Are you a spammer?  I’m sure you’re not.  But I’ll cheerfully wager that some of you have, at one point, been confused for one.

According to the BBC, undercover US researchers, or white hat spammers, have finally unearthed the secret economics of a 21st century boogie man: the junk mailer.

In the name of research, they sent out millions of spam messages from thousands of hijacked home PCs with an offer from a bogus pharmaceutical web site.

The scale of the operation delivered returns well in excess of $2 million per year even with a response rate of 0.00001%.

Are you shocked by the figure?  I am.  And I’m not talking about the loot.

It tells me that many legitimate email campaigns should have no expectations of response rates much above the spammer’s one in every 12.5 million.  Why?  Because, computer jacking aside, separating the crass from the criminal can prove tricky for all but the untrained eye.

Too many firms are postmarking their campaigns in the suburbs of Spamalot.  Emails might promise “much cheapness” but the market filters out, one way or another, poorly conceived, rendered, executed or measured campaigns.

Unfortunately, the honest, if unsophisticated, mailers cannot, spammer-style, dodge costs and will see their investment disappear in a flash of one-size fits all 0.01p bundles.  A good campaign, particularly in B2B, is personal from start to finish.

The journey from Spamalot to email’s Holy Grail begins with a five simple steps.

Personalise – An email should be a personal message.  You are not talking to a list of IT directors stuck to PCs in large multinational organisations.  You are talking to Christina.  She’s a real person who, by the way, prefers her BlackBerry.

Specialise – What’s your firm’s history with Christina?  Acknowledge her status: profitable customer, lapsed customer, new prospect or hot prospect.  Your communication should reflect any special relationship.

Energise – Get active and move the relationship forward.  Take the opportunity to drive the relationship based on individual needs.  Use interesting triggers to interact with her regularly for sales, information or service.

Dramatise – Email is a real-time medium.  If you hear of industry issues that Christina is likely to be facing then tell her how you can help.  Don’t stick to a dull monthly schedule.  Be dramatic and talk when she needs you.

Synergise – Your campaign is only a cog in your marketing wheel.  If it’s not linked with your databases and web analytics, it will fail.  Every interaction with Christina, from introduction to conversion, can be automatically logged, updated and used.

The ability to communicate personally and meaningfully with customers can deliver spectacular results: way in excess of standard response rates of two per cent.  The path to the Holy Grail of one-to-one marketing is, across the sales funnel, being built rapidly in the digital era.

Spamalot, on the other hand, is a dangerous place.  As the research shows even real spammers are struggling to generate the volumes required to turn a profit.  Monty Python’s suicide squad trained to end it all in less than 20 seconds.  That’s 20 seconds more life than many of today’s ill-fated email campaigns.

You have two options to generate email returns: 1) become a professional spammer or, 2) take the personal journey towards more professional email marketing.   Not much of a choice really.

Go the extra mile.  You can rest assured that it’s not very crowded there at the moment.

All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about.  White papers, blog posts, webinars, videos, eBooks…

But even the best thought leaders often follow a simplistic content promotion strategy that completely ignores the idea of a sales cycle.  Basically, they pump out some new content, promote it, and repeat.

The results is an over-emphasis on the recent instead of the relevant.

Most companies have a few pieces of core content that were usually produced early on — the ones that summarise the whole story in one place.  Or the ideal introduction to the market/app/technology/issue.

These powerful pieces often get buried under layers of new content — but the new material may not be the best starting point for every prospect.  Over time, a company’s content tends to get more and more specific.  You cover the broad landscape, then zoom in on issues.  But new prospects that know nothing about you would be much better off starting with the earlier ‘landscape’ pieces.

We like to get our clients thinking about the sales cycle and what content is right for each stage in it.  A first-time web visitor should be led to the big-picture pieces. Subsequent web visits or emails  could help them progress further, ideally based on insight into who they are (job title, industry) and what they’re doing — what pages they visit, what papers they read, what links they click on in an email.

We’re starting to work with a powerful tool that does automated lead nurturing based on demographic and behavioural scoring.  This makes it easy to target the right content at the right prospects as they progress through the sales pipeline.

As a result, clients can serve up  the most relevant content to each prospect, instead of just the most recent.

We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter that Pär briefed in and designed (we wrote it for him).

The newsletter does a lot right:

• It’s clear, colourful and inviting – three colour-coded sections; design in the service of content
• It’s about the reader’s concerns not just the company’s –only one short bit is about VNL at all — and they’ve earned the right to smuggle that in
• It’s packed with content – incuding recent industry news items (pre-digested) and links to two videos and two white papers.
• It starts with a nice, personal note from the CEO – giving it a human face
• It’s as long as your arm – nothing wrong with scrolling if there’s a lot to say — and it’s better than reducing the content to a series of cryptic lines.
• It’s a link-fest – driving people to the VNL website; with proper analytics to track the click-throughs

We even like the way the housekeeping is handled at the bottom:

Newsletters are an important string to the B2B marketing bow.  We could all do worse than following this one.

Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals.  They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their Macs.

Clearly, they got under Microsoft’s skin, because the crack Seattle Rapid Response team has leapt into action (what, three years later?) with an expensive riposte: the “I’m a PC” campaign.

The result is wrong in so many ways, I can’t summarise them all in a blog post.  Hitting the lowlights:

• It’s needlessly defensive – Microsoft owns the PC market.  Why the hell are they stooping down to swat at a niche player? Real leaders should never look back, down or to the side.  They only look ahead.

• It’s over-produced – This one spot cost more than fifteen of the Mac commercials. Which kind of proves Apple’s point. Guerrilla marketing will always be cooler than Madison Avenue marketing (or wherever Big Agency lives these days).

• It backfires – Microsoft is not content with market share, mega-profits and virtual ubiquity.  It desperately craves the one thing it can’t have: coolness.  So instead of letting go of cool (the only cool thing to do), they concoct this shrill howl. It isn’t just not cool.  It’s watching your Dad dance.

• It proves the opposition’s case – They want to say, “We’re creative and interesting too!”.  But by assembling this cast of PC-people (in both senses), Microsoft sends the message, ‘We are everyperson.’ And everyone is no one. Bland. Boring. Even though some have beards and some scuba dive and some don’t even comb their hair.

The whole exercise reminds me of an embarrassing bit of greenwashing that Ford did a few years ago.  The CEO barked, “Make us look green!” and the hapless marketing department was caught without a plan.  They cranked out a glossy insert packed with every mini-credential they could muster. One was, “The roof on this factory is covered in grass!” (neglecting to mention that the factory belched out 200,000 F150 trucks at about 18 miles per gallon each).  Another said, “our design team has four vegetarians.” (I’m not joking).

I’m sure Microsofties are enjoying their foray into “I know you are but what am I?” marketing.  Turning the other cheek can be excruciating when you know you could kill your enemy with one blow.  But internal morale-boosting and good marketing are two very different things.  And Microsoft now looks like the kid who discovered bell-bottoms about three parties after they went out of fashion.  Blush.

Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies?

We all could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great, if insidious, effect. There can only be a few women of a certain age on the planet, for example, who haven’t heard of Boswelox, Pentapeptides or Nutrillium. (All, I think, purport to firm the skin and make it glow – which is real important of course if you’re Andi McDowell).

Ridiculous as the science  underpinning these products may be (that’s not for me to judge), the bottom line is that product or feature naming in the hugely competitive cosmetics industry really does work.  Millions of women (and, increasingly, similar numbers of men) are persuaded by the pseudo-science to buy pots and pots of gloop, simply because naming like this gives a reason to believe that it can really protect the skin, hair, eyes, lips or whatever from aging.

What does this mean for B2B? Well, pseudo-science is probably not the right route to take, because purchasing in B2B is essentially a completely rational process where scores of technical experts in big purchasing companies evaluate and then re-evaluate vendor claims. But that doesn’t mean B2B marketers shouldn’t put effort into proper, accurate naming.

There are three reasons that spring to mind as to why it’s important.

First,  naming things says they’re unique to you and it’s a good way of identifying the advantages and benefits you deliver to customers, the things that differentiate you from the competition.

Second, clear names make you stand out from the generic descriptions that pollute B2B tech and which are partly responsible for ever more (and incredible) claim inflation..

Finally, if you get naming right, it can make a real difference to SEO performance: particularly if you can capture terms that resonate in the market.

Interestingly we’ve just gone through an intensive process of positioning and messaging for one of our newest clients, Secerno, where naming was central.

Based in Oxford, Secerno has some wonderful, patent-protected technology for creating intelligent perimeters around enterprise databases to prevent unauthorized activities by outside attackers, as well as trusted insiders. (It’s a hot, hot company and if you’re a large enterprise that has vulnerable data, you should check it out at www.secerno.com)

As with a lot of our clients, the process has led to the creation of a completely new naming architecture covering what the company does, how it does it and the benefits it delivers.

What Secerno has taught us, though, is that while naming things is important, it’s really just the start.

We’re working with a really smart client on this one, the company’s marketing director, Emma Dunstone.  She believes in the new naming and she understands that for it to live and, more importantly, become part of Secerno’s DNA, it’s simply not good enough to have it just written down in brochures and on the website. You have to believe in it. You have to breathe it.

BTW (and as a concluding comment on naming), I recommend e3p skin protection spray from Clarins. You’ll get the benefit of its Magnetic Defence Complex which protects your skin from the ageing effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves. Looking at the pictures to the right of this post, I’d say that’s pretty vital.

A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding just sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday.  He’s Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT.

The article is called Corporate Branding is Dead and its central metaphor is… well I’ll let Axel say it:

 ”Most CEOs don’t recognise that the way their company is visually represented is in fact the company’s body language.”

Any presentation coach will tell you that your body language speaks louder than your words.  But for most B2B companies, the visual side of their communications is the last thing they think about (if they think about it at all).

As a result, the typical B2B brand slumps into the room, mumbles under its breath, looks down at the floor, picks its nose and scratches its genitalia.

No self-respecting company would hire a salesperson who gave this kind of impression, but thousands are happy to have logos, websites, brochures, data sheets and business cards that do.

Design and visual communication is moving up the agenda at Velocity as we see the value it brings to our clients — especially in an increasingly digital landscape.  As we help our clients present themselves to the world, it would be remiss not to work on the body language, too.

Marketing is communication.

B2B marketing is bad communication.

That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.

Their expectations couldn’t be lower.

They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web pages from people just like you and IT’S NOT FUN.

Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise them once in a while?

To actually have fun in producing something so people will enjoy reading it?

To take a deep breath (or a deep draught), let your B2B inhibitions slide away and just talk?

Your prospects are begging you: “Do anything you like but please stop BORING me.”

Re-think that email. Pulp that brochure. Reject that ad idea. Aim higher.

Will we ever learn?

The hilarious spoof of Microsoft’s attempt to re-label the iPod packaging appears to focus on a modern marketing issue.  But Plato, the pick of Greece’s golden generation of thought leaders, first identified the problem almost 2500 years ago.

In Plato’s Cave, a first generation white paper, poor souls are imprisoned and chained with a restricted view of the outside world.  They quickly give the shadows and echoes they encounter their own distorted meaning.  There is, for them, no life or reality outside the cave.

This all might sound a little Greek to you.  But there are two relevant B2B marketing messages that link the clip with the allegory:

1) Firms are caves.  They have an entrenched, but generally distorted, view of the outside world based on shadows and echoes of information.  Without regular research, we forget that things can be done differently and more effectively elsewhere.

2) Firms like caves.  And that’s a big mistake when the market outside is fast, futuristic and unsentimental.  We must be confident enough to challenge entrenched internal processes and cultures to deliver customer friendly output.

The Microsoft clip shows why process driven presentation won’t get customers drooling.  The film makers, believed to be an internal Microsoft team, used competitive comparison to educate the organisation where it was all going wrong.  We like it.

Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general….

Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

Velocity, the B2B technology marketing agency, is happy to welcome the newest recruit to its design department, Lee Hosford.

Lee is a talented designer and photographer with a great eye for type. He’s also a dab hand at Photoshop, Illustrator and all the essential tools of the digital design trade.

Lee comes to us with an honours degree from Southampton Solent University’s highly regarded design department. He also did an internship at Ryan Emo Design & Advertising in Southampton.

On top of all that, he’s a nice guy and a blues fanatic.

“To be honest, design used to be an afterthought at Velocity,” admits Stan Woods, Velocity MD, “The idea comes first.  But as the department grows, we’re discovering  the benefits of integrating design ideas at the very beginning of our thinking.  And we’re doing a lot more brand identity and web design work than ever before.  Lee’s an important part of all this and we’re really glad to have discovered him.”

Despite living in a ‘creative’ world, most agencies are pretty linear.  They take the brief, then they do the creative.

Velocity is a bit different.  When we do consulting engagements – helping companies clarify and communicate their positioning and key messages – we do creative as part of the engagement, before any specific brief is on the table.  Lots and lots of rough concepts — headlines, images, copy, straplines…

What we’re doing is exploring a wide range of attitudes (statesman-like, aggressive, cheeky, outrageous) and many different ‘ways in’ to the story.  There are thousands of ways to start any given story and the creative shows us which ones make the reader want to know more.  These tend to end up somewhere near the home page of the eventual website build.

The rough concepts often look like badly-designed ads, not because we’re recommending print advertising (it’s amazing how little we do these days) but because the one-page ad is the ‘elevator pitch’ of the marketing discipline.  If we can get a compelling story down in a few paragraphs, a headline and a photo, we know we’re on to something.  They’re badly designed because they’re not designed at all — they’re simply thrown together in Adobe InDesign (the marker pad de nos jours).

At first, we did this because  it’s fun and we knew it would make an impact, taking the abstract ideas from our recommendations and making them come to life.  Covering a conference table with short, sharp, confident ideas invariably gets people all fired up (we love that).

To justify this part of the engagement, we started saying that it ‘informed the strategy’; that the proto-creative work gave us a valuable steer about the positioning and messages we were recommending.

Then, after a few of these engagements, we realised that our cover story was actually 100% true.  The creative work ALWAYS changes the strategy and the recommendations.  It really is a great way to road test our ideas.  If a positioning idea that we’re recommending just doesn’t have an edge on the page, there’s usually a good reason.  Maybe it’s just not very credible or it isn’t as distinctive and differentiated as we’d thought.

Sometimes the perfect way of crystallizing a complex story just pops out of an unpromising stab in the dark. Which sends us scurrying back to the presentation decks for some intense post-rationalisation.

We know of no other agency that does this creative play so early in the consulting process. Most don’t do it at all.  But it’s become an invaluable part of our process that we forego only under supernatural duress (pretty much never).

A few of our clients have given us permission to share these ‘idea harvests’ with other (non-competitive) companies. So if you’d like to take a look, feel free to give us a call.

It’s funny, but oftentimes we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’.  In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful press briefings and writing some deadly dull ‘opinion’ pieces in the name of trying to grab people’s attention.

The fault usually lies in believing our own hype:  in assuming that the things that get us all lathered up are the same things that get customers, web searchers and reporters excited too.  More often than not this is simply not the case.  The fact that your widget has successfully passed a beta test phase for version 11.5.2 is probably of interest to only five people in this world - and four of them are likely to be sat in the same cubicle as you.

And even if you do know you’re on to a hot thing, how often are we wise enough to factor market forces into the planning process?  We might be selling very hot cakes indeed, but if everyone else is too then it’ll be extremely hard to make ourselves seen and heard.

In practice, it takes a great mind to fathom this stuff.  The skills for getting it right aren’t really marketing skills per se, they’re more about being a good salesperson.

The trick is to get inside the heads of the people you’re trying to reach, and to understand the competition for their mindshare… and only then to figure out what it is that you’re going to write or produce and how you’re going to distribute it.

Good salespeople do this all the time.  They have a keen appreciation of things like ‘pitch angles’, ‘buying cycles’, ‘competitors’ and ‘budgets’ (or someone’s ability to cough up cash)…. all of which requires a great handle on the pulse of the marketplace.  Conversely in marketing, when it comes to generating new ideas for content, we’re more likely to organise a 30 minute brainstorm meeting, then neck a Diet Coke (or three) and start hammering away at the keyboard.

This approach is not good.  It can result in a bunch of boring, irrelevant deliverables or things that are destined never to be heard amongst a sea of white noise (and sometimes both!).  Worst of all, doing things this way nearly always represents a gamble in terms of time, money and resources - since we have no idea if there will ever be a realistic market out there for our new-fangled stuff.

The salesperson’s trick is to know the pitch thoroughly and to have researched the market well enough to know whether she will be wasting her time - before setting off.   Now whilst it isn’t always possible for us marketers to do an in-depth analysis of our customers - reporters, web site visitors, etc - there are some great new tools that we can use to make our work more scientific.

Over the summer months Google released a stack  of (FREE!) new search marketing research tools to help us understand what the web is interested in.  Their Keyword Suggest tool is primarily designed to help people make better decisions about keywords for Google Adwords (Pay Per Click / PPC) campaigns, but it’s also an very valuable app for researching the popularity of our content offers and the language that we use to describe them, as well as understanding our competition.

For example, I’m thinking of creating a new white paper on ‘mobile marketing’ to help me go and sell to mobile marketing-type people.  What Google Suggest tells me is that there’s a healthy number of people searching for this term - approximately 31,000 per month right now.  But if I run a normal Google search on the phrase I also find that I’m up against approximately 33 million other web pages who are also interested in marketing ideas, products or services in the same area.

Alternatively, a bit of research on the phrase ‘mobile promotions’ gives me 1,600 searchers per month and just over 1 million competing web pages; and ‘mcommerce’ gives me an audience of around 900 per month and only a million or so competing pages.

Now assuming that my budget is limited, I have some valuable new information to play with.  I know that it’s going to be far more cost-effective to create content offers around ideas and phrases such as ‘mcommerce’ than ‘mobile marketing’: and, whilst the general thread of my piece may not be radically different from what I’d originally planned, if I optimise the content around these new ideas I stand a far higher chance of engaging with people through search (because my corresponding web page will be fighting it out for the top spots on Google with only one million other pages, as opposed to 33 million.)

In addition, I might just find I have a bunch of new angles to play with.  Let’s say I decide that ‘mcommerce’ is a different kettle of fish to plain old ‘mobile marketing’ - as mcommerce speaks to buying and selling over a phone, whilst ‘marketing’ may be more about finding and influencing people.  Hey presto!  Another rich - and marketable - seam of content ideas is opened up.  Further, this angle might just ring a few new and meaningful bells for the piece, as it’s the importance of the transactional capabilities of the mobile web that my sales guys have been banging on about for the past six months……

With Google to play with there’s really no excuse for inventing our content plays in a vacuum.  Pulling useful research data from the interweb has never been easier, and it ought to make our work more effective.  So buff your pitch up.  A 30 second stint of research might make your content efforts go a whole lot further than you thought….

A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to every B2B marketer.

But there’s a factor that cuts across all of these and is probably more important than any of them: confidence.

Confidence is the attitude of leaders and winners. Great marketing always has plenty of it and the vast majority of mediocre marketing has little or none.

Used recklessly, confidence turns to arrogance and alienates your audience. But used well, confidence works wonders for any piece of marketing communications you apply it to:

• It gets noticed – jumping out from the background noise.

• It demonstrates your leadership instead of just claiming it.

• It differentiates you from your lacklustre competitors.

• It exposes your passion and your belief in what you do.

• It says you’re having fun – people like that.

• It is fun – turning marketing from a chore into a sport.

• It motivates the company – making people proud to work there.

Confidence really is the secret weapon of B2B marketing (for B2C, it’s not a secret). Even companies locked in commodity markets can leap out of the pack with a little attitude and energy.

As an agency, our best work is our most confident work. It happens when we dare to present something to a client that we know is likely to be rejected. It happens when a client recognises that the option that makes them sweat is probably the one to choose.

Confidence has to come from something real or it transmits false bravado. It has to be rooted in conviction. When we do our consulting process for new clients, we’re always looking for the pockets of passion inside the company. The people having the most fun. The people who believe in what they’re doing and aren’t afraid to tell people why it’s great.

We call these the ‘crown jewels’ of any company and our work is all about discovering them and pushing them to the front of the story… with oodles of confidence.

I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb.

As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief - around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it - this globbet of content is really, really important - this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky - use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better - your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

We blogged a while back about the idea of guerrilla video for B2B websites — foregoing expensive video productions to just go out and get the footage you need to tell a story.

All it takes is an idea — and a client with some vision and courage.

Our client VNL has plenty of both. Marketing guru Pär Almqvist and CEO Anil Raj responded to our ideas for bringing their story to life on the small screen with just three words, ‘Let’s do it’. A few weeks later, Pär and I were in Deorhi, a small rural village in Utar Pradesh, armed with two Sony HD camcorders.

VNL is the inventor of microtelecom, the re-engineering of the mobile infrastructure especially for rural markets. That means base stations that are solar-powered, incredibly low-cost and easily assembled by people with no technical expertise.

VNL sells to mobile operators but we wanted to make the promise of rural connectivity come to life by talking directly to the operators’ potential customers: the villagers themselves.

Deorhi was the perfect village for our needs. Two hundred kilometers from Delhi, Deorhi receives what we call ‘accidental mobile coverage’ because of its location near an important road between to larger towns. The people of Deorhi were never targeted for mobile services, but they got them by accident.

Deorhi is also where VNL’s Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Sirohi, grew up (his father founded the first school in Deorhi and served as it’s principal for 42 years).

The idea for the video was simply to go to Deorhi and interview the villagers about their experiences with mobile phones. We then edited the results into a warm, compelling piece that makes the VNL story come to life.

We expected people to like using mobiles — after all, it’s the first connectivity of any kind for Deorhi. But we were really blown away by the impact that mobile services are having on people’s lives — both for personal and business reasons.

The people of Deorhi were incredibly open and generous. As guests of the Sirohi family, we were also guests of the entire village. That made it easy for Pär and I to conduct over thirty interviews with everyone from 6 year-old kids to an 88-year old man.

After just a few interviews, we knew we’d got what we came for: even without professional cameramen, the footage looks great (bright sun and pretty amazing camcorders helped). We used one camera on a tripod and the other as a hand-held for cut-away shots and footage of the village. The stationery camera used a lapel microphone to make the sound as clear as possible (hugely important).

Pär composed and created the soundtrack himself. He’s not just a ‘marketing dude’, he’s also an incredibly talented musician and kick-ass web developer (he designed and coded the entire VNL site, which we wrote).

The footage was edited by Hugh Gormley, our quasi-in-house editor extraordinaire and posted on VNL’s Resource Library, designed and coded by Pär.

It appears alongside an interview with CEO Anil Raj that we shot over a few hours in Delhi (again, using our two camcorders). It’s a long piece so we cut it into chapters for easy navigation.

Looking back, a few lessons from these first forays into guerrilla video:

• Just do it – The costs of this kind of project are so low, you can shoot first and ask questions later. If you don’t like the footage, abort.

• Keep it simple – Start with a simple idea. No actors. No dramatisation. Just one idea executed well.

• Don’t ignore production values – Yes, it’s the YouTube ethic, but problems with sound, lighting, framing or focus will distract from your message.

• Invest in post-production – The film is made in the editing. Get a great editor and let him do his job. (Thanks, Hugh).

• Skip the committees – Pär and Elise Alpen were the only client contacts for both of these films. We checked in on the key decisions but they let us get on with everything else. It helped that Pär could handle a camera and both kinds of keyboard.

• Go for the end customer – B2B markets can be a bit abstract. Think about skipping over your direct customer and talking to the end consumer for some real energy and context.

Maybe we got lucky with these two films. But the point of guerrilla video is to keep costs low enough to be able to switch to Plan B or kill the project if it isn’t shaping up the way you want.

It isn’t just a video thing: this ’shoot from the hip’ marketing is on the rise as companies harness the power of blogs, forums, wikis, social media, pay-per-click and email.

As our name implies, we LIKE this kind of marketing. It’s fast. It’s fun. And it makes a real impact in the time it takes traditional marketing to arrange a conference call.

We’ve got more videos in the works for VNL and for clients like dotMobi – and we’re hatching a few new case study ideas for ourselves. Don’t touch that dial.

Don’t know about you, but it’s Friday evening and we’re offski. Peroni awaits. We’re celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.

This is our latest and greatest project on Wordpress. Those super smart investment guys at Kennet - whose funds assist great tech firms such as Clearswift (also a Velocity client), Kapow and Daptiv - asked us earlier this year to help them revamp their corporate positioning and give their web site a lick of paint.

Well, here she is: a totally new web presence for a totally different technology Venture Capital fund. We like to think we nailed this one - in fact we’re super proud. Although it’s a small site, it’s deeply layered with some luscious design and content touches that set it apart from the competition as a thinking man’s investment firm.

In fact, we can vouch for this first hand. We’ve worked real close with Kennet’s senior team over the past few months to get it off the ground. So, big thanks to Max Bleyleben (check his blog on the European VC scene here) and the crew for being so clued up and game for trying something a little different.

Credits:

Strategy, words, direction and project management: Velocity
Design: Tourist
Development and implementation: Two Thirty

Warm glows all round.

…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but not as you know it.)

We’re so proud about this one that we’ve issued a hard-hitting press release that explains what it’s all about in full.

The short story: it’s the first part of a new Velocity campaign for dotMobi, which is designed to help make “.mobi” the domain of choice for all mobile web sites.

It’s a great brief, working with a really great organisation. Watch this space…

Project credits: design and content - Velocity; development and implementation - dotMobi.

We’ve been beavering away over the past few weeks on an important new campaign for one of our shiny new clients in the mobile internet space.

It’s a fascinating area - full of over-hype and under-delivery a few years ago; now ripe and ready for prime time.

Looking at the guts of the technical environment, it’s clear that much has happened since the heady days of BT advertising ’surf the mobile web’ with a dodgy GSM connection and a two-tone, LED-like WAP browser. Now we have 3G, in-home Femtocells for maximum coverage, and a mini super-duper iPhone in our hands. As a result, the mobile web is now ready to be used as a killer marketing platform.

But where to start?

This is one of the most interesting questions in ‘new media’ marketing right now. Nobody’s really developed the killer app or the definitive campaign yet. And it looks like in many ways we’re also recreating many marketing mistakes of the past.

Just like the desktop web took a bunch of successfully established marketing activities and deliverables and ‘transcoded’ them online into brochureware web sites, Flash microsites and the like, the mobile web seems to chock full of broken e-commerce sites for ringtones, poorly formatted mapping services and mind-numbingly frustrating directory listings.

The view from here is that we really need to stop and start again when it comes to building successful marketing experiences on the mobile web.

Here’s some obvious - but often forgotten - points to take into account:

• Phones screens are small (less content is more)
• Usage patterns have different restraints: time, location, etc (think running from tube to bus into town for a meeting and trying to check up on some facts)
• Speed is important. Not in terms of speed of connection (although this obviously helps), but in getting to the point as quickly as possible. Fewer clicks to action, easier to search and find, that sort of thing.
• Development standards and processes are different. See ready.Mobi for an example of how different by running your url through their free page and site checker. It’ll show you how your site looks on a Nokia (or a Motorola, or a Samsung…)

That’s a lot of difference - but, if you can build this kind of thinking into your creative plans at source they ought to present a bunch of great marketing and communications opportunies.

For example, how about a mobile version of your site that serves mobile-centric content only….? Like creating a stripped down ‘About’ and ‘Products’ section, but a top line presentation of those important white paper pdfs in an iPhone browser-friendly format so that - instead of playing Sudoku - executive types can read them on their long train ride home?

Mobile-thinking seems to be the future of the mobile web. What do you think?

We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

1. A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
2. A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

• What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
• Do you make you accessible enough?
• What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
• What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
• How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

OK, Listen Up

Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and you’re going to enjoy it.”

Boring copy is all the same:

It uses the passive voice
“The interaction is further enabled by automated screen-scrape optimization technology…”

It’s jargon-soaked
“…utilizing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that combines traditional Business Process Management (BPM) with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) into a seamless, scalable Blah-De-Blah (BDB).

It’s abstract instead of concrete
“…enabling better processes through systematic automation of yadda-yadda-yadda.”

It’s all in the 3rd person
“The software helps financial services companies better manage their customer-facing…”

This last point is rarely talked about but is especially crippling. Pick up your last data sheet. Now go through it and change the third person phrasing into second person singular: the subject is “You” (the reader).

You’ll have to rewrite the copy to make it sound right. And once you do, you will have made it better. More engaging. More down to earth. More personal.

I’m not suggesting you only use the 2nd person. That would be weird. But try using it and see if it doesn’t help you focus on a specific reader or listener — and help them focus on your message.

Case in point: you’ve probably noticed that the first half of this post is written in the third person. The second half is written in the second person singular. And it’s just that extra notch more engaging. Don’t you think?

Anyone can claim anything they like about their product or service. Claims are empty. Your job as a B2B marketer is to get believed.

But credibility is a funny thing. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes us believe one person and not another; or believe one claim while remaining suspicious about a very similar claim made by someone else.

To make sure your message is believed, you can’t have too many credibility-builders (though spending too high a proportion of your reader’s attention on credibility issues might backfire by making you appear desperate). In general, more credibility is better.

Let’s look at the top cred-builders:

• Statistics - ideally independently generated
• Awards – the fairy dust of the credibility business
• Accreditations – sometimes essential, other times a hygiene issue
• Analyst attention and endorsement – can go a long way for some customers in some markets
• Media attention and endorsement – the better the source, the more it adds to your cred
• Lists of customers – if you’ve got ‘em, flaunt ‘em
• Testimonials – more credible than you’d think; the good ones have a ring of truth
• Case studies – often boring and ignored; if you can get them read, they’re worth their weight in gold
• Your resources and assets – just being big and solid and here to stay builds credibility
• The credentials of your team – hard to get this into every conversation, but never hurts
• Other successful products – winners breed winners
• Your company’s commercial success – the trick is to not to focus on the growth but the reasons behind it

Softer signals that indicate credibility:

• Your reputation – the only way to control it is to execute brilliantly in every department
• The way you speak – a straight, open, honest tone of voice does wonders for credibility
• The way you look – clean, inviting design says clear thinking and user-friendliness
• The way you behave – personal interactions can wipe away all of the above or double it

The last credibility builder is probably more important than the first sixteen but is usually undervalued: good, solid logic.

If your argument makes sense and is built on premises that the audience accepts, they will believe you. If it’s built on shaky foundations or makes little leaps of faith, they won’t.

At Velocity, we often break down our clients’ stories into a diagram that shows the steps to a sale — the things people have to believe in order to progress to ‘Yes’. Sometimes the path shows four easy steps separated by simple logic. Other times, it’s seven or eight steps, some separated by yawning chasms — the zones where we’ll have to work extra hard to get prospects to the next step.

The sixteen credibility-builders are all important. But without the seventeenth – a good, strong case – you’re supporting a false front. Spend some time analysing your own steps to a sale. Make sure you’re not asking people to take leaps of faith. Build an argument that earns every step and you’re more than half the way home.