We’ve been working with the company and its CMO John Watton and CEO Paul Ostergaard since the end of 2007. For those of you that don’t know the company, it’s the leading maritime e-marketplace, helping the buyers and sellers of ship supplies to reduce the costs associated with doing business together and more than $1 billion-worth of trading goes through TradeNet, the company’s  electronic trading platform.

The success is testament to CEO Paul Ostergaard’s determination to stick with his e-marketplace vision when every other e-marketplace was falling by the wayside. And John’s innovative, creative approach to marketing is propelling ShipServ to new levels.

Congratulations to both of them and the rest of the team.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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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.

So what are they? Personas are idealised, but specific, portraits of real users. We try to imagine a real person visiting the site – what sex are they, how old, what job do they have (we try to be as specific as possible, down to the precise company if possible), what type of information are they looking for and what do they want to do it with it once they’ve found it. Properly done, personas should replace guesswork with a clear understanding of what actually motivates people to visit your site and their needs when they get there. If you think about, it’s obvious that someone at the early stages of putting together an RFQ has very different requirements to someone who’s already put your firm on the shortlist and is looking to prepare a briefing document for his management team. Industry analysts and prospective employees have different requirements yet again.

For large consumer sites, it certainly makes sense to conduct research and intervews with consumers to identify the user groups you want to come and use your site. But in the B2B world, we’ve found that there’s really no need for this. A few hours in a room with some key stakeholders in the business – a senior marketing person, a sales guy, a partner manager and a senior techie are usually sufficient – as well as some telephone calls with people in the field, some actual partners or customers should get you pretty close.

That’s because there’s no call to overburden personas. It ‘s all about identifying the precise needs of your visitor groups and then using that to identify the site’s success factors, the navigation structure that best meets those needs, the content you require, the elements missing from your site and the features that are unnecessary.

We speed the process up by using a cool tool call Mind Manager from a company called Mindjet  – a mind mapping application – that let’s us quickly identify all our über-user types and then, on a single sheet of paper, permits us to summarise our mythical user’s background, his needs when he visits a vendor’s website and a typical scenario – really a detailed exposition of why he or she might be prompted to visit the site.

Here’s an example we prepared earlier.

Once we’ve got the personas done – there are usually no more than eight  – we can get really specific on the brief for the web designer.We find doing this can cut the early stages of design by half, because the designer has real people in her mind when she gets to work.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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But the excitement is tempered with dread of the same old arguments.

Major web projects have huge internal visibility.  Good web tools deliver bonuses and people, unsurprisingly, demand them but, more surprisingly, want to help build them.

It’s bizarre.  We don’t feel qualified to build cars just because we drive them.  We rely on Ferrari to do fast, reliable and beautiful cars.

Opinions can cause havoc with project scope, timescales and budgets.  That’s why the Top Ten Mistakes of Web Management, despite being over a decade old, remains relevant.  Readers can learn why strong project management is as important to web usability as cutting-edge design.

Two of the ten points stand out.

Never design for your executives.  Internally-focused sites brim with mission statements, photos of the CEO, and corporate history.  You are not the centre of your customers’ universe.  Top executives grow to love a customer-focused site because it delivers.

Never design for your org chart.  Users should not be able to deduce your organisational structure from your website.  Build sites according to tasks users want to perform on your site.  Nothing else matters.

B2B marketing agencies work best with clients who bring a strong, autonomous project management structure with tunnel vision on their users.

That’s why we loved building Psion Teklogix’s new site.  Todd, Marcos, Maria and Roman channelled every ounce of our energy into research, mapping, design and testing based only on user personas.

If you want to know how to get the best from your agency you could do worse than talk to them.  They did such a good job of shielding us, we still don’t know how they did it.  But we know they did.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategies, B2B sales, B2B web marketing agency, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital communications, Online PR, technology marketing agency

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This recession is no different.  The financial industry’s plunge was abrupt and violent.   The rest of us are still spinning in the vortex of change.

So what’s out?  Relativism.  Soft opinions. Subjectivity.  Emotion.  Man is no longer the measure of all things.

And what’s in?  Absolutism.  Hard facts.  Objectivity.  Statistics.  Marketing is the measure of all things.

New order marketing firms need to put a data fist into their creative gloves.  Here’s our verdict on how the contenders are shaping up.

WPP and Omniture
WPP is a vast empire.  An empire under threat.

Its tie up with Omniture acknowledges demand for “analysis, measurability and focus on return on investment.”  It’s a positive admission of an historical failure to turn data into action: a failure that can no longer be tolerated.

Verdict: The Empire Strikes Back

Salesforce.com’ unleashes Service Cloud
Salesforce.com made a fortune in sales force automation.  It wants to make another one by turning loose web data into structured actionable information.

Service Cloud allows clients to “enable businesses to join the conversation” on search engines, social networks and web forums.  Firms gather loose product feedback, structure it, and  plan intelligent service responses direct to customers.

Verdict: Empire Building

Facebook and Polls
Facebook sits on a data goldmine.  It knows it.  You know it.  Users knows it.  But can it unlock the cash without fomenting a mass user exodus?

The company needs to find a way, as the Guardian puts it, “to tap the value of all the rich user data that the site gathers”.  The poll idea is interesting, but it doesn’t sound like the latent actionable information that will open well-guarded corporate vaults.  And as for the latest volte-face on personal data…

Verdict: Emperor’s New Clothes

A shift from qualitative to quantitative assessment is here.  It’s no bad thing.  If half our marketing doesn’t work, then let’s stop doing it.

Author Paul Brodeur once said “statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.”   We need to be tougher now.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategies, B2B sales, B2B web marketing agency, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital communications, Online PR, technology marketing agency

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