Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to heart, let’s talk first impressions: Landing pages. For many of your potential leads, they’re the first meeting with your company. Either you win enough trust to introduce yourself properly, or they’ll bounce right out.

This 11-slide presentation is all about first impressions: Some of the best product landing pages in the business.*

After the slideshow, look for the list of resources. In the slideshow, either use the arrows at the bottom to navigate or simply press right-arrow on your keyboard.

The Landing Page Resource List

♦ Google tells you how to ensure lightning quick landing pages: How can I improve my landing page’s load time?

♦ Landing pages should have a strong, clear and easy call to action. Check out Smashing Magazine for best practice in design of call to action buttons. For copy, Quora tells you what kind of text works best.

♦ Michael from SAP’s Integrated Marketing tells you how to shorten the B2B buyer cycle with landing pages.

♦ Brendan tells you just how to create a secondary call to action.

♦ Stan and Doug nailed it in the Content Marketing Workbook: You need to make yourself useful. A good landing page screams utility.

♦ Landing pages should be regularly experimented with using A/B testing. Try Google Website Optimizer for an easy way to do this.

♦ Landing pages often make a simple, sharp and absurdly ambitious promise. Many combine imperatives (“go here”, “do this”, “start that”) with a bold claim in the new naive style.

♦ Oli of Unbounce, the landing page specialists, provides a gorgeous 12-part landing page rehab program.

♦ If you like spending money on A/B testing (that is, if you want help to get it right), Visual Website Analyzer is a smart place to put it.

*The landing pages used as examples in this tutorial were pre-selected by the legendary UX (user interaction) community at Quora. The pages were offered as “killer landing pages for products“. As most are B2C, they may need tweaking for B2B purposes, but the principles abide.

What’s your take on the 11 landing pages? Drop a comment.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B lead generation, Demand Generation, design, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Web Marketing

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This 22-slide presentation is all about first impressions: Some of the best product landing pages in the business*, and a somewhat slanted visual introduction to me – all paint pretty arresting pictures. If one topic doesn’t churn your butter, maybe the other will.

After the slideshow, look for the list of resources. Just click on the thumbnail below and away you go; either use the arrows at the bottom to navigate or simply press right-arrow on your keyboard.

The Landing Page Resource List

♦ Google tells you how to ensure lightning quick landing pages: How can I improve my landing page’s load time?

♦ Landing pages should have a strong, clear and easy call to action. Check out Smashing Magazine for best practice in design of call to action buttons. For copy, Quora tells you what kind of text works best.

♦ Michael from SAP’s Integrated Marketing tells you how to shorten the B2B buyer cycle with landing pages.

♦ Brendan tells you just how to create a secondary call to action.

♦ Stan and Doug nailed it in the Content Marketing Workbook: You need to make yourself useful. A good landing page screams utility.

♦ Landing pages should be regularly experimented with using A/B testing. Try Google Website Optimizer for an easy way to do this.

♦ Landing pages often make a simple, sharp and absurdly ambitious promise. Many combine imperatives (“go here”, “do this”, “start that”) with a bold claim in the new naive style.

♦ Oli of Unbounce, the landing page specialists, provides a gorgeous 12-part landing page rehab program.

♦ If you like spending money on A/B testing (that is, if you want help to get it right), Visual Website Analyzer is a smart place to put it.

* The landing pages used as examples in this tutorial were pre-selected by the legendary UX (user interaction) community at Quora. The pages were offered as “killer landing pages for products“. As most are B2C, they may need tweaking for B2B purposes, but the principles abide.

If you want to share the landing page content, but not the Ryan Skinner content, I won’t hold it against you. Here’s the landing-page only content.

Got your own observations on these landing pages, or landing pages in general? Drop a comment. Or leave your guesses about the location of that big chicken….

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B lead generation, Demand Generation, design, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Web Marketing

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Ok, I lied. There’s no sex in this post. Adverts, on the other hand, aren’t technically allowed to lie. Back in the 19^th 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 20^th 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.

But there’s no law against bad spelling, grammar, or inaccurate use of terms. I’m one of those people for whom bad spelling and grammar are akin to the screech of nails down the blackboard of my soul. I spent a good 15 minutes staring at two pieces of bad advertising on the Tube this morning:

1) Nintendo DS’s 100 Classic Books. “100 classic novels… from Jane Eyre to Hamlet”.

Hamlet is not a novel. It’s never been a novel. It’s a bloody play, as anyone with half their wits about them knows.

2) Magnum Temptation. “It’s name? Magnum Temptation”.

This kind of thing puts me in danger of injuring myself, such is my righteous ire. There are talented young people out there busting a gut to get into copywriting, and some smug pillock can’t even be bothered to read through his or her own copy and check for grammatical howlers like this one. And, apparently, neither can anyone else in the agency. It’s an insult to the audience, to people who genuinely care about the quality of their work, and to the whole institution of ice-cream -eating. I will never buy a Magnum again.

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Photo credit: Michael Karshis

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Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Copywriting, writing

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Why B2B marketing is the place to be

• Because business can change the world and technology is changing it.
  While Diet Coke will only ever be sugar water without the sugar.

• Because it’s hard.
  You have to really understand this stuff to sell it. There’s no coasting.  And hard things are always more rewarding.

• Because it’s exciting.
  Our clients are innovators and entrepreneurs. Brilliant people inspire.

• Because it’s grown-up.
  We don’t condescend to the target audience and we don’t manipulate his or her insecurities. We build compelling arguments, back them up with air-tight evidence and incite action. And you don’t have to shower after doing that.

• Because it’s incredibly dynamic.
  Digital, analytics, video, lead nurturing… this is the steepest learning curve you’ll ever be on. Ask any snowboarder: that’s the best part.

• Because it’s cutting edge.
  Some of the new B2B tools are much more sophisticated than their consumer versions. They have to be when a sale can mean a million.

• Because it’s important.
  For every bottle bought of Katie Price’s Sensation (or whatever), there are a hundred business-to-business transactions behind the scenes. In economic terms, she’s the tip, we’re the iceberg.

For more information on the kind of person we want, see below.

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Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Copywriting, design, Technology Marketing

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Image credit: Deborah Leigh

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Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes bras to also make outer garments. Hopefully the dresses will be designed with the logistics of bra-wearing in mind, because there’s nothing more annoying than finding a beautiful dress and then discovering that you can’t wear a bra with it and have to spend the evening wobbling to and fro with reckless abandon.

Anyway, this isn’t the main point. The point is the advertising campaign. Ultimo are shouting from the rooftops that they’re using REAL WOMEN. Apparently this is somebody’s idea of a fresh and innovative campaign, never mind that Dove has done that already, followed by Wonderbra.

The fact is that pouring some ordinary pretty women into some ball dresses doesn’t make me think “Hey, she looks like me. Ultimo are totally on my wavelength, and what’s more, they’re a fine, morally upright company that doesn’t peddle a soul-destroyingly perfect image of beauty”. I see “real woman” every day in the mirror, and frankly, she doesn’t get me excited. The problem with Real Woman is that she’s ordinary, and I want to imagine that I’ll look extraordinary in that dress. I’m buying into an idea.

Ultimo is not giving me a revelation by saying that real women don’t look like models. I know that already. I know they’re airbrushed. I find them no more eroding to my self-esteem than a Barbie doll. It’s gob-smackingly patronizing to suggest that by putting Christine the medical secretary from Croydon in a ball dress you’re relating to me as an ordinary woman, or that we all have terrible body image problems, or that if we do, using ordinary women as models will be the cure.

For an advertising campaign you need traffic-stopping images. And ordinary pretty women don’t make the kind of visually arresting image that you need to stand out in a world chock-full of advertising. The thing about supermodels is that they’re, quite honestly, really weird looking. If you saw one in the street you’d think the aliens had landed. But up on a billboard, they look amazing. That’s why they’re models. If real women had the same effect the world would stop functioning.

What people are really saying when they say “We must have Real Women! No more of these Slavic teenage Amazons with pipe-cleaner arms and legs! Bring me Jo the size 16 nurse from Bolton!” is that they wish models ate a bit more. If there were some kind of feeding programme to make models eat pork pies and Mars bars, there would be no need for this sanctimonious, cynical kind of campaign. Because that’s what this is, a worthy platitude dressed up as advertising. It’s as manipulative as airbrushed Glamazons – even more so in fact because it’s hiding what it is. Give me Naomi Campbell any day: at least she doesn’t pretend to be normal.

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What does all this have to do with B2B marketing? Well, arguably nothing, except that there are lessons to be learnt from this that are golden rules of B2B marketing:

Don’t assume you know your audience – they’re dying to prove you don’t, so don’t give them the opportunity.

Don’t try to be down-with-the-kids – it’s like your dad dancing. Please just try and sound normal.

Don’t innovate for the sake of it – sometimes diversifying is good, but innovating for the sake of it can dilute your message.

Don’t use clichés – unless you’re really good at parodying, if it’s been done to death then don’t resurrect it.

Don’t forget a good argument wins – manipulation is always a little sneaky part of marketing, but ultimately it doesn’t beat a copper-bottomed argument.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Branding, Innovation, Marketing

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Ok fine, the iPad is better than this.

Photo credit: Phil Campbell

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Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived to fill the void in your life that you didn’t know you had. Marketed with Apple’s customary élan, the iPad seems set to achieve world domination despite the very obvious question which no one seems to be asking: how are men going to carry it around? Are we going to finally see widespread uptake for the man bag?

Doug and Stan have got themselves a pair of iPads. Strictly speaking, they ought to be blogging about it, but it’s my turn to write a post so I’m hijacking their topic. So far it seems they love their new toys, and although they’ll deny it, Apple’s branding must have a lot to do with it.* The appeal of the coquettish lower-case i is so irresistible the designers must be hugging themselves (whilst carting another wheelbarrow-ful of cash to the bank).

Like the iPhone, the iPad can do just about everything except bump off your mother-in-law: music, films, video, unrivalled on-the-go internet access –it’s a veritable smorgasbord of entertainment and future models will undoubtedly exhibit hundreds of other handy features. All this can leave you feeling like the Apple progeny are taking over the world. They are, of course, but don’t let that worry you.

It’s worrying the people at Adobe though. Unless you live under a stone you’ll know that the iPad doesn’t do Flash. AdMob has also joined the ranks of companies who have incurred Apple’s imperial displeasure. Sure, Apple should be allowed to do what it likes with its own stuff – but only up to a point. Econsultancy’s Meghan Keane pointed out that Apple’s move to force developers to use iAd is anti-competitive and could land Apple in trouble with the regulators.

I’d argue that Apple’s general behaviour is becoming increasingly anti-competitive; it’s not just confined to AdMob. What’s frustrating is that Apple doesn’t need to behave this way. It’s already got the edge in terms of innovation, usability, and design. Sure, it’s still a little pricey but that actually only helps its brand image. It doesn’t need to act like the bully in the playground – acting that way just makes it look a bit… paranoid, frankly. Paranoia and bullying are signs of weakness. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Jobs has been quite seriously ill: that would be enough to make anyone fearful about losing their edge.

Apple’s behaviour doesn’t fit with its brand image: laid back, cool, sleek, and user-friendly. If it’s not careful it’ll destroy that: people are already disappointed about the lack of Flash. Of course Flash has its flaws, and it’s good to try and innovate to make poorer alternatives vanish into oblivion, but there’s a difference between offering new things and marketing them, and imposing your will on the market. It’s a difference Apple seems to have lost sight of.

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*I shouldn’t be smug because it works on me too.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, Advertising, Branding, Corporate Positioning, design, Marketing, Technology Marketing

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Roger Warner, friend of Velocity and all-round PR guru, has flung open the doors to the Museum of Social Media. Before you all start planning an office field trip to see it, it’s actually online – you can visit it here (and no, it doesn’t have a gift shop).

Conceived as a repository for the good, the bad, and the just plain baffling, it charts the meandering and sometimes hiccupping progress of social media marketing.

Take, for example, the bizarre decision to promote Skittles by posting a load of ker-razy videos and ask people to share them. Unlike their previous Twitter-based campaign, this was a campaign that deserved to have a loud raspberry blown at it. So, there it is in a virtual glass case, preserved for posterity.

We decided to interview the esteemed Professor Warner, to see if he had any pearls of wisdom to impart about the development of social media marketing.

Where did you get the idea for the museum? Why did you start gathering the stories together?

It’s a ‘keeping perspective’ thing. What’s going on today is very similar to what happened 10 years ago… Social Media, like the first promise of the Interweb, has become near-mythical. Having lived through round one, I’m keen to keep a scrapbook this time. When I look back, discussions about bricks vs clicks were almost irrelevant. The real winners were the ones who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in – and we need to remember this right now.

Grand concepts and frameworks didn’t work well (e.g. Boo.com); whilst more randomly organised, iterative services did (eBay, Flickr, etc…). This is very close to my heart. I run a new(ish) Social/Online agency and I’m building a services business around doing pragmatic stuff now. So having a museum means I can put the futurology that bugs me (and also all the great stuff) into a box and keep it close by for future reference. As such, it’s a pet project.

Why do you think even big brands with such a lot of marketing clout get it wrong?

Often they’re taken in by the glamour of it all and get blinded. A common request is ‘I’d like to do a Twitter campaign.’ This is bit mad. Brands have to ask themselves ‘why?’. If they don’t have a very concrete answer then they should have a lie down and/or read up a bit on some history.

In other words, it should never be about the Social Media-ness of it all. My feeling is some brands get so lathered up that they lose context. They just get strung out on the *possibilities* and the *concepts*.

Today, the world needs to understand that just because YouTube lets us upload video, this doesn’t mean a million people want to create mini feature films for brands in exchange for a gong.

Social-for-Social’s-sake campaigns fail because they ignore the basics. And it’s not Social’s fault… it’s more to do with human nature and the way we use things. We *really* need to remember the lessons of the past and to keep reading our little blue book of effective marketing. The psychology of DM still applies. Good old content is even more critical. And Google is still huge, huge, huge.

Social Media changes *how* these things are important… but they certainly don’t go away. Also, a little research never hurt anyone. We should all do more of it before we get excited.

Do you think we’re now entering a more egalitarian age of marketing, where the consumers can get involved?

We ought to be asking: can Social fulfill the promise of a mega conversation with all of the marketplace? Probably not, unless more Twitter-friendly sales people are employed. There’s a fundamental tension that we need to figure out. Generally, marketing is about NOT TALKING TO PEOPLE in the physical sense. Talking is the job of sales. Good marketing reduces the amount spent on sales people and processes. In this context, the promise of Social gets a little messy…

We need to de-focus on the promises, concepts and the channels and start thinking about the core value of it all. Right now, lots of marketing departments see Social as a must-have. Near term this may not be the case – unless they can prove that it helps marketing to do better marketing.

Marketing has changed for good I think. Today, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re conversational pieces, support things, widgets and whatnot. Gone are the days of Ridley Scott TV spot blockbusters. Brands need to be helpful, memorable and available and figure out how their customers are using Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc in this context.

Any particular favourites?

I love Converse’s domination campaign. It’s not particularly Social, but it’s so pragmatic and smart it hurts. I wish we’d done it.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Message Development, Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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One blogger, the Ad Contrarian, acts as a bracing, acerbic and amusing antidote to all the hype. My grey hairs particularly like his aphorism that “Marketers always overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior.”  Even if you’re a hyperactive social media marketer or a died-in-the-wool B2B marketer (the Ad Contrarian talks mainly about consumer marketing), you’ll find real insight and humour on his site. Recent weeks have seen a fun debate about web advertising and its impact on brand building. I particularly like his ‘10 bullshit professions‘ (though what’s a third base umpire do when he or she is at home?).  And he’s written a beautifully written and insightful free e-Book about consumer advertising in the modern age.

Check him out. You won’t be disappointed.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Branding, digital marketing

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The general consensus out there seems to be that French Connection’s new ad campaign is a right royal triumph. If you’ve been living under a stone for the past few months and haven’t seen it, click here to see what I’m on about.

This Is The Woman, This Is The Man has a cool, art-housey feel to it. A little bit French New Wave, with some arch copy (‘This is the man. He knows not what sequins is’). Brilliant! It’s as if the creators put in photos and text into a machine, pulled a lever, and out popped a lump of gold. Instant iconic advertising.

But something struck me as curious. The copy for the adverts for The Man are all in UPPERCASE. The copy for The Woman is all lowercase. Mais pourquoi?

My inner lentil-eating bra burner finds this mighty suspicious. Why are the slogans for The Man ‘Eat meat. Dress well’ and ‘Man should be brave”, but the ones for the Woman are ‘She knows we are looking’? Are they really trying to promote the message that the ideal French Connection woman is just a pretty thing to look at?

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Perhaps the CAPITAL LETTERS are just to try and catch men’s attention because otherwise they won’t read it. Like having the menswear section on the ground floor, because otherwise they won’t bother to go upstairs.

Actually, this wasn’t going to be my main point. My main point was that typography matters. The way you shape the letters conveys subtle things about the meaning of the text. This is why I’ve interpreted the lowercase text as implying inferiority in comparison to the uppercase.

This isn’t news to anyone in design, but it’s something I hadn’t worried my pretty little head about much until recently. Ever since joining Velocity I’ve coveted the wooden letterpress blocks that we’ve got decorating the office. I finally got some of my own and I love them. But why? They’re just letters.

It could be my medievalist’s background: I studied manuscripts and book hands from the middle ages. Back then, people cared about how text looked (most of the time) because books were so expensive and written out by hand. Not only that, but they were beautiful because the content mattered. Reading a book of prayers was a visual as well as cognitive process. The image of the word on the page stuck in the mind as much as the meaning.

It’s the same association between the look of the word and the meaning that advertisers exploit. Guinness had several typefaces in the early years but since 1963 they’ve used a custom-made typeface called Hobbs, which is instantly recognizable:

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This is what it would look like in other typefaces:

Just doesn’t work does it? It’s like having Coca-Cola as Coca-Cola. It’ll never catch on. Guinness needs to look sturdy and beefy but a bit old-school. It’s a classic, and it’s typeface needs to be classic too. Coca-Cola has to look carefree and fun with a bit of 1950’s diner about it. Perhaps I only think that because that’s how it’s always been, but Guinness has been through several incarnations and the unifying theme seems to be that they all feel stout and robust and no-nonsense. Just like a pint of Guinness.

And on that note, I’m off down the pub.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Copywriting, design, Marketing

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Trawling LinkedIn as is my wont, I came across this website which was thoughtfully shared with the world by Reuben Webb:

http://www.101cliches.com/view-the-101

Oh how I sniggered. What fool uses this kind of advertising dross! I wondered. Then I saw one that I’d toyed with using. And then another. Thank goodness I looked through the ones I’d done before they got anywhere near a client, otherwise I think I would have exploded in a puff of shame.

The thing about visual clichés is that they’re so pervasive. You almost don’t realize you’re churning them out. Using a beehive to indicate industriousness is hard to avoid because that simile is now ingrained in the western world’s creative psyche (I blame Virgil. Don’t believe me? Read up on your Aeneid Book 1 and the description of the building of Carthage).

They’re just so easy: if you’re having a tough day and you can’t seem to come up with any decent imagery or snappy headlines, the siren call of the cliché is hard to resist. No one’s going to scratch their head and say ‘Er, why is that there?’ People recognize them and can understand what the advert is driving at without even having to think. But that alone should be reason enough to avoid them like the… um, plague.

Doug has a theory that bad adverts occur when someone starts with an image and then builds the copy around it. There’s something in this, but at least two of the clichés I’ve been guilty of using (at the first draft stage before I discarded them) actually haven’t been inspired by a picture at all. The cliché is just in my head already, placed there by social conditioning. Of course, there are days when a cliché doesn’t pop up at all, and fortunately these are more prevalent than the other sort of days. But you never know when one might sneak up and bite you on the bum.

My method for avoiding clichés is to not look at pictures at all until later. I start by brainstorming all the headlines and copy I can. Then I go away, make a cup of tea, walk around a bit, chat to some colleagues or whoever, yawn, stretch, and then go back and look at my ideas again. And again, and again, until it’s right (all the Velocity people are perfectionists, we can’t help it). If you do this you can catch any howlers before passing them to the client. We work hard to make sure puns, clichés, commonplaces and anything remotely hackneyed is strangled at birth. Cruel, but our work is better for it.

We never do this.

Photo credit: Ben Becker

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B marketing, Copywriting, design

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