I’m not sure we quite achieved that at Velocity’s first live (streamed on Ustream) Marketing Masters one-hour-long interview with John Watton,  Director Global Brand & Marketing at Expedia Affiliate Network. But it was tremendous fun and John was terrific. As Goldwyn also said “we spared no expense to save money on this one”, but, despite that, the session seemed to work well.  (You guys can be the judges on that since we intend to make most of the discussion available over the next few weeks, broken up into chapters covering the subjects we talked about.)

So what did we discuss? A bunch of stuff:

–like the changing role of the CMO in B2B tech (John’s qualified to talk on that one having had senior marketing roles at Oracle, Microsoft, Ariba and others as well as EAN.);

–the shape and skills  for in-house teams in the digital B2B world;

–the importance of marketing automation and how to get the most out of it (answer: start small, use common sense and don’t try to overreach);

–why it’s important to experiment with social media, even if you’re the most senior marketer in the room (as John says, social is not going away anytime soon, so senior marketers have to understand it in order to deploy it);

–content marketing strategy (mainly what content works best where and for whom)

–and marketing’s changing relationshipe with the sales force.

An hour spins past quickly when you’re having fun, but I wish we’d spent more time talking about the last of these. We meet lots of sales driven companies as part of the business development process here at Velocity. A lot of them are really dis-satisfied with marketing and have had two or sometimes three senior heads of marketing in the recent past. When we talk to them, it’s often really clear why. Sales is looking for compliant marketing, marketing that just does what its told and more often than not marketing that’s locked in the 20th Century. They haven’t realised that buyers don’t buy like they used to and competitors don’t compete like they used to. And that the best sales people don’t sell as they used to.

John was the first user of Marketo in Europe back in 2008, when he was at Shipserv. A big achievement there was his transformation of the role and position of the marketing department. Because he was able to apply marketing thinking and strategy to the company’s web site, digital campaigns and content, he was able  to turn marketing – which until then had been seen as just a service to sales – into the organ that owned and filled the sales funnel. Because he delivered the leads that the direct sales force needed, marketing became the force that it should be. Marketing transformed from simply making the arrangements into making the rain.

Anyway, you’ll be able to see the discussion over the next few weeks. We declare the initial experiment a success and we plan to do more. If you have suggestions about B2B marketers we should invite, please send them to us. If you see ways we can make the output even better, feel free to let us know. But remember we are all acolytes of  Goldwyn at Velocity: “I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.”

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B Marketing Automation, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, B@B marketing, Content, Content Marketing

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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 thing: our regular blog readers don’t get to see them unless they happen to follow the blogs we’re posting on. We wouldn’t want to simply cut and paste the posts here — that would create duplicate content and we’d get Google-slapped. But maybe we could just let our readers know about some recent posts out there, in case they want to check them out.

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of four recent posts we did on Econsultancy, the world’s greatest digital marketing community, training company, research house and event organiser (ok… and client of Velocity):

Targeting by psychographics instead of demographics
We all consider the mindset of our target audiences but do we ever actually segment our audience and target campaigns accordingly?

Help – I’m being stalked by a clumsy ad retargeter!
The marketers at Fuze Meeting have been retargeting our whole company — and any of our clients who attend one of our web meetings hosted on Fuze. I complained. Was ignored. And posted about it. I then got a very strange response (offline) from a crazy person claiming to be the head of marketing at Fuze. Ask me about it sometime.

Website governance problems are eroding effectiveness
Ryan actually wrote this puppy but it’s under my byline due to the guest posting rules. It’s all about the importance of proper web quality management, especially for companies with big, global web estates. How do you monitor the quality and compliance of 25 sites?

Why B2B marketers need to be revenue marketers
Why accountability is the new B2B mission — and why owning the revenue pipeline is essential.

There. I feel much better now that these posts are also being shared with our immense, loyal — dare we say passionate – Velocity blog readers. And I think I did it in such a way that Econsultancy doesn’t lose any Google juice (in fact they get the backlinks).

—————————-

Photo: a.dombrowski flickr creative commons

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B Blogging, B2B content marketing, Content Marketing, SEO

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In theory, that’s all changed. With what Eloqua calls revenue management and Marketo revenue mastery, marketing spend can now be remorselessly linked to company revenue. Content actually has to move audiences, and generate cash. Hmmm, brutal.

CMOs in front of this curve gush about it. As any Central Asian despot will tell you, nothing shortens the path to power than control over a pipeline. At least nominally, these CMOs must meet clear targets, and there’s every reason they’ll start expecting their agency partners to live and breathe the new modus operandi.

This is what I call play-for-pay: agencies producing content, ideas and collateral not for an up-front sum and a pile of expectations, but for the promise of later reward for traffic, social shares and revenue generated. Not only would companies rather pay for performance than promises, but play-for-pay would allow them to retool their whole relationship with content partners.

Here are some observations on how that might work:

1. Agencies will resist. Talented professionals, they will say, aren’t going to want to do great work when they’re not certain they’ll be able to feed their kids. This is rubbish, of course. There are countless ways to mitigate performance risk. But a start by splitting up-front and post-campaign rewards makes sense.
2. Companies will need to set up a meaningful performance bar to measure against. Content for demand generation would provide small premiums based on click-throughs from search, social shares, downloads, backlinks, etc. Content for lead nurturing would reward all traffic that redirected to a product information page, or lead to a conversion.
3. Transparent and robust content-specific metrics need to be in place. Google Analytics could demonstrate a specific piece of content’s visibility and impact on site traffic. Marketing automation could link a sales prospects’ viewing of content with eventual revenue. A Klout-type of service could indicate the number and influence of social shares.
4. Affiliate marketing would be a significant influencer. A company might encourage content providers/agencies to develop content on their own platforms or in their own channels. Content that drives business could then be lifted up and incorporated into the company’s own site.
5. An infrastructure would have to be in place, in order for smaller companies to benefit. The big B2B brands could do this themselves. Some probably already are. But others are going to struggle getting attention from speculative content producers. With reliable content metrics and performance bars like those mentioned above, a B2B content e-marketplace for smaller brands would only be one entrepreneur away.
6. Brands rethink their marketing communications role. Eloqua’s Joe Chernov is already talking the publisher talk. Thousands will need to start walking the walk. This means shepherding and channeling the creative energies of formless masses, not agency lackeys. Think 20th century film production company structures.
7. Agencies become organized around home runs (and the sluggers who hit them), not account management chess. In other words, agencies may become talent development and management outfits, helping great creatives spread their performance risk, and nurturing new stars. Publishing houses or sports teams are the easy metaphors here.
8. Still no way to measure lift-off. With all the measurement in the world, there is still a degree to which great work creates countless immeasurable benefits. Content performance rewards should start steep, then taper off, then ramp up again to account for the kinds of indescribable brand benefits great work can create.

Anyone else see obvious ways such a process would work? Simply drop a comment. I see this post as a living document, edited and added to over time as experience grows. And I’ll circle back around later to go deeper into each of these points in separate blog posts.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, Content, Content Marketing, metrics, revenue-driven marketing

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Why, he vented, was it so hard to persuade the Limeys to implement cohesive marketing programmes that had been proven to work elsewhere? Why did we find it so difficult to do the hard yards of building a solid database of customers, prospects and suspects, segmenting them every which way, targeting them with creative campaigns and measuring results?  And then doing more of what works and ceasing to do what doesn’t?

His justified spleen reminded me of criticisms of British public policy in the post-War era. We denizens of Blighty have long suffered from politicians taking the non-strategic, easy choices. We prefer to muddle through rather than making decisions on evidence-based analysis. We have a long history of simply firing and calling what we hit the target.  Is this malaise also affecting B2B marketing too? And, if so, why?

As part of the download process for our recent B2B Marketing Manifesto we asked people to complete the sentence, “The hardest part of B2B marketing is…” (You can read the full results of the survey here). An eye-popping finding was that the hardest part of B2B marketing was convincing other people within the company to do the right things.

So, why? Two factors, I think, are key. British firms are either sales-led or engineering-led. Hardly any are marketing-led

Lead by sales

Much of the British tech industry happens to be entirely sales-dominated outposts of American technology companies. Or run by people who earned their spurs at such companies. American firms love the openness of the UK market and the fact that we speak the same language (though after 20 years, Doug is still confused by the difference between the top or bottom of a road. And he insists on bringing things when he should be taking them and vice versa. We’re hoping Velocity’s newest star striker Ryan Skinner, (born in Portland, OR, but brought up and educated in the Peach State) isn’t cut from the same Yankee cloth.)

American tech firms most often choose guys (and it’s nearly always guys) with stellar sales track records (usually from other American firms) to lead their Redcoat subsids. These people invariably cut their teeth in the pre-digital age. By and large, they see marketing as made up of people who make the arrangements, rather than the ones who make the rain. As our survey showed, most B2B marketers spend a lot of their time trying (and often failing) to persuade their boss to do the right thing. This was OK (though definitely not optimal) when we were locked into the broadcast, print-centric world of a few years ago, where the marketing pinnacle was launching Version 3.1.6, organising the next industry piss-up (I mean, exhibition) and inviting some  trade press to the company’s latest product launch. But in the new science-based marketing world, where you need to blend multiple tactics to move individuals through a complex sales funnel, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Sales fixated managers often don’t get that.

Lead by engineering

By contrast with the sales-led invaders, many indigenous tech firms were begun by engineers and techies. While these folks should  be open to the science-based arguments marketers can make today, most have experienced marketing as a discipline that dumbs down their products and solutions, reducing them to white noise benefits. This has largely been the fault of B2B marketers themselves, too many of whom have been happy simply to be the marcoms person, rather than getting so close to their company’s technology they can smell the benefits, let alone articulate them clearly and concisely.

A dearth of world-class product marketing

There’s a third reason that British B2B marketing is so hard. The obsession with sales and the preponderance of engineers has led to a dearth of true product marketing in the UK.

Product marketers are the people who are responsible for conceiving and defining a new product (based on customer interaction and insight), for developing and improving the product through its lifecycle, for its application in new market segments and solutions, and for, should the time come as it inevitably must, deciding to kill it. They tend to be people who are as comfortable talking to engineering as cutting edge customers. They are people who are responsible for the success (and failure) of any product. They are vital to any marketing department. They have been largely invisible in perfidious Albion.

Doug and I have been in the business a long time and have met many, many brilliant product managers in the US tech firmament. Many have become CTOs. But we can count the number of great ones in the UK on our fingers – and a good proportion of those were American in any case. This is not, despite what he says, because Yanks are inherently superior. It’s actually a painful symptom of the other two issues: an obsession with sales and engineering. And it really hurts B2B marketing over here.

The good news for my American CMO is that the situation seems to be changing. Most of our clients (and an increasing number of the people we run into out there) are embracing analytics and lead nurturing. And most are throwing their weight behind complex, mutli-thread content-led campaigns that motivate prospects to move towards a sales conversation. They understand the importance of the right positioning and messages (and keeping these refreshed in the light of changing marketing circumstances.) And they value creative that incites action.

It is true that Brit B2B marketers have found it traditionally difficult to earn an equal place at the sales or engineering table. In future, and in the best companies, that will not be the case.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Technology Marketing

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Birth of a B2B Campaign.

The B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign map, kind of

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing agency, digital marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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The company offers the best Microsoft .Net CMS on the planet (running nearly 10,000 websites worldwide for almost 3000 customers), along with tools for social media, eCommerce, marketing and sales and event and meeting management. The result: some really impressive numbers over recent years:

–Average growth of 35% per annum over the last five years

–License revenue growth of 49% in 2009 in the teeth of the downturn

–Revenues a spit away from $30m.

The company entered the US market in mid-2009 and has developed a huge community of partners providing add-on apps, plug-ins and extra functionality via its EPiMore programme and an open-source-like community with over 8500 members, called EPiServer World. Best of all, they are really top people that we’ve enjoyed working with on positioning and messaging and thought leadership over the last couple of years.

If you’re looking to move your web estate onto a new platform, you should check EPiServer out.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Social Media, Technology Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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I came across this fact in a blog at the fabulous O’Reilly Radar site debating whether Twitter was a conversational or broadcast medium. The author, Mark Drapeau, argues that Twitter operates more like a wiki, as a knowledge sharing, co-creation platform that produces content and facilitates consumption. Mark argues that the 10% of top tweeters are ‘subject-matter experts, passionates, mavens, and thought leaders who break news, write strong opinions, and tell jokes’. That’s why Twitter is a great research tool. You can find out what’s hot in a market by spending a couple of hours on Tweetdeck.

While what Twitter is may be a pretty interesting debate (and pretty vital to understand for B2B marketing types), Drapeau mentions something even more interesting, the concept of  ’lethal generosity’ . This was first talked about by Shel Israel in his Global Neighborhoods blog. He talks about a data storage community that was set up by Hitachi Data Systems as a wiki that became really active. Interestingly HDS, instead of branding the site as an HDS wiki, opened it up to the entire data strorage community including other vendors as well as customers, analysts, press and the like. HDS kept in the background. Out of this act of generosity came a fascinating, but unsurprising (for social media practitioners at least) development: the community recognised HDS’ contribution and the motives behind it and started calling it  ’the HDS wiki’ anyway and, de facto, HDS became recognised as the thought leader.

As Shel says:

“This is an example of “lethal generosity”. Every time a competitor joined into the wiki conversation, it re-enforced Hitachi’s leadership. If it did not join in, it was visibly boycotting a place customers found valuable. Lethal. In social media, the best way to beat your competition is to be more generous with anything that your customer values (my emphasis).”

This feels like an important principle of social media marketing that B2B marketers need to take to heart: recognise the customer is now in the box seat. Provide what he wants by putting his agenda at the heart of what you do online,  while avoiding cramming your brand or widget in his face at every opportunity.

‘Lethal generosity’. Love it.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, Social Media, Web Marketing

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What’s become clear to us when working with clients in markets like these is that the way you market is as important as what you market. How many times have you read the same hackneyed phrases on a B2B tech vendor’s site (‘total solution’, ‘industry leader’, ‘our mission is to make you successful’, ‘total cost of ownership’…), all written in a dry, jargon-rich, third person style that has your eyes drooping after just a few short dreary seconds?

Back in the day, vendors used to be the only source of information. Now, the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, combined with the spread of social networks, means buyers can afford to be sceptical of vendors’ claims – particularly in the early information-gathering stages of a sale. And the fragmentation of media means that the sources of more impartial information and analysis – often from peers in the same industry via blogs – have spiralled. The result: vendors have to earn the right for prospects to read what they’re saying in an environment that’s becoming more and more hostile. The fight for credibility starts with the first sentence and is hard fought until the very last. Because you’ve got something to sell, there’s a big, red, neon sign on your head that sizzles, “Caveat Emptor”. That raises the communication bar to new levels.

You can get close to getting over that bar by the way you write and communicate. In our experience, three principles are critical:

Humanity – your targets are likely to be humans first and software engineers or mobile infrastructure specialists second. If we write our copy for people – in the first person, with clarity and humour and an in an independent tone of voice that doesn’t cram your widget into every sentence – we can come across as people they might like to do business with.

Empathy – Marketing via the web today is about having conversations rather than broadcasting. Conversations involve listening to what the other guy is saying. Putting your own goals aside to demonstrate that you understand what your prospective customers are up against will earn you marks from your increasingly sceptical audience.You may be desperate to talk about your vision, your technology and the fact that you have a new and highly experienced CEO. Suppress the urge. Your prospects couldn’t care less. They want to talk about  - and learn more about how you can help them with – their problems, their challenges, their opportunities and the very real things that stand in their way.

Confidence – People buy from confident companies. You’re probably really great at what you do. Why not act like it? In a world where people are short on time and have a dizzying range of information sources to choose from, confidence feels like an important brand value. If you don’t have confidence in what you say, how can a prospect?

Communications that stick to these three principles are always better than those that don’t.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing

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Ghost-writing almost certainly happens a lot in B2B – after all copywriters are used for pretty much everything else  - web pages, brochures, white papers, ad copy… – so we shouldn’t be surprised they’re used for blogs.I’m focussing on blogs that purport to be from a particular individual, rather than generic company blogs written by multiple individuals.

There are a few arguments in favour of ghost-writing such a blog:

– The purported author can’t write – or at least not in the right way. She  may have a lot of important and interesting things to say, along with insight about her customers’ needs, trends in the market, predictions about the future and so on, but just can’t write entertainingly, coherently or engagingly. We’ve all met senior executives who are great talkers, managers and salespeople whose written offerings don’t reflect their charm or insight. Making a blog interesting enough so that visitors come back time and time again, feel engaged enough to leave comments and tweet and re-tweet  is frequently as much about creating an attractive, distinctive voice as it is about the subject matter. Lots of people find it hard to inject  energy, humanity, wit and fun into their prose. For them – and for their readers  - ghost-writing makes sense.

– No time. The person simply doesn’t have time to polish her prose twice-weekly, but can spend the 15 minutes or so on the phone required to download her thoughts. Having said that, there’s usually nothing more deathly than the PR-Department-produced CEO blog – does anyone know of a single good one?;

– A great ghost writer. For great read understands the person, the company, the sector, the customers, the technology almost  (sometimes more) than the supposed author. This will often be someone that’s been writing for the company for a while or has developed their own domain knowledge in other guises.

Here are the reasons why ghost-writing doesn’t make sense:

–Authenticity. The best blogs have this in spades. I read Seth Godin’s blog because he knows what he’s talking about and that gushes from every line and word giving me an interesting perspective on marketing that takes my thinking forward. It’s hard for a ghost to be authentic if he doesn’t understand the subject area as well as his ‘name’, even if only by a fraction. Authenticity is a particular problem when the subject of the blog is deeply technical or experience-based (actually we think marketers should just get out of the way when techies need to talk to other techies). It’s hard to fake technology insight. It’s also hard to convince readers that your blog is authentic if, say, it’s about the ins and outs of running a global company when you haven’t been a CEO but have close access to one; or that your insights about IT restructuring are compelling if you haven’t been a CIO but talk to one twice a week. Having said that most B2B blogs fail the authenticity test, ghost-written or not.

–Ethics. I said above  that I wasn’t going to talk about this,  but it feels important when the blog stakes a lot on the name and personality of the author itself; and where the reader thinks he has an intimate, albeit virtual, relationship with the writer – because he visits daily, occasionally comments and receives responses back and so on. It would really piss me off for example if I found out that Seth Godin’s blog was written by an army of  assistants.

If you’d asked me in September 2007 whether Velocity would be ghost-writing a lot of client blogs, I’d have probably said an emphatic ‘yes’. Our social media work was just beginning and we were starting to experiment with online content marketing. Since we produce a lot of content for clients, I figured then that we’d do a lot of blog writing too. It really hasn’t turned out like that, and I think the authenticity issue is the reason. Of course we do write some client blogs – but only where we have real, proven domain expertise. There’s also a case for ghost-writing what we call the ‘grout’ of any blog (‘check out this white paper I discovered’, ‘we won this award and here’s why’…). Today though, our role is usually more strategic – helping decide the editorial content and future direction of the blog, promoting it, improving it.

It would be interesting to hear from other people what they think about this issue. Let us know.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B social media, Blogging, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Technology Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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But the question implies that  these people, having reached the giddy heights, are pretty much all the same in what they do and how they think and behave. In our experience, this members of this group are likely to be as different from each other – in motivation, outlook, experience and purchasing habits – as any other so-called homogenous group (like fans of  Abba, circus performers or members of the British Cabinet). And you have to treat them differently.

I came across a useful example of the problems of treating C-level execs as a single homogenous blob  in CIO Magazine’s recent State of the CIO 2009 report. They surveyed just over 500 heads of IT and characterised CIOs as one of three types:

1. A Function Head: These CIOs are focused principally on improving IT operations and systems performance, cost control, IT crisis management and security. They see their role as striving for IT operational excellence.

2. A Transformational Leader: Like the Function Heads above, these guys are internally focussed, but see their role as one of creating change for their company by working closely with business operations and cross-functional corporate departments. Their activities are centered more on process reengineering and automation, not just delivering the basic IT services. Business process re-engineering, implementing new systems and aligning IT with corporate business goals are their main drivers.

3. A Business Strategist: These CIOs focus most of their attention on driving business strategy for competitive advantage. They actively search for opportunities to differentiate their company using IT. They think about how to develop and implement new go-to-market strategies and they try to stay very close to customers.

Group 1 and 2 seem cut from the same cloth to me, but both are clearly very different for the business strategist group. The CIO analysis reminds me of Geoffrey Moore’s famous ‘Crossing the Chasm‘ hypothesis where he divided the world up along the technology innovation lifecycle saying that technology visionaries (or in CIO’s parlance ‘business strategists’)  are technology enthusiasts looking to use technology to tilt the market in their favour and pragmatists are looking simply for  productivity improvements.

Whether there are two groups or three is moot: the point is that marketing to these two groups is very different. (It’s likely  that these types of CIOs are emblematic of the companies they’re working for – it’s unlikely a visionary CIO would work for a pragmatic company and vice versa, or at least not for very long – so the rest of the board and the line of business decision-makers are often visionaries or pragmatists too.) Even within each group there may be gradations: we’ve come across visionary CIOs who understand the nits and grits of just about every leading (and bleeding) edge technology  at a deep technical level, as well as ones who last touched code in the COBOL era, but look and sound like Harvard Business School alumni.

So what about marketing to these different groups? Many of our early stage clients are looking for  visionaries and keep tripping over pragmatists. The CIO survey said that fewer than one in five of those surveyed were business strategists. In our experience visionary leaders tend to be super-information hungry and look to rub shoulders with like minded professionals. Social media marketing should therefore be an excellent route to these people, providing you have something to say that grabs their attention. If you’re operating in an industry dominated by cost cutters and process improvers, it’s probably best not to push content offering strategic revolution. Slow and steady wins the race for these guys.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Online PR, Technology Marketing

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