Your prospects are being buffeted by a firehose of information. If you’re hoping to win their attention, you’d better be prepared to earn it.

Content Marketing is your way to cut through the noise and hop over the barriers. This short, sharp eBook summarises how we at Velocity approach it, including:

• What Content Marketing and Thought Leadership are
• Why you need to get good at them (and fast)
• Why you’re perfectly placed to do it really, really well
• How to pick a topic prospects care about
• How to go beyond the dry, stale white paper
• What we think ‘good’ looks like — lots of examples

We don’t usually ask people to fill out a form for our content but we put a lot of work into this one and would really like to know who’s downloading it.

So we hope you don’t mind our asking for a little info (it’s worth it) and we promise not to spam you.

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© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B social media

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Choose your B2B patients wisely

The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates.  But they don’t have the best survival rates because they’re better surgeons.  They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully.

Great surgeons know exactly what variables in the patient’s history correlate to successful outcomes. They then avoid patients who don’t fit the profile and focus their energy on the patients most likely to survive.

To show why this is really relevant to you as a B2B marketer, I’d like to start with how it’s relevant to us as a B2B agency.

At Velocity, we apply the ‘patient screening’ idea when we’re meeting prospective clients for the first time.  Some agencies hoover up every bit of business going. They’ll say whatever they need to say and be whoever they need to be in order to win the business.

To be honest, we’ve been guilty of this in our time.  And it invariably ends in tears (the equivalent of the patient dying). We’ve been seduced by exciting projects that really didn’t play to our strengths and we’ve usually regretted it — even if the client ended up happy.

The fact is, we know exactly what we’re good at. And while it’s okay to go a bit off-piste, we have to recognise that doing so will, over time, lower our hit rate.

More to the point, the time and energy we put into these tangential projects are invested at the expense of projects that are right in our sweet spot. The ones we slam dunk every time.

So we’ve learned over the years to spot real, Velocity-shaped holes in prospect companies. And we’ve learned to spot projects that really don’t need what we do best. When we respectfully decline the latter, we spend more time on the former. So our hit rates go up. Our clients say nice things about us. And we attract more of the projects we love.

The exact same principle applies to all B2B marketing. The idea isn’t to attract every prospect who has a passing interest in what you do.  The idea is to generate sales-ready leads that hit smack in the middle of your sweet-spot; the projects that need exactly the dimensions your products excel at.

To do this, you need to know the precise size and shape of your sweet spot. You need to not only know who you are and why people should care, you need to know how you stack up against competitors and substitutes.

Only then can you isolate the dimensions that set you apart and build your marketing around them.  When you do this, you’ll be generating and nurturing contacts that lead to great sales conversations — instead of meetings where your sales people are bending over backwards to fit a brief that really isn’t suited to your business.

More ‘perfect fit’ projects means more successful projects, more happy customers, more recommendations.  Fewer perfect fits means… the opposite.

Our eBook, The Holy Trinity of Tech Marketing, talks about the three questions that will help you identify your company’s sweet spots. This is where we start when we take on new clients. Because if you get this right, the success rates rise for everything else you do.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Demand Generation, lead nurturing, Sales

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That’s why we created our new eBook: The Content Marketing Workbook (out in June) and turned it into a 20-minute webinar presented with B2B Magazine next week.

The webinar takes place on Wednesday, 3 June, 2009 at 3:30pm and you can register for it right now, right here.  Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why traditional marketing is broken
• Why Thought Leadership and Content Marketing are the answer to a killer question
• Why you’re in the perfect position to do this so well
• The principles of great Content Marketing
• Three weird metrics to think about
• How to find the right topic and generate great content
• Which medium is right for your message
• How to market the content you’ve created

We think this is the single most important thing you should be doing as a B2B marketer.  Join us for the webinar and find out how.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B social media, digital marketing, Online PR

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