Velocity has done a hell of a lot of B2B marketing videos in the last year or so and only a few have been what most people would call viral video — like this one for your favourite marketing automation vendor:

Before running through the different types of video marketing – and giving examples – it’s good to think about the marketing goals that video can serve:

Video marketing goals

Thought leadership video – taking a stance on an issue or simply sharing best practice.

Product marketing video – including product tours, demonstrations and tutorials.

Case story video – including interviews and talking heads featuring customers – and maybe jazzing them up with the more televisual elements of the customer business (great if they happen to make beer or skiwear; not so great if they’re in insurance).

Video that humanises the brand — fun or viral videos – These are videos with a bit of humour; something you hope will be passed around, linked to or tweeted. Like this one we did a while back (a public service video with our new voice-over)

We’ve experimented with using xtranormal (a text to video tool) for this. It’s a kind of off-the-shelf animation tool with robot speech. Fun, fast and cheap. Here’s an obscene example. The humour in these often comes from the fact that a robot is saying human-like things (especially swearing).

Blogger-relations videos – Where one of your senior people name-checks some key bloggers.

We did this for Cisco and the bloggers really responded to it, with lots of backlinks & posts. (The link drops you in at 2:13 for the blogger mention but you can watch from the start if you’re thinking of transforming your data centre).

TYPES OR STYLES OF B2B VIDEO MARKETING

Taking any of these goals, there are then a lot of different types of video marketing, including:

VIDEO INTERVIEWS

Smart people, saying smart things.  One at a time or multi-person films on a single theme or issue

(Five standalone case videos can be re-cut into some themed pieces)

We like using an off-screen interviewer, editing out the questions and using title cards to introduce topics. Sometimes with a fixed and a hand-held camera for cut-aways.

VIDEO WHITEBOARD SESSIONS

Get your best presenters to give an informal presentations at a whiteboard or flip chart.

Like this one we did for App-DNA.

Success depends on a good, natural presenter.

You don’t need fancy production values: you’re presenting a chalk-talk.

These are great for introductory stuff but can also do deep drill-down material for later in the marketing funnel.

ANIMATED VIDEO MARKETING

You don’t have to do the standard flashy icons-in-white-space video. Put a bit of fun in your video marketing with something like this ‘Monty Python’ one we did for Hyperion:

Or something like stop-motion, low-tech video marketing can be really fun in a high-tech market.

Here’s a Lego Man one we did for ShipServ.

‘KINETIC TYPE’ VIDEO

Write a snappy script, animate every word spoken with on-screen type that zooms in, animates, etc. Again, one for ShipServ:

DOCUMENTARY-STYLE VIDEO MARKETING

Treat the topic as a documentary filmmaker would. Like this one we did for VNL in a rural Indian village:

SCREEN-BASED VIDEO MARKETING TOURS

This one for dotMobi combines a screen tour with an interview.

(We shot off the mobile because of time and budget constraints. Should have done proper screen grabs).

WEBINAR OR PRESENTATION VIDEOS

Just capture the audio and show the slides and/or the speakers.

These can be boring to watch after the event but there are ways to jazz it up.

ROUNDTABLE VIDEO MARKETING

Hold a roundtable, shoot the proceedings and edit it into something snappy.

Getting more from your video marketing content

Although you can crank out a decent viral video or video interview with very little budget, video does tend to cost a bit more than other types of content marketing. So here are some ways to squeeze more from your videos:

– Recut previous video content into new pieces – five old case studies can give you the material for a brand new thought piece on a given issue.

– Do ‘Takeaway’ pdfs or web pages that summarise the session (creating new downloads and giving you extra SEO juice). Salesforce.com did these Dreamforce Takeaways – short summaries of the best sessions from the Dreamforce event. A great way to turn video into content that search spiders can crawl..

– Use transcripts of the text – take the whole script and get it on a web page somewhere for easy reading and SEO.

– Turn your video marketing into blog posts, articles or even an eBook – just extract the ideas, simmer and re-spin.

– Create sound bite extracts for presentations and sales teams – so they can drop a 10-second video clip into a powerpoint deck

– An interactive Tablet Magazine for iPad or Android – video is great in an interactive magazine or eBook (we like PressRun for this and not just because they’re a client)

-- Create a soundboard – like this Alec Baldwin one (only much prettier and with good content!)

The Bottom Line?

Video is not only an incredibly powerful medium for B2B marketing, it’s also a flexible one. The trick is to be clear about your goals, choose the right kind of video to accomplish them and maximise their impact through promotion and re-purposing.

So that’s our B2B marketing video summary — and only a little bit of it was really about viral videos.

We’d love to hear your experiences and see any examples of B2B video marketing you’ve done (or just ones you like).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B video marketing, B2B viral videos, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, viral video

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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 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 smart people) then help package up their ideas and best-practice advice into content assets for the site.

The core piece of content on the site is a chunky eBook called The Social-Powered Enterprise: how social media is transforming your three most important disciplines. The three disciplines are sales, marketing and customer service and the book presents plenty of action points and cases in each area. There’s a form to fill in to get the eBook — but it’s worth it!

If you’re putting social to work in your business, the rest of the Social Success site is full of best-practice content and expert advice for you, including:

Social Media Expert Interviews
With people like Jacob Morgan on Social Collaboration and Brad Cleveland on Social Customer Service.  These guys really know their stuff and the interviews capture their thinking really succinctly.

Social Media Resource Roundups
These are short curated pieces that summarise some of the best resources out there across the web on subjects such as Mobile Social Media and Social Business Metrics and Social Selling (among others).

Dreamforce Takeaways
Dreamforce is the hottest tech event in the world, attracting amazing speakers. Dreamforce Takeaways are our attempt to summarise the most social-media-relevant sessions in a quick, easy-to-digest way. And you can listen to the original sessions and see the slides here too.  Our favourite is the Social Roadmap session with Gary Vaynerchuk, Charlene Li of Altimeter Group and Adam Brown of Dell.  But there are five more excellent ones to browse through.

Social Media Mini-Guides
These are more extensive articles on specific social disciplines including Social Selling and Social Customer Service.

Social Media Articles
Including this crowdsourced piece on Social Media Business Etiquette that had dozens of top-notch contributors or this one on Social Innovation.

A killer Social Media Infographic
On the Six Principles of Social Media Success from the eBook. It’s the social ethos captured in one rather tall graphic.

The site is a major initiative by Salesforce UK and it’s all about helping growing businesses (and businesses that are already massive) to get social media into their DNA – as Salesforce itself has done.  It’s not about selling software, it’s about evangelising something the company really believes in (working with them, we’ve seen how they walk the talk).

The project was the brainchild of Kieran Flanagan, the Search Manager for Salesforce EMEA and it’s an impressively ambitious play — the content will be rolled out to France and Germany this year. We’re not kissing arse when we say this (maybe a little) but Kieran has been hugely impressive through the entire process. He mined the considerable expertise and experience inside Salesforce to make sure we were capturing best practice strategy and real-world tactics. And did it with intelligence, focus and charm.

We loved working on the project and learned a hell of a lot on the way.

There’s a lot more to come on the Social Success site. Drop in, find the content most relevant to you – and do share it with your Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends and Google+ circles. They’ll thank you for it…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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We hopped on the Eurostar at an ungodly hour for B2B content marketers:

B2B content marketing love train.

On the way, we entertained each other by singing B2B content marketing songs (“Lonely days are gone/I’m a -comin’ home/My baby, she wrote me an eBook”).

Then Neil started telling B2B content marketing jokes.

Neil and his niche fan base.

But B2B content marketing jokes aren’t exactly suited to all audiences…

Bless.

Unfortunately, by the time we arrived in Paris, we had forgotten that we had come in search of B2B content marketing insights. So we just had a massive lunch at La Fontaine de Mars (Cassoulet to kill for) (no, literally: there must have been eight species in that bubbling, bean-studded ooze)…

The Last B2B Content Marketing Supper

Jim The Second

Luke

It was time to walk off that lunch and seize a B2B content marketing photo opp.

B2B content marketers

Followed by a boat tour on the Seine…

Jim mugs Simi

Past Notre Dame

And ended up back in one of the many B2B content marketing bars that line the Paris side streets…

Stan gets them in.

Followed by a brilliant, sunny next day.

Les Bollocks du B2B

Including a bit of shopping:

Le Bon B2B Content Marche

And the train back to the real capital of B2B content marketing: London.

Halina and Wendy

In short: a B2B content marketing good time was had by all.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the new year.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Content Marketing Strategy

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I watched Moneyball last night.

It’s the true story of how baseball started to introduce statistical and scientific methods to build better teams with reduced budgets.

For over 100 years baseball scouts (usually ex-players) picked and discarded players using gut instinct. Their thinking on what makes a great player conformed: technique, grace, beauty, reputation, potential, reliability and creativity.

Scouts looked for what you might call a player’s player. And the received wisdom worked, in the sense that nobody got fired for employing it.

The Oakland Analytics
No sport is an exact science, but baseball gets closer than most. There’s a mountain of data managed by a bunch of geeks who can tell you everything you need to know about players from a numbers perspective: hits, walks, runs, steals…

And these people look at the game differently. They don’t understand potential or grace: they do understand the raw contribution every player makes to the bottom line of winning matches.

And guess what? An analyst’s player isn’t a player’s player. Not even close.

The raw data theory is simple: it says you can assemble a winning team for a fraction of the usual cost if you change focus from subjective feel to objective analysis.

But would anyone have the bottle to take on the establishment and risk their reputation and livelihood? Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, with one of the league’s smallest budgets, risking their reputations and livelihoods, finally went for it and recorded the longest winning streak in baseball history with their ugly team of graceless, ageing misfits. And changed the game.

Resistance is Futile
The Oakland management team realized they could only compete by focusing on direct return on investment. They stopped asking how much a player would cost to buy: they started asking how much a run, or even a win, would cost to buy.

They looked at the sport differently and, despite being lampooned by a hostile establishment with everything to lose, they changed the way baseball works.

And it’s the same in B2B marketing. Time to adapt or die. Let’s:

Quit thinking of science as a geek’s preserve and embrace a quantitative approach to marketing.

Stop caring about what our peers think and start finding out which investments actually buy us prospects, customers and revenue.

Cease wasting cash on what’s big and trendy and keep investing cash in whatever tried and tested process keeps bringing in the punters.

Lose reliance on big opinions and take control of the marketing process with big data.

End the fascination with agency beauty parades and get deep and dirty with analysts and data jockeys who truly understand what’s working.

Adjust any hiring processes that rely on portfolios that don’t show impact on the bottom line.

Scrap any marketing campaign that talks costs rather than value and revenue.

Pull creatives out the darkness and give them a fantastic platform to spin their best ideas.

Rethink the idea that growing a marketing budget is more important than delivering more than less.

I could go on. But at the end of the day it’s all about money, whether it’s ball or marketing, and we’d all better get used to it.

I’ll leave you with a quote from  “The Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns:

“There are greater causes by which to frame an enterprise, and there are nobler metrics by which to measure the value of effort. But we cannot escape the fact that money is both a necessity in life and the most basic scorecard of success in business. Even if it is not the validation we seek, it is the most basic of test that we must pass.”

And it’s our job as B2B marketers to make sure we pass the test every day.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing

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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.

Of course, there’s no need to be too narrow. and if a single piece of content can cover more than one target audience, why not go for it? It saves time and money and raises your Return on Content. Unfortunately, it’s not always a good idea to try to kill two birds with one content stone. In fact it’s rarely a good idea. Here’s why:

Different people ALWAYS have different perspectives, agendas and issues

• A board member has a different view of the world than a junior manager (where seniority is the dimension of differentiation)
• A test engineer has a different set of challenges than a sales director (the target’s discipline is the dimension)
• A hospital administrator cares about different things than a high school administrator (market sector)
• An existing customer has a different view of you than a cold prospect (degree of familiarity with your company)
• A Chinese manufacturer has different concerns than a French one (region)

Pick almost any meaningful dimension and you’ll find your prospect base starts to divide itself up along that spectrum.

The key questions are:

– How important are these differences in the context of the story you want to tell?

-- What are the penalties for addressing more than one target audience in the same piece?

Let’s go to the whiteboard please, Janice.

Here are two targets – Persona A and Persona B.
They have some things in common but lots that are not shared:

You’ve got a few options for targeting A and B with content:

• Aim for the common ground– keeping your story in the lavender zone; this is good if that zone is still compelling enough to both A and B. The downside: you’re often forced to leave out really good parts of your A story or your B story.

Tip: Signal the scope of the piece in the title and the introduction, then tell people up front who it’s for and why: “This piece is for A and B — we know you’ve got a lot of differences but here’s what you have in common and why this piece is great for you.”

• Try to tell the whole A + B story– signalling to the reader that ‘this bit applies to A’ and ‘this bit applies to B’. The downside: B people get bored during the A bits and vice gets bored during the versa.

Tip: Sidebars that clearly signal “Hey Mr A! Read this bit!” can help you balance your agenda without boring the pants of of one target or the other.

• Do a piece of content for A and another for B– This lets you tell your best story to each audience. The downside: it costs more and takes more time.

Tip: Use broader, more generic content to buy time while you develop your targeted, persona-specific stuff.

Of course, it’s great if your target audiences have a lot more in common, so the middle ground contains most of your goodies:

But sometimes, you cant fake it. Your two targets have so little in common that almost every paragraph contains a fork in the road and every sentence needs a conditional:

B2B Content Relevance & Alienation
There are two tests to help determine if the piece you’re developing really ought to be two pieces:

The Relevance Test – lumping two audiences together means each will have to wade through things that are not relevant – that’s a negative experience and can lose readers.

How much of your content is actually irrelevant to A or B? Can you make it relevant by explicitly building bridges? If a third of your content has no relevance or resonance for one target or the other, it’s probably time to split the piece.

The Alienation Test – Even if there’s lots of common ground, a single message that’s gold dust for A can be a major turn-off for B. One example: when marketing some kind of media (trade show, magazine…) one audience (the exhibitor or advertiser) is selling to the other (the visitor or reader). In this case, talking all about how the former will enjoy a ‘captive audience for your sales team’ will be perfume to A and skunk juice to B.

Is there any important message to one audience that will actually alienate the other? These need to be managed carefully — and lumping both targets together is rarely the answer.

Of course, sometimes — like on the home page – you have to address the issue and find the most compelling common ground. But if there are significant relevance or alienation issues, you want to stream people off of that common ground home page as quickly as possible so you can look them in the eyes and sell to them without fear.

Why this matters
As a reader, you know when you’re reading a great piece of content: it seems to almost have your name on it. It’s aimed at a spot right in the middle of your forehead. It uses the language you use to describe the challenges you face in terms you recognise.

You also know when a piece is not quite aimed at you. It uses unfamiliar language; is pitched at the wrong level (too techie, not techie enough); talks about problems you haven’t experienced and skips over ones you have.

The penalties of badly targeted B2B content marketing
Making a piece to target two different audiences forces some bad things to happen:

– You’re forced to use generic language – instead of language that’s specific to one of the audiences.

To a hospital administrator, “increase asset utilisation” is a bore, but “double your operating room throughput” resonates. But you can’t say that if you’re also targeting high school administrators with the same piece.

– You talk about abstract ideas – instead of concrete realities.

To a marketing director, ‘improve process efficiencies’ is ho-hum jargon while ‘get more campaigns to market faster’ is lean-forward stuff.

– You’re forced to ‘couch’ your killer messages – instead of letting them fly.

‘For people like A, this widget halves costs and for people like B it’s doubles revenue.’
‘Finance guys love it because it saves money; engineers love it because it improves performance.’

Yuk.

The Bottom Line
(because all lines have bottoms have and all bottoms, alas, have their lines):

Non-specific, abstract, couchy talk sucks. While specific, concrete and direct talk moves mountains and blows away molehills.

‘All things to all people’ results in boring work. While relevant points told in familiar language feels ‘just for me’.

Great content hits people between the eyes. And mediocre content falls at their feet with a pffffttt.

The time to discover which of the two piles your next piece of content marketing  falls into is at the outline stage – where the problem will leap off the page and kiss you full on the lips (but in a bad way).  That’s reason enough to always do an outline stage.

The Reco: do occasional broad-brush content marketing but, as a rule, do more pieces and make each one highly targeted, with a persona so clear you can talk to it.

How about your own experiences? Any pieces you wish you had split into two or three? Any that spanned different audiences but worked just fine?
We’d love to hear about it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, Copywriting, persuasion, Thought Leadership

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If there’s such a thing as a template for a B2B content marketing blog post; then it looks a bit like this:

Dear Prospective Client,

That thing you’ve been trying to do. Well, you’re not doing it right.

Here’s a reason, preferably a list of reasons, why it’s going pear-shaped.

And here’s how we can save you from yourselves.

Send your cheques to…

We call it the Helen of Troy structure because – going by my Twitter feed – it launches about a thousand posts a day.

We’ve all done it. I moaned the other week about the feeling of doom – the Ave Santini Moment – as planning starts its descent to content marketing hell.

But maybe it’s time to focus on the clients getting it right, and applaud a tangible shift toward content marketing best practices in recent months.

The Ave Maria Moment
More recent planning discussions have honed in on one of content marketing’s sweetest spots: where content production and promotion work in harmony give you one almighty return on investment.

It’s the Ave Maria Moment: the feeling of marketing ecstasy (of the old-fashioned kind) accompanied by the sound of a celestial choir making soothing music in my head as a plan starts coming together.

And this one comes together hard to put content at the fulcrum of the whole B2B marketing process:

Optimized Content Marketing
The first challenge of content marketing, as Doug recently discussed, is the creation and management of a great content development process. But the second is ensuring content rolls off the press fit for promotion from day one.

If you don’t get support from people in charge your key promotional channels then you’ll be praying for a miracle. Here are the 10 Content Marketing Commandments that will ensure your content hits the ground running from day one:

1. Ensure every piece comes with campaign support. Plan supporting plays like landing pages and blog posts for the website or emails for nurturing campaigns long before launch day.

2. Customize content to reflect each channel. Adapt content (main feature or support) to introduce, for example, references to past behaviour in nurturing or referral pages in campaigns for better results.

3. Inject keyphrases into your content. Turn simple backlinks into juicy anchor text by optimizing your content title and landing pages (at the very least) with your top researched keyphrases.

4. Remember the funnel effect. Each piece of content is part of a wider funnel. Don’t forget to cross-reference other content, particularly if it’s a step further down your funnel.

5. Research your social network. Make sure your content is aligned with big subjects already popular in your social circles and our content is likely to compel. Makes selling in these related guest posts simpler.

6. Introduce social content. Referencing the work of others using quotes, excerpts or mentions in your content will increase the chances of them engaging with your work and (if it’s good enough) promoting it.

7. Get social feedback. Take the opportunity to share early drafts with people in your social circle: they’ll get to know your work as part of the process and help to make it better.

8. Socialize your database. Don’t forget that your database has its own social network. Make it easy to share your best content with simple integration with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (at the minimum).

9. Introduce campaign tags. Make sure you can chart the performance of every channel and medium by adapting shared campaign tags. You won’t add them after the content is launched.

10. Integrate channel feedback. Understand the goals of every challenge and make sure every piece of content has a clear impact on promotional metrics.

© neilstoneman for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing

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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 room of their marketing strategy and there’s no going back.

But as more and more B2B marketing departments ramp up their content marketing efforts, a new bottleneck is developing: the content development bottleneck.

Content development is the process that drives the conception, development and production for your content marketing machine. And since it’s a fairly new discipline in many B2B marketing departments, there aren’t a lot of best-practice processes in place for it.

A good content development process turns a bunch of random activities into some kind of a system, covering everything from idea generation to copywriting, design, production and the all-important approvals process.

The goal is simple: quality at scale — being able to produce the right amount of excellent content with the team you’ve got. (Notice I said ‘the right amount’ not ‘the most content you can generate’. Sometimes fewer, better pieces is the way to go.)

Here are nine content development tips to help:

1) Start with a Content Marketing Strategy

Not having one is the number one cause of content development inefficiency, because everything is ad hoc. A good content marketing strategy starts with your goals; then summarises a quick audit of existing content; captures the core messages you need your team to deliver; outlines your target audience personas; creates a topic list. It also outlines the team roles and responsibilities and captures any core content principles you want everyone to follow. This is your content marketing playbook.

2) Create an Editorial Calendar

This is essential for maximising your content development resources and keeping everything on track. Some editorial calendars identify a different theme every month or quarter; others map the content to the different stages of the buying cycle; others cover one product line at a time. Whatever editorial strategy you choose, get it down in a calendar so you can see what’s due when and who’s doing it.

3) Use timelines for every piece of content

Sounds too obvious to mention but every piece must have its own production schedule detailing the major milestones and their corresponding dates. When you’re overwhelmed, it’s easy to skip this and mark everything ASAP. But it’s amazing how often people will hit deadlines if there really are deadlines to hit.

4) Avoid ‘stop & start’ content development

A lot of content marketing teams we’ve seen tend to focus on the big pieces and let everything else stall. Tips 2 and 3 should help avoid that, keeping early stage projects progressing even as the big pieces get the attention they need. Otherwise you get peaks and troughs in your content marketing efforts instead of a nice, steady flow.

5) Make the most of each piece of content

A big part of the art of content marketing is the art of ‘atomising’ your content to get the most out of your budget – without seeming to be repeating yourself everywhere. So a big, fat eBook gets re-purposed into a slideshare, series of blog posts, guest posts, articles, worksheets, videos, etc.

Each gets a re-spin but they’re all based on the core ideas, so exploit the original research and development.

6) Make your blog the foundation of your content marketing

A content marketing strategy without a blog is like a speedboat without an outboard motor. When there’s no time for a major piece of content, there’s still time for a blog post. Use the blog to promote content, test new ideas, atomise existing content, build relationships with influencers and encourage engagement.

7) Use content curation

You don’t have to produce 100% of the content you offer to your target audiences. A lot of great content is essentially curated content – stuff that you’ve found out there in the world or on the web, added a bit of value and linked to. The key here is to add that value. If you’re writing about ‘Ten Marketing Strategy Posts We Love’ summarise why you love each post and give a glimpse into the content. Done well, content curation stretches your budget without diluting your content brand.

8 ) Use outside resources effectively

It’s a rare content marketing team that can produce everything in-house. But if you throw everything out to agencies and writers, you may lose the authenticity that makes for great content. The trick is to find great resources (writing being the absolutely critical one) and use them intelligently, playing to their strengths and yours.

9) Let the data be your guide

Analytics is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. Measure the things that matter most and test the things you need to learn about. The data will tell you where to put your content development resources. Without it, you’re in ‘spray & pray’ mode.

Follow these nine principles and your’e on your way to that lean, mean content marketing machine that’s the envy of your B2B marketing peers.

A few content development resources:

Our Content Marketing Workbook – a primer on the art & science of content marketing

The Content Marketing Tutorial – a short, sharp Prezi that outlines the process of developing a great piece of content (view it in full screen mode).

The Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute – tireless evangelists and best-practice advisors

Managing Content Marketing

Managing Content Marketing – the book by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose

The Econsultancy Content Marketing Best Practice Guide – free if you’re a member of Econsultancy (you are, aren’t you?)

Creating Content That Sells

Creating Content That Sells – a guide to content marketing for demand generation

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog

The Velocity Content Marketing Blog – all about it for B2B marketers

Got any other tips for content development?

We’d love to share your thoughts with fellow B2B marketers, so do comment away…

[BTW – This post was written using Inbound Writer, the content development tool. It scores a 70 on their Document Score. I reviewed Inbound Writer here but was maybe a bit sarcastic so this is my attempt at using it for real. I'll add my thoughts to the review post itself.]

———

Photo: Creative Commons by zigazou 76

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Development, marketing strategy, Thought Leadership

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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 just simple data charts (bars & pies) made pretty. Or they take a bunch of different data points, give them to an illustrator and turn them into an editorial-like page with big, fat numbers, twitter birds, logos and lots and lots of explanatory text. The data didn’t really have to be visualised. The chunks of stats don’t really hang together or interact or contribute to each other. It’s just a pretty page that might as well be text.

For us, a great information graphic is one in which:

• The visualisation actually adds value – it’s not about making data attractive to children; it’s about making data sing
• The picture tells the story – or many different stories; very little text is needed
• That story is BEST told in graphic form – it’s not just text & data with colours and shapes
• One glance makes you lean forward – making you want to know more & dig deeper
• The graphic combines many dimensions – change in a single value over time is a chart; great B2B infographics have layers
• But there is almost no ink that doesn’t contribute – no twiddles and bar-chart-as-city-skyline (what Tufte calls ‘chartjunk’)
• The final effect is beautiful – they can’t help but be so

The Chartball posters by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Senior Graphics Editor/Programmer at the Wall Street Journal, tick all these boxes and are an absolute delight. (Joel Avery, the newest hire in our design department turned us on to these. And we’re really glad he did. The Chartball posters are fantastic.) Here’s a small detail on the pitching staff of the 2009 Yankees, strikeouts against walks (pardon the png quality):

Andrew clearly loves data (not just illustration) and that passion leaps off the page. You could spend hours with any one of his poster-sized summaries of a single sports team’s season. And as you absorb the data, the season actually comes to life. You can see, touch and feel the texture of the season. Star players pop out. Winning streaks emerge and fade back to normality. And, best of all, the data sub-plots relate to each other, adding insight and suggesting causation as well as correlation.

We’ve seen very, very few B2B infographics that do all this (and we’ve struggled with it ourselves). But this is what we aspire to.

Anyone out there have any great examples in B2B?

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

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How does it work? Well, it’s my first time, but this is what it looks like to me:

– You tell it three keyphrases you want to write about – I used B2B Content Marketing, B2B Content Marketing Strategy and B2B Content Marketing Tactics.

– It goes off and does natural language analysis of lots of websites and social streams that are related to these three terms.

– It then drops you into a dashboard with some cool-looking features:

In the middle is the panel where you write your post. I’m writing in it now.

On the right is a list of 118 relevant terms that “your audience is using when discussing your topic”.

For me, this list was a bit weird before I started typing (SEO figured high up; But, on the plus side, the term “Velocity Partners” appeared, which is gratifying as we’re certainly all about B2B Content Marketing strategy) (see what I did there?).

The cool thing: as you type, this list changes, and the terms I’m actually using in my blog post start to float to the the surface. For instance, at this moment, the list looks like this:

But before I started typing, it looked totally different, with terms like Search Engine Optimization on top.

Above this list is a panel for Focus Terms – the ones that have been emphasized in my blog post. None are here yet, because I haven’t typed very much yet.

Here’s the interesting bit. In the upper left is a dial that shows my Document Score for this post. Right now, it scores this post as a 5 out of 100, which is not very good:

[I'll update you with my changing Document Score in square brackets as I go on.]

Below the Document Score dial is a box for suggestions on “Steps to Improve My Score” which reads, at this very moment: “Your document doesn’t include the right number of Focus Terms” (not a crime as none have appeared in that box yet) and “Shorten your title”. Hmmm. Getting a bit bossy. (My title is ” Can dynamic SEO tools really boost traffic from B2B content marketing? ” but I can take a hint, so I’m changing it to “B2B Content Marketing: a writer’s SEO tool.”

[Ooh. I just shot up to a 36/100 and I haven't even made the title change yet.]

Here goes, I’m going to make the title change…

[And I just shot up to a Document Score of 40/100.] I kind of like this!

It make me feel that I’m actually improving the SEO performance of the piece as I type.

The big question: will this kill the human-reader-value of the post?

Inbound Writer has a nice way of addressing this: below the improvement tips is a box that says “My Strategies” with “Search & Social” as one and “Reader Targeting” as the other. What this lets you do is set your strategy so the Document Score reflects your priorities, instead of some abstract notion of B2B Content Marketing strategy.

[Update: I just got penalised a point for some reason. I'm down to a 39/100].

For example, I set my Search & Social Strategy to ‘Balanced Strategy’ which means it’s balanced between search popularity and search competition:

And I set my Reader Targeting to “All Education Levels”. For what that’s worth.

What this doesn’t do is help you avoid writing a really crappy blog post artificially packed with blatant keyphrases like B2B Content Marketing Strategy. But if you were that way inclined, no tool will really help you.

So I’m about half way through this post. Has Inbound Writer helped me much? Not sure yet.

It’s certainly making me painfully aware that I have to use terms like B2B Content Marketing Strategy and B2B Content Marketing Tactics more than I might otherwise do. For this post, it’s okay, because the review format is letting me use these terms a lot without sounding like an SEO robot. But for a different kind of post, my human readability would suffer, I fear.

[Back up to 41/100 -- two lousy points for that blatant keyphrase pimping??!]

I like playing with this tool but I’m not yet convinced it will work. Doesn’t Google hate this kind of keyphrase packing? Time will tell, I guess.

I just tried something. I included a list of keyhprases from the Relevant Terms list on the right and tried to make it seem natural. Result: I got a warning that said, “Improve your score by refining the focus of your document.” and it stuck me on 41/100.

So I deleted that.

[I have now used the term B2B Content Marketing six times and the term B2B Content Marketing Strategy six times each, including these ones. But I'm still on 41/100].

My robot advisor wants me to add another keyphrase to my Focus Terms list. It says that for a post of this length (865 words) I should have three Focus Terms. So now I have to get the term B2B Content Marketing Tactics into this post somehow. Two more times according to my live data.

Here goes: the nice thing about B2B Content Marketing Tactics is that they naturally emerge from your B2B Content Marketing Strategy. No. Sorry. I’m hating this. That last sentence is CRAP for human beings and I just refuse to write for a bloody algorithm.

Why? Because it’s just poor B2B Content Marketing tactics, that’s why. [Up to 42/100. Shooting for 60/100. Wish me luck]. I now have three Focus Terms in my list and my Improvements suggestion box simply says, “You may need to take additional measures to improve your score.” Intrigued, I click on the little arrow for more advice and get, “… the terms you are focusing on are not highly rated.” and a suggestion that I might want to choose another subject!

The nerve. I want to write about THIS subject. B2B Content Marketing is what we do! Why would I want traffic for a “highly rated” phrase like Web Content Management if we don’t DO Web Content Management!?

Annoying but somehow a perverse challenge. And I love a perverse challenge — the perverser the better. [43/100]

Here goes. I’m going to go for a 4.5-star term called “Content Development” which I can live with in this post. After all, you can’t do B2B content marketing without seriously considering your content development strategy.

Content development is indeed one of the major challenges in B2B content marketing, so I have no problem adding the term ‘content development’ into my blog post. [45/100 -- I think I'm on to something here].

But is Content Development a 4.5-star term for the right reasons? Will it attract the kind of people I want to reach (B2B content marketers) or will it also rope in all those ‘media’ types who are always going on about ‘content’ by which they mean things like Madonna songs and Big Brother’s Little Brother, which, to me, are both content-free zones, but hey, I’m fifty.

My point is: this post may end up ranking well for Content Development but then attract all sorts of riff-raff. [51/100! We're on the move!]. So the post may rank well but have a massive bounce rate when the media types show up and realise that this is about content development but not in the Big Brother’s Little Brother sense of the term.

Now my suggested improvements say, “Refine the focus of your document” (duh) and “Use a more highly ranked Focus Term in your title.”

So I am now changing the title of this post to “Content Development using Inbound Writer.” Let’s see if it buys be any points….

[Success! I hit 60/100. Dare I aim higher? I dare.]

Content Development is indeed a funny thing. Especially when your content development is being shamelessly distorted by some BLOODY ANNOYING SEO TOOL. Calm. Breathe.

I now have a blog post that’s all over the place.

Weirdly, that’s okay THIS TIME because this is actually a review of a content development tool called Inbound Writer. So the scattiness and wandering and keyphrase-packing is all kind of relevant to the content development task at hand. [Still 60/100].

It looks like the only thing I can do to improve my score is to abandon this post and start another post on Content Development. Maybe I’ll do that.

Conclusions:

– The jury is out. Writing for Google before the mythical B2B marketing reader in my head is really foreign to me. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a bad thing.

Maybe this tool isn’t really designed for me, but for an “SEO copywriter” (a term and job title I instinctively don’t approve of).

– Putting that aside, the thing I’m not convinced by is the way the tool suggests terms for me. Shouldn’t you determine your best terms before you start? And shouldn’t they be RELATED TO WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO instead of simply relating to a juicy term that’s under-competed?

– But if you’ve got your keyphrases sorted, and can live with a mediocre Document Score (limited by the popularity of your chosen terms) then Inbound Writer might help you keep your eyes on the prize as you write.

Bottom line: I’m still suspicious but I may give it a few goes before making up my mind. Now for that post all about Content Development…

My final score:

And the Focus Term usage panel:

——————————–

UPDATE

After the response from the Inbound Writer team (see my comment below), I felt I’d been a bit hasty in my review.  So I went back to use Inbound Writer again, this time for a straightforward blog post called Content Development: Nine Tips for B2B Marketers.

My experience? A bit better than my first go, which was kind of distorted by combining a post with a review of the tool I was posting with.

The Inbound Writer robot gave me a similar set of tips to improve my score (which started with a whopping 78, dipped into the 60s then ended up as a 70).

The robot kept suggesting I focus on terms that had more search action, like Marketing Strategy. I’m still dubious about writing to a topic that is so broad – it might get more traffic but would also get a massive bounce rate.

I used the Focus Terms a hell of a lot in this post, which upped my score but may have damaged my human readability a bit:

Bottom line?
I feel like I’m pretty SEO-aware as I write blog posts, so I’m not really sure this tool will help me that much.

But I can see its value as a short cut for writers new to a market who haven’t done a comprehensive keyphrase analysis and don’t have time for one. In that scenario, Inbound Writer could help find good keyphrases and remind the writer to optimise around them.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Content Marketing Strategy, B2B Content Marketing Tactics, B2B SEO, Content Development, SEO

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