

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| December 15th, 2009 | no comments

How often do you need to publish content? 1-7-30-4-2-1

Content Marketing is like publishing -- you need an editorial calendar and a bit of discipline. This guest post on Junta42 by Russell Sparkman of Fusionspark Media talks about how frequently you should be doing different elements of your content marketing mix.

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| December 4th, 2009 | 2 comments

November 2009

Woo hoo! John Watton, B2B Marketer of the Year

Woke up in a haze on a strange sofa in an unknown flat. Looked down: dinner jacket. Weird purple stain on shirt. Ah -- it wasn't a dream then: John Watton, our intrepid ShipServ client really did win B2B Marketer of the Year in the B2B Marketing Magazine Awards last night...

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| November 26th, 2009 | no comments

Why B2B customers are easier to lose than convert in one visit

Converts to digital conversion practices abounded at Econsultancy's Marketing Masterclass last week. Find out how you can be the last funnel standing in the interminable B2B buying cycle.

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| November 24th, 2009 | no comments

Why CIOs don’t belong on the board

We did a fascinating interview with IT industry evangelist and FT.com columnist Ade McCormack yesterday (watch this space) and he shared some controversial ideas about CIOs and IT departments being…

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| November 18th, 2009 | no comments

Diary of a Tweet: Clarity vs Twitterjunk

The birth of every every new communications medium is followed by a period during which the underlying technology actually cramps the communication it’s supposed to be enabling.  When it comes…

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| November 13th, 2009 | 3 comments

16 ways to alienate a B2B buyer

Most B2B marketing doesn't just fail – it actively repels the people it's trying to attract. In other words, most B2B marketing would deliver better results if it didn't exist at all. When I buy things for Velocity, I'm a B2B buyer. Here's the best ways to alienate me...

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| November 10th, 2009 | no comments

B2B marketing predictions for 2010

We were recently asked where we thought B2B marketing would go in 2010. Made us think. So here are some predictions for the next year:, including kind-of-obvious ones, less obvious ones and a few we'd wish would come true...

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| November 6th, 2009 | 6 comments

Lethal Generosity: a key principle of social media marketing?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of tweets are generated by just 10% of Twitter users, reflecting the fact that these people are subject-matter experts, passionates, mavens, and thought leaders. B2B brands that can create places where this type of exchange can happen are engaging in something called 'lethal generosity', a key principle of social media marketing.

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| November 5th, 2009 | 3 comments

Rise Up And Defy Marketing’s Inquisition

Velocity puts McLuhan, B2B copy and all your customers in its dock. And there's no way we're letting them out - unless you convince us otherwise.

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| November 2nd, 2009 | no comments

October 2009

You can’t have a conversation when you use a megaphone

Most B2B marketing organisations are set up for interruption-based, broadcast style communications and this traditional approach to marketing consumes 80-90% of the budget. This is strange in a world where there's been a dramatic shift from megaphone marketing to listening and engaging in conversations. There's need for a new type of marketing professional called a content strategist. Do you agree?

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| October 29th, 2009 | 6 comments

How you market is almost as important as what you market

In a world where B2B companies all communicate in the same boring way, the way you market is as important as what you market. A mixture of humanity, empathy and confidence in your communications will help you rise above the herd.

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| October 26th, 2009 | no comments

The Velocity B2B Marketing Tube Map

We've always loved Harry Beck's legendary design for the London Underground Tube Map, so thought we'd do our own version mapping out the B2B marketing landscape. Kind of makes sense if you give it some time. The junctions were the trickiest bits...

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| October 19th, 2009 | 4 comments

Brevity is the soul of traffic safety

A friend sent this photo of a Velocity-related traffic sign. I'd like to say we couldn't have said it better ourselves, but if that were true, we'd be out of business...

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| October 14th, 2009 | one comment

September 2009

Quick Case: when content goes social

It's been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we'd report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It was the first time we've used social media as a vector for our content marketing and so makes a nice case study.

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| September 30th, 2009 | 2 comments

Microsoft marketing hits new low

We've given Microsoft's marketing a hard time in this blog before and we've also had some nice words to say about them. But this one takes the cake: if you haven't seen the new Windows 7 Launch Party campaign and the excruciating videos that support it, you must now drop everything and go see it.

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| September 28th, 2009 | one comment

Join us for a Demand Generation Webinar

Stan Woods will be taking part in what's shaping up to be an excellent webinar on Innovation in Demand Generation and we thought you, as a loyal Velocity blog reader, might like to drop in (register here). John Watton will top the bill with a short case study on how ShipServ created 75% more sales opportunities without extra budget or headcount.

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| September 24th, 2009 | no comments

B2B blogging for beginners

Let’s face it: these days, if you don’t have a blog on your website you’re admitting that you have nothing to say about your market, your customers, their problems…

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| September 14th, 2009 | no comments

August 2009

Ghost in the machine: who should write your blog?

There's a debate in the blogosphere about whether it's right for a blog to be ghost-written, particularly one advertised as being written by a particular author. Rather than get exercised about whether this is right or wrong, the question is: can it ever work effectively? Find out what we think.

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| August 27th, 2009 | one comment

Why ShipServ won a 2009 CRM Market Award

Once again, ShipServ has 'scooped' a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) -- this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine. ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries. The judges recognised ShipServ "for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media" -- including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we're kind of proud of our work on all these).

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| August 25th, 2009 | no comments

It’s Time For The Corporate Galactico

The football season is here. But it's not just football superstars who'll make waves this year. Corporate comms teams are also looking for their Galacticos.

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| August 17th, 2009 | no comments

All CIOs (or CEOs) are not the same

We're often asked s for creative ideas that target 'the C-suite' - CEO, COO, CFO, CIO and so on. It's natural because these guys are usually the ones to sign the cheques, particularly for significant purchases. But the question implies that these people are pretty much all the same in what they do and how they think and behave. In our experience, this isn't true.

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| August 13th, 2009 | no comments

Check out the eBook Ebook

We've discovered a great new e-book from Jonathan Franz, a great copywriter based in Massachusetts, about how to exploit ebooks in your content marketing effort. You should check it out.

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| August 7th, 2009 | one comment

The Web Form Wall

It's a perennial debate: give your content away with no registration (web form), or force people to give you their details to get the goodies. Both arguments are compelling and both approaches have penalties...

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| August 6th, 2009 | 4 comments

July 2009

Why Real Research Is Better Than Norman Muller

Well done to young Matthew Robson for his report into teenage media consumption. But anyone taking a look should remember that individual points of view are no substitute for real research.

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| July 17th, 2009 | 2 comments

Chalkbot sprays the Tour

It's not B2B but we just had to share this one. The Nike-sponsored Livestrong Chalkbot is driving the Tour de France about 8 hours in front of the riders, spraying messages on the road in emulsified chalk. Road messages are a Tour tradition but these are different...

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| July 14th, 2009 | no comments

V Shortlisted for Glittering B2B Gong

We’re pleased as Punch to have been shortlisted for a B2B Marketing Magazine Award for our recent work with ShipServ.  It’s hard to come over all surprised about it –…

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| July 10th, 2009 | one comment

Velocity takes New Media Age Awards by storm (but loses)

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.

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| July 1st, 2009 | no comments

June 2009

Bloggers and Influence Part II

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.

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| June 26th, 2009 | no comments

The white paper is dead…or is it?

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...

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| June 16th, 2009 | 3 comments

The Content Marketing Workbook

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!

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| June 11th, 2009 | 3 comments

Choose your patients carefully

The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates. But they don't have the best survival rates because they're better surgeons. They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully. Here's why B2B marketers should do the same thing...

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| June 8th, 2009 | no comments

Watch the Velocity web seminar on Content Marketing

Stan just presented our web seminar with B2B Marketing magazine, called "Content Marketing: Thought Leadership in a Web 2.0 World". Seemed to go really well. Over 130 people attended and the feedback was excellent. The seminar is based on our imminent Content Marketing Workbook, which you'll be able to download from this site very, very soon...

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| June 3rd, 2009 | no comments

May 2009

Join us for our new Content Marketing Webinar

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 case studies and white papers, most of them really aren't doing it at all. Our new webinar explains all...

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| May 27th, 2009 | no comments

The changing look of listing / portfolio sites

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.…

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| May 27th, 2009 | no comments

Viagra spam gets creative

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…

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| May 27th, 2009 | no comments

Velocity/ShipServ shortlisted for Best B2B Campaign at New Media Age Awards

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 Media Age Effectiveness Awards that take place on 25 June.

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| May 14th, 2009 | 3 comments

B2B Bloggers and Influence: Part I

The issue of bloggers and influence divides B2B opinion. Do you think they're anti-social ranters or a genuine community of influence? Find out our verdict now.

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| May 8th, 2009 | 4 comments

Why we steal from our clients.

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 our experience, that's just not how it works...

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| May 6th, 2009 | one comment

April 2009

ShipServ wins First Tuesday ‘Most Promising Internet Company 2009′

We swelled with pride yesterday when our client ShipServ won First Tuesday's prestigious 'Most promising Internet Company in the UK 2009' award. First Tuesday logo

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| April 29th, 2009 | one comment

Web personas and Mind Maps

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, personas mean you can develop better sites faster, ones that meet the needs of your customers, prospects and other stakeholders more effectively. They force everyone to think about what users might actually want to do when they visit your site and then shape the design accordingly.

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| April 22nd, 2009 | 5 comments

Simple Steps To A User Focused Site

We never tire of building websites. The sheer pace of technology change means no two sites are the same. But the same old battles are usually just round the corner.

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| April 20th, 2009 | no comments

How strong is your B2B positioning?

Positioning is one of the essentials of B2B marketing but we don't see a lot of companies getting it right. It's a simple idea: as a marketer, you should explicitly manage the place your brand holds in the minds of your target audience so that it's clearly differentiated from the competition. We use this triple-test to develop strong positioning statements for our clients...

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| April 16th, 2009 | 3 comments

Clean tech marketing and green tech marketing: a different kind of B2B

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 have in common. So we thought we'd capture them in this new slideshare...

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| April 7th, 2009 | no comments

New media frenzy: the medium is just the medium

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 as each of these new media gropes for its place in the communications ecosystem. But all this new media is still powered by the same thing...

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| April 6th, 2009 | one comment

Bessemer’s Ten Laws for SaaS companies

Just came across an excellent presentation by Philippe Botteri and Byron Deeter from Bessemer Venture Partners on the 'Ten Laws of Being SaaSy'. It summarises the key principles of getting a successful SaaS business off the ground (and to IPO). These guys should know. Bessemer is one of the most successful SaaS investors out there (VeriSign, Postini, Skype and lots more). Very good advice...

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| April 2nd, 2009 | one comment

March 2009

Twitter in B2B – a Velocity Slideshare

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 today); businesses are doing it (not just techie ones either); bloggers are doing it; and, yes, lonely people are doing it. ShouldB2B marketers be doing it?

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| March 30th, 2009 | no comments

Don’t get lost on the mobile Web: a mobile marketing e-Book

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 resource for mobile marketers.

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| March 26th, 2009 | no comments

The Disruptive Idea: that’s what it’s all about

Disruptive ideas are not the only way to build a successful business. Sometimes just doing lots of little things better than the other guys is enough. But a disruptive idea is probably the single most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal. And most marketers spend far too little time generating them.

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| March 24th, 2009 | 4 comments

SouthWest rap elevates the brand

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.

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| March 23rd, 2009 | no comments

ROI and social media marketing for B2B

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…

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| March 19th, 2009 | 5 comments

Postcreditcrunchism: marketing is the measure of all things

The history books will look upon the credit crunch as an agent of dramatic change. Marketing, for one, will never be the same again. It's probably for the best.

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| March 16th, 2009 | no comments

Cross-fertilisation in social media:
tweet my post and I’ll post your tweet

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 off into Twitter tweets, blog posts, comments and backlinks. This cross-fertilisation can feel distressingly self-referential but that's really the source of social media's power...

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| March 12th, 2009 | 3 comments

Atomizing your content: your B2B social life

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, links to it, re-tweets it, rates it, comments on it, shares it and (of course) follows the backlinks back to your site. This social media is becoming increasingly important in digital marketing. At Velocity, we have content all over the place, including...

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| March 10th, 2009 | no comments

Digital Velocity in eight tweets: accelerate your online engagement

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, as social media beds down and Twitter takes off, we thought it would be a good time to summarise all the things we do to help our clients engage with their audiences online.

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| March 8th, 2009 | no comments

‘Inspired by Kittens’ – Five branding lessons from social media

In September 2008, Fallon's Executive Creative director, Al Kelly, posted a video to YouTube called Kittens Inspired by Kittens.Within five months, the video had had 4.8 million views on YouTube, 95,000 references on blogs around the world, 64,000 Tweets and 1.5 million Google searches (as well as 28 traditional media stories).

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| March 5th, 2009 | 4 comments

Is the Mobile Web ready for B2B (and vice versa)?

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 web in B2B markets but it's exploding in B2C and we can see the shock wave approaching on the horizon.

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| March 4th, 2009 | no comments

Velocity commissions new Alan Kitching poster

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…

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| March 2nd, 2009 | 3 comments

February 2009

7 tips for writing number-based headlines

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…

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| February 27th, 2009 | 8 comments

Microsoft gets it right

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 right.

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| February 24th, 2009 | no comments

Going social in B2B: seven automatic actions for every piece of content

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…

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| February 18th, 2009 | no comments

17 Strategies to Killer Ads

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 of advertising approaches that underscores that it's the quality of the original idea and the associated strategic thinking that really make great campaigns.

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| February 13th, 2009 | no comments

Why Ronald Reagan is the Spitting Image of an internet pioneer

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.

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| February 6th, 2009 | no comments

Who needs editors?

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…

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| February 5th, 2009 | 2 comments

January 2009

10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B

We're exploring how to use Twitter for B2B marketing right now (you can follow us at http://twitter.com/velocitytweets). As part of that exploration, I saw a great post from Chad Horenfeldt at his Anything Goes Marketing blog about how to use Twitter for B2B marketing in tandem with email.

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| January 28th, 2009 | 3 comments

B2B Content Marketing – five or so mistakes

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…

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| January 26th, 2009 | 2 comments

Digital PR: Shut up and listen

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 up on digital, but this guy seems pretty switched on.

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| January 19th, 2009 | no comments

Slugwatch: the power of content marketing

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…

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| January 16th, 2009 | no comments

The web is 6500 days old

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 a server via the Internet and the first website was built in mid-1991 at CERN, where Berners-Lee was then working. What are the top 5 innovations over that period that have changed the tech marketer's life?

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| January 6th, 2009 | one comment

December 2008

The perfect direct mail list: just 23 companies

Ray Kessler needed to sell his vanity number plate fast. How did he generate a list of just 23 companies with a good chance of being interested? I know because I was one of them...

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| December 23rd, 2008 | 5 comments

Papa’s got a brand new bag, maaan.

A bravo for emusic, one of the best music download sites out there, and some thoughts on building relevant communities in B2B. 'Build it and expect them to come' doesn't work in the wild world of social networking.

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| December 18th, 2008 | no comments

Drop-down positioning at the Royal Opera House

Check out this very funny drop-down menu from a Royal Opera House web form. Did the ROH construct this delightful list of titles to avoid annoying its Earls, Dukes, Barons, Sultans and Rabbis (they must HATE having to choose Mr) or is this just a clever bit of subliminal positioning?

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| December 15th, 2008 | 4 comments

Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR

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…

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| December 11th, 2008 | no comments

Velocity Xmas B2B Technology Marketing Newsletter: the Gift That Keeps on Giving

That's right, deck the halls - it's the giving time of year. In our bumper edition Xmas B2B marketing newsletter, you'll find: groovy new white papers, audacious new blog posts, and exciting news about new staff, clients and much, much more. Go grab it NOW!

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| December 10th, 2008 | no comments

Survival kit for growth companies

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…

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| December 10th, 2008 | no comments

Opt-Out: Digital Marketing’s punch in the stomach

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 any upside: the dreaded Opt-Out. Here are some ideas for dealing with it...

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| December 8th, 2008 | one comment

Zappos’ culture: paying employees to leave is great marketing

Zappos, the online shoe retailer, takes a distinctive approach to company culture that delivers real marketing and brand benefits. Check out his excellent presentation from O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Summit here...

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| December 5th, 2008 | one comment

Customer Value Propositions in B2B Markets

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 Business Markets and it makes a compelling case for what the authors call "Resonating Focus"...

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| December 3rd, 2008 | no comments

November 2008

Credit Crunch B2B Marketing: Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Online PR

The CEO is stalking the corridors, blood dripping from his Budget Axe -- and he's on his way to the marketing department. How will you defend your marketing plan? At Velocity, we're deeply into two powerful new weapons that are not only incredibly effective, they're virtually Crunch-Proof™...

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| November 28th, 2008 | no comments

Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development

Engineers take the leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits like Evel Knievel approached the Snake River Canyon: they fall down. Our Hierarchy of Benefits gives you a better way to do corporate positioning and corporate message development. It provides a practical solution: the Bridge (or, for the Tarzan in all of us: the Vine).

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| November 25th, 2008 | no comments

Spamalot to the Holy Grail: a personal email journey

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, or white hat spammers, have finally unearthed the secret economics of a 21st century boogie man: the junk mailer.

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| November 21st, 2008 | no comments

Your new content may not be as relevant as your old

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. But even the best thought leaders often follow a simplistic content promotion strategy that completely ignores the idea of a sales cycle. Basically, they pump out some new content, promote it, and repeat. What they're doing is burying the best under the newest...

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| November 18th, 2008 | no comments

A really good newsletter

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 that Pär briefed in and designed (we wrote it for him).

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| November 13th, 2008 | no comments

Cisco gets gold star for daring to do it differently

As a marketing company, we spend a lot of time trying to get attention for our clients’ latest gizmos. That's why we applaud Cisco's latest product launch teaser campaign.

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| November 11th, 2008 | 3 comments

Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign

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 Macs. Clearly, they got under Microsoft's skin, because the crack Seattle Rapid Response team has leapt into action (what, three years later?) with an expensive riposte: the "I'm a PC" campaign. The result is wrong in so many ways, I can't summarise them all in a blog post.

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| November 10th, 2008 | 11 comments

Because you’re worth it

Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies? B2B could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great effect.

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| November 6th, 2008 | 4 comments

Branding as body language

A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday. He's Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT. The article's central metaphor is that a company's visual identity is its body language...

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| November 4th, 2008 | no comments

October 2008

I beg you: don’t bore the bejesus out of me

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 pages from people just like you and IT'S NOT FUN.

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| October 31st, 2008 | no comments

Tech marketing trapped in Plato’s Cave

For 2000 years we've been told to research and change or suffer the consequences. It's still an issue today. Learn how one of the biggest names in the tech has been reminding itself of the danger of following processes rather than customers.

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| October 14th, 2008 | no comments

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in a B2B Environment

How can Social Networking work in a B2B environment? Well, you can start thinking about creating more 'social' content as PR tools that can be used by people for facilitating dialogue, spreading your messages and enabling you to manage relationships in new ways.

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| October 8th, 2008 | 6 comments

September 2008

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town

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 out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general....

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| September 24th, 2008 | 2 comments

Wordle Does Velocity

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 came out:

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| September 24th, 2008 | no comments

Playing in the creative sandbox

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, we do a creative firestorm as part of the engagement, before any specific brief is on the table. Lots and lots of rough concepts -- headlines, images, copy, straplines. Here's why...

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| September 16th, 2008 | no comments

Buff Your Pitch Up. Google Suggest & B2B Content Marketing

Often 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 'opinion' pieces in the name of trying to grab people's attention. The fault usually lies in believing our own hype. Here's some Google-inspired ideas on how to avoid falling into the trap...

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| September 9th, 2008 | no comments

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 any of them: confidence.

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| September 4th, 2008 | no comments

July 2008

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.... Read on for a super-simple guide to pimping your content to search engines.

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| July 25th, 2008 | no comments

Guerrilla video: VNL thinks beyond B2B

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

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| July 22nd, 2008 | no comments

A Different Kind of Growth Equity Investor Needs a Different Kind of Web Presence

Don't know about you, but it's Friday afternoon and we're offski. Peroni awaits. We're celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.

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| July 18th, 2008 | no comments

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...

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| July 10th, 2008 | no comments

June 2008

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.)

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| June 16th, 2008 | no comments

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...

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| June 6th, 2008 | one comment

May 2008

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.

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| May 26th, 2008 | 3 comments

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...

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| May 23rd, 2008 | no comments

The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

This Mind Map 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...

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| May 21st, 2008 | no comments

B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win

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. Here's why...

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| May 16th, 2008 | 4 comments

Love Writing? Love Tech? Love Marketing?

We're in hiring mode once again. 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...

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| May 1st, 2008 | no comments

Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

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...

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| May 1st, 2008 | 4 comments

April 2008

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...

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| April 18th, 2008 | no comments

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....

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| April 15th, 2008 | no comments

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. It's hot, hot, hot! Here's a snippet...

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| April 4th, 2008 | one comment

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." Part of this is the 2nd person singular voice. I'm talking to YOU...

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| April 4th, 2008 | 3 comments

March 2008

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 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. Need some cred-builders? Here are seventeen...

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| March 28th, 2008 | no comments

Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation

I just returned from a great week away in the Lower 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.'

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| March 18th, 2008 | 2 comments

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). This 'ten point framework' will make your PPT's hum...

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| March 12th, 2008 | one comment

February 2008

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...

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| February 29th, 2008 | one comment

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...

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| February 23rd, 2008 | no comments

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?

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| February 19th, 2008 | no comments

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.

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| February 7th, 2008 | no comments

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 'Tipping Point' is fundamentally flawed. It's compelling stuff, but what's the point of 'tipping' and the pursuit of 'influencers' in a B2B environment..?

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| February 1st, 2008 | 2 comments

January 2008

Tweakonomics: Why B2B Marketing Agency Retainers Suck

This post hereby announces the death of the good old monthly agency retainer. 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...

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| January 25th, 2008 | one comment

The difference between B2B and B2C… in one New Yorker cartoon

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 New Yorker* and realised my job was done...

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| January 23rd, 2008 | no comments

7 ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in B2B marketing

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 in the way of the signal Most B2B marketing – especially in technology businesses – is so full of noise, the static drowns out the music.

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| January 22nd, 2008 | 2 comments

The ‘Big Mo’ in B2B technology marketing: are we listening to Gartner?

As we seek to build our business, we're meeting a lot of B2B tech firms. Pretty much every one of them says their own momentum is intimately connected to what leading industry analyst Gartner (which just happens to be a Velocity client, BTW) thinks about their company...

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| January 18th, 2008 | no comments

Building a B2B case: 8 tips from criminal lawyers

We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We're advocates. So I did some research into how lawyers do what they do, focusing in on the summation to the jury, where the whole case comes together into one clear argument...

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| January 16th, 2008 | no comments

Pico-Branding: New Rules for Marketing

How does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging, and every other web 2.0 BlaBla service change what we need to be doing in marketing, and what are the concepts that matter? If you really want to know then read on...

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| January 15th, 2008 | 5 comments

The Power of Content: a video case study

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 short (sub-two-minute) video case story about a project we did for IntelliQ, an analytics company...

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| January 14th, 2008 | 5 comments

Building a case: structure before style

Good arguments are always well structured. Bad ones tend to be poorly assembled. Structure isn’t especially difficult. The main thing is to decide on one and to follow it. Here are a few tried and tested structures...

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| January 13th, 2008 | no comments

B2B web marketing trends for 2008

Here's our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms...

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| January 4th, 2008 | 3 comments

Selling to existing customers

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 sense to turn these internal 'champions' into a stealth sales force?

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| January 3rd, 2008 | no comments

December 2007

Why Blog in B2B? The Final Word…

The 'why blog?' question still rages in B2B - and nowhere more so than here at Velocity. Our conclusion: the biggest and best reason to blog in the B2B space is because - if it's done properly - it's a relationship winner...

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| December 23rd, 2007 | 2 comments

Usability error – won’t work, too new…

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 system...

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| December 21st, 2007 | no comments

LinkedIn: Facebook for ugly people?

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 re-visiting old contacts and trying to create new ones as part of the process of finding Velocity-shaped holes...

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| December 19th, 2007 | no comments

How NOT to sell yourself online

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...

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| December 13th, 2007 | no comments

Sites we like: Flickr Tag Browser

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...

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| December 12th, 2007 | no comments

Why Web Usability Matters

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: ‘No! It’s gotta feel sharp!’

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| December 11th, 2007 | no comments

Your 2008 marketing plan: the B2B Svenn Diagram dilemma

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...

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| December 8th, 2007 | one comment

Big Eat: Pay-per-click as haiku

In literature, there are novels, short stories, poems and -- the ultimate distillation of emotion and idea -- haiku. Three lines. Seventeen syllables. In marketing, there are white papers, brochures, data sheets and... the pay-per-click ad.

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| December 7th, 2007 | no comments

Widgety Goodness: Widgets and Social Media – WTF?!

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...

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| December 6th, 2007 | 3 comments

12 Days Later: SEO Velocity Style – Get Results Quick!

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 on our key term 'B2B technology marketing agency' on Google.com (that's right .com!). Here's what happened in the interim...

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| December 5th, 2007 | no comments

The Rise of Clean Technology

According to the The National Venture Capital Association (US), Clean Technology is the hottest thing on Sand Hill Road. During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into clean tech startups, compared to $1.8 billion for all of 2006, and a mere $533 million in 2005...

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| December 2nd, 2007 | no comments

November 2007

Four steps to a B2B sale

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 marketing plays an especially important role...

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| November 29th, 2007 | no comments

No such thing as B2B

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 Ericsson India for instance) and is convinced that businesses don't buy from businesses...

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| November 28th, 2007 | no comments

What’s the freakin’ (Power)point!!??

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, head-f**k for boring people to death?

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| November 26th, 2007 | 2 comments

Straplines: preaching what we practice?

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 that we're proud of...

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| November 25th, 2007 | no comments

How many agencies does it take to change a light bulb?

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... But what's the future for PR?

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| November 24th, 2007 | 10 comments

Velocity time warp: going way, way back to the early SEO days

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...

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| November 23rd, 2007 | 3 comments

Hot potato: the holy trinity of technology marketing

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...

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| November 18th, 2007 | no comments

Content Sells: harvest your two big assets

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...

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| November 13th, 2007 | no comments

A Second Life for Marketers?

We've been keeping an eye on virtual worlds like Second Life for a while, waiting for the killer app for business...

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| November 5th, 2007 | no comments

October 2007

Abbreviations, Acronyms & Jargon

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…

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| October 20th, 2007 | no comments

Going vertical: you can’t fake authenticity

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…

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| October 10th, 2007 | no comments

Customer-guided marketing: is yours?

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…

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| October 6th, 2007 | no comments

September 2007

Pecha-Kucha: the future of Powerpoint

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…

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| September 3rd, 2007 | one comment

August 2007

A letter from Mr Al Fayed. It’s how you say it that counts….

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…

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| August 13th, 2007 | one comment

July 2007

Mechanical Turks & Zubka

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…

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| July 19th, 2007 | no comments

Does search matter in B2B?

Search matters.

The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa reported the following:

    93% of participants said they would research online when

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| July 17th, 2007 | no comments

x5 reasons to blog

That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em:

    Improved SEO – a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search

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| July 13th, 2007 | no comments

June 2007

Marketing whole products

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…

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| June 30th, 2007 | no comments

YouTube for B2B Technology Marketing

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…

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| June 20th, 2007 | no comments

Earning the right to sell to CIO’s

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…

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| June 18th, 2007 | no comments

May 2007

What’s in a (domain) name – part deux

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…

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| May 15th, 2007 | no comments

iinovate

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…

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| May 1st, 2007 | no comments

April 2007

Reasons a business should blog a lot…

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…

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| April 17th, 2007 | no comments

Fair Isaac

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…

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| April 13th, 2007 | no comments

Yugo now

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…

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| April 12th, 2007 | no comments

How (Not) to do email marketing

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).…

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| April 12th, 2007 | no comments

Insult to injury

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…

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| April 12th, 2007 | no comments

What makes a good web site?

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…

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| April 11th, 2007 | no comments

Lovable Morons are back

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…

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| April 10th, 2007 | no comments

Logos we love: IBM

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…

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| April 10th, 2007 | no comments

Web 2.Over?

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….…

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| April 6th, 2007 | no comments

Basecamp shows how it should be done

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…

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| April 5th, 2007 | no comments

Second Life gets its own accounting software

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…

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| April 5th, 2007 | no comments

Secrets & Lies

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…

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| April 5th, 2007 | no comments

March 2007

What’s in a (Domain) Name?

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…

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| March 23rd, 2007 | no comments