B2B content marketing

The B2B Marketing Fun Poll

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We’re convinced that – even for the driest of B2B markets – successful marketing is fun marketing.

B2B Content Marketing Roundtable

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Doug joined Joe Pulizzi of the CMI and Jim Burns of Avitage on this Marketing Made Simple TV show. Check it out.

Using Piktochart: a marketing technology review

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A friend alerted me to Piktochart, the online Infographics creator so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my first impression after making two infographics, the one you see above (which took about 7 minutes) and a spoof Content Marketing Strategy infographic I cranked out last week and shared on Pinterest (yes, it did [...]

B2B Marketing Research: content marketing goes mainstream

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A quick bit of B2B marketing research: a comparison of ‘Content Marketing’ compared with the general Advertising and Marketing category search volumes and with other related terms. From Google Insights for Search.

The editorial calendar for content marketing: a round-up

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As B2B marketers get serious about content marketing, they’re starting to bring together the people, processes and technologies needed to run a continuous content-generating machine. An editorial calendar is central to this new discipline and the core of a marketing plan. To call it best practice is like calling breathing a best practice technique for [...]

How to use Prezi for B2B content marketing

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Prezi is the cloud-based presentation software that’s like Powerpoint on LSD. Its ‘zoomable user interface’ (ZUI?) with swoopy transitions and infinite drill-downs make it a sexy alternative to boring old slides. Here’s how and why you should put it in your B2B content marketing toolkit…

How to build a B2B content marketing team

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Great B2B content marketing is teamwork. But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so here are the ten types you need on your team…

Salesforce Social Success case study

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Kieran Flanagan has written an excellent summary on SEOmoz of the Salesforce Social Success content microsite. He tells this B2B content marketing case story so well, I won’t try to re-tell it here.  Just wanted to share my favourite graphic from it: Says it all — the sweet spot for all B2B marketing is where [...]

Pinterest for B2B marketing: Velocity dives in

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At Velocity, we never let a bandwagon rattle past without at least making a token effort towards hopping on board. So when Pinterest started to pick up steam, we registered without a moment’s hesitation. Our excuse? We need to learn about this stuff even if it’s not exactly suited to our business. As soon as [...]

The problem/solution structure in B2B content marketing

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When it comes to structuring a B2B marketing argument, it’s hard to beat the good old ‘Problem/Solution’ structure. It’s stood the test of time for some very good reasons: It gets the target audience nodding in agreement – if they recognise the problem you’re describing, they’re much more likely to lean forward and give you [...]

Is B2B content marketing jumping the shark?

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‘Jumping the shark’ is one of my favourite expressions. Wikipedia tells us it means “the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. The phrase is also used to refer to a particular scene, episode or aspect of a show in which the writers [...]

Content Differentiation: Doug Does Mad Marketing TV

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I was honoured to be invited to be Jeff Ogden’s guest on Mad Marketing TV, the excellent series of interviews with B2B marketers. Here’s the interview — and the ‘after-party’ chat — on Content Differentiation (the next big challenge for content marketers).

Viral videos? First have a B2B video marketing strategy

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A client asked for a bit of help in putting together a video strategy for next year’s marketing plan. In writing a reply, we realised that there are so many different ways of using video in B2B content marketing – not just the obvious video demos and viral videos…

Starting with an earthquake and building to a climax

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Sam Goldwyn, legendary Hollywood film producer (famous for malapropisms, paradoxes and errors of speech) once said: “We want a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax”. I’m not sure we quite achieved that at Velocity’s first live Marketing Masters one-hour-long interview with John Watton from Expedia.

Social Success: a new content site for Salesforce.com

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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 to find the considerable pockets of expertise within Salesforce (the place is crawling with very, very [...]

Velocity’s B2B content marketing research trip to Paris

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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 marketing works for B2B content marketing agencies over in Paris, the French capital of B2B content marketing. This B2B content marketing blog post is a [...]

B2B content marketing: when target audiences clash

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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. The best content marketing tends to be narrowly targeted, focusing on a very specific audience. That’s how we maximise relevance, earn downloads and reward engagement. [...]

Content Development: Nine Tips for B2B marketers

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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 telling clients and prospects why it’s such a powerful thing. Today, those conversations are a lot shorter. B2B marketers have discovered content marketing as the engine [...]

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

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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 has gone B2B infographic crazy in the last year or so, we’ve been much more likely to be disappointed than delighted. Most B2B infographics are really [...]

Content Development using Inbound Writer

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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 enthusiastic that Ryan gave it a go and Ryan, while considerably less enthusiastic, thought it might be worth playing with. So I’m creating this very [...]

Are you coming to FUNNEL?

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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 Lancaster Hotel in London. As a friend of Velocity, you get a 20% discount to the event just by using this code: FLD508. Four tracks: Attract, [...]

Why you should give away the very thing you sell

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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 that we thought would have died off by now: “Why should we give content away that tells people exactly how to do what we do? Won’t [...]

Content marketing & marketing automation webinar

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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, Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point and Hubspot takes you through his principles of content marketing and Doug Kessler from Velocity shares Twelve Lessons learned from our [...]

Are you the bore in the corner?

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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, clear eye. And the result was, in Andrew’s words, “overwhelmingly bad. Every page on our website, every article we’d written, every e-newsletter, every piece of collateral [...]

Five B2B marketing posts we think you’ll like

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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 this persona in mind, via the magic of content curation, here are five blog posts we’ve enjoyed recently: Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie [...]

B2B Marketing Webinar: B2B Content Marketing and Automation

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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 at 1pm London time and you can register here. Facilitated by John Sweeney of DemandGen, the marketing automation consultants, the web panel will include Velocity’s [...]

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about

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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 for their companies; they’re all great at what they do; and they’re all Velocity clients – which says a hell of a lot about their judgement [...]

Internet Marketing Strategy: a meaty new briefing for all marketers

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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 – take an info-break and read this one report from the Gods of Digital Marketing: Econsultancy. It’s the new Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing and, unlike the [...]

In case you missed these B2B marketing guest posts

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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 [...]

12 Lessons from the Manifesto Campaign – Project Open Kimono 13

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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 market. There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea… 12 Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto Campaign View more presentations [...]

B2B chalk talk videos: capturing your best experts

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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 and meetings. The one who can make your story seem so simple, clear and compelling. This guy is a priceless asset – but the one thing [...]

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

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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. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more [...]

B2B content marketing around buying triggers

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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.

Post-Digital Marketing: The Rise of Meatspace

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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 myopia and start thinking about ideas in the real world again (then spin them in digital directions). A cool example from the consumer world: The [...]

LinkedIn Maps: your network visualised

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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, dynamic map showing all your connections and how they’re related to each other. It colour codes the clusters it identifies and lets you assign your own [...]

A nice bit of visual B2B personalisation

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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 of so many friends and contacts looking back at me.  I also like the little scribbled comments like ‘See Simon’s new job’. The only question [...]

How to inject urgency into your B2B marketing

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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 hour of every day and about how the best-laid campaigns of the humble B2B marketer doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Haiti anymore. But we haven’t [...]

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

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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 the Manifesto. In the spirit of Project Open Kimono, here’s what we’ve learned. What we did To announce the publication of the B2B Marketing Manifesto, we [...]

B2B Marketing Agency campaign in a scribble

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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.