B2B marketing

The B2B Marketing Fun Poll

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

To all B2B media: A modest proposal

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Make branded media available on your site, behind a special “paywall”, build more traffic, brand love and social goodness.

The editorial calendar for content marketing: a round-up

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

Sexy new FODM 2012 mailer. Oooh….

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The Future of Digital Marketing event (FODM) is a highlight of the digital marketing calendar and one of Econsultancy’s longest-standing events. So we were thrilled when Laura Wall asked us to do the main print promotional piece for the 2012 event.  We gave it to Luke Donaghey to design –– he did last year’s bright, [...]

Pinterest for B2B marketing: Velocity dives in

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

The problem/solution structure in B2B content marketing

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

Is B2B content marketing jumping the shark?

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

Content Differentiation: Doug Does Mad Marketing TV

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

How far are we from blind software taste tests?

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So many pieces of enterprise software, so little difference. Could we start thinking branding and emotions as part of the software product? Is there room for delight, serendipity?

Starting with an earthquake and building to a climax

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

Friday post: B2B AWESOME!!!

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This is a Friday Velocity post. That means all bets are off, and this is totally NSFW. But fuck it. I think it’ll make you feel awesome.

Billboard boycott – let’s start with B2B billboard ads

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Having spent my entire career in marketing, I’m hardly an anti-capitalist. But there is one form of advertising that I’d happily see banned tomorrow: billboards. The multi-billion dollar outdoor advertising industry is built on a premise that all marketers should reject: that it’s okay to sell people’s eyeballs without their consent or benefit. As a [...]

The Marketo Revenue Rockstar Tour Review

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I just got back to the desk the day after Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar event in London so I thought I’d file a quick report on it. The event was fantastic. A buzzing, interesting, challenging day full of best-practice insight on demand generation and marketing automation. Not to mention the chance to meet lots of people [...]

Are you coming to FUNNEL?

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FUNNEL is a great idea (well, we did help develop it). It’s a B2B marketing event that covers the entire sales/marketing pipeline. It happens on 1 November at the Lancaster Hotel in London. As a friend of Velocity, you get a 20% discount to the event just by using this code: FLD508. Four tracks: Attract, [...]

Content marketing & marketing automation webinar

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In case you missed last week’s Content Marketing & Marketing Automatation webinar put on by DemandGen’s John Sweeney, here’s a link to the archived talk with slides. In it, Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point and Hubspot takes you through his principles of content marketing and Doug Kessler from Velocity shares Twelve Lessons learned from our [...]

Are you the bore in the corner?

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When he was working for a big B2B company, Andrew Walker did a brave thing. He audited every piece of communication that his company put out, with a cold, clear eye. And the result was, in Andrew’s words, “overwhelmingly bad. Every page on our website, every article we’d written, every e-newsletter, every piece of collateral [...]

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about

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You’re a marketer, we’re marketers. It’s good to share the things we like. Here are nine companies you ought to know about. They all help marketers make more money for their companies; they’re all great at what they do; and they’re all Velocity clients – which says a hell of a lot about their judgement [...]

Internet Marketing Strategy: a meaty new briefing for all marketers

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If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the change taking place in digital marketing – and all the blogs, eBooks, videos and research reports that try to explain it all – take an info-break and read this one report from the Gods of Digital Marketing: Econsultancy. It’s the new Internet Marketing Strategy Briefing and, unlike the [...]

12 Lessons from the Manifesto Campaign – Project Open Kimono 13

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We’ll be wrapping up the results of the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign soon, but here’s a quick tour of some of the lessons learned as we brought the Manifesto to market. There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea… 12 Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto Campaign View more presentations [...]

Just buy the f**king product

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Inspired by the story of the new best-selling children’s book sensation “Go the f**k to sleep”, we bring you the story of a CEO* brought to the edge of desperation as he copes with digital marketing.

Company blog as B2B skunkworks

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How making your business’s blog into a testing ground for new ideas can drive innovation, and provide proof of concept for radical changes.

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

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This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more [...]

We’re Hiring: Digital Marketing Analyst

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Are you ready for the Land of Accountability? If you’re a B2B marketer with a thirst for measurement then find out why we might be your next assignment.

A nice bit of visual B2B personalisation

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LinkedIn just sent me a nice piece of highly personalized B2B email. I’ve never seen ‘visual persoanlization’ in an out-bound email before but it’s pretty compelling to see the faces of so many friends and contacts looking back at me.  I also like the little scribbled comments like ‘See Simon’s new job’. The only question [...]

What B2B marketers can learn from Viagra Spam

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Viagra spammers have a tough challenge. They know that if they can get their message to a few billion people, a few thousand morons will place an order. But they also know that spam filters all over the world are set specifically to prevent them from doing so. One of the toughest hurdles: the email [...]

How to inject urgency into your B2B marketing

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We talk a lot about the Battle for Attention in B2B and about Buyer Attention Deficit Disorder and the relentless Mississippi of info-dreck that gushes through us all every hour of every day and about how the best-laid campaigns of the humble B2B marketer doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Haiti anymore. But we haven’t [...]

Five things I’ve learned in B2B marketing

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Well, I’m moving on to work for Thomson Reuters (the siren call of being able to walk to work proved to be too strong to resist), and I thought I’d get all reflective and try to sum up some of the (many) things I’ve learned at Velocity.

Cross-Promoting B2B Content: Project Open Kimono Part 4

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It’s time to talk about cross-promoting content as we approach week three of Project Open Kimono, the real-life, almost-real-time, warts-bunions-and-all case study of our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.  The idea is simple: in every piece of content you produce, tell the reader (or listener or viewer) about the most relevant other pieces of content you’ve [...]

B2B Content Marketing Trends and Spends

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Marketing Profs and Junta 42 haven’t half been busy lately. They’ve produced a report into content marketing, surveying skills, resources, and trends. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive report of its kind, surveying 1100 American marketers in May 2010. These are some of the highlights. All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content [...]

B2B Marketing agency Velocity publishes “B2B Marketing Manifesto”

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Velocity, the B2B marketing agency, has produced a new eBook for marketers called the B2B Marketing Manifesto, available for download from the Velocitypartners.co.uk website. The B2B Marketing Manifesto tackles the choice facing B2B marketers today: either step up to the challenge of marketing in a digital world, or continue using the internet for digital brochureware [...]

The B2B Marketing Manifesto: hot off the press

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“This is without a doubt the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer. It’s also the scariest.” That’s how our new eBook, The B2B Marketing Manifesto begins. It’s a lunatic rant, a call to arms and a plea for ambition in B2B marketing — with eleven specific recommendations for rising to the [...]

Sales and Marketing: the same hymn sheet

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Our friend Stephanie Tilton (one of the Savvy B2B Marketers) and the folks at AG Salesworks have just published an excellent eBook on the subject: Gear Up For Success: 8 Steps to Get Sales & Marketing Cranking in Unison:

The B2B Marketing Manifesto

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A tirade against the reactionary forces of traditional marketing. A wake up call. Okay, a bit of a temper tantrum.

Sex, Lies, and Advertising

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Back in the 19th Century, you could make all kinds of wild claims about your Tincture of Gripe Water or Dr Astoundo’s Patented Baldness Liniment. Nobody could sue you if it didn’t do what it said on the tin. That changed in the early 20th Century, which is all to the good. It means marketers have to be more creative when promoting products or services, and not just resort to bare-faced lies.

Anatomy of a project: Calnetix

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We’ve just completed a big project for Calnetix, a company that turn waste heat from industrial processes into energy. It’s green, clean, and it saves money. What’s not to like? Watch the Prezi to find out what we did.

Ten ways that B2B marketing copy goes wrong

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Let’s face it, most B2B copywriting is not very good. There are many reasons, but here are our top ten. Is your latest B2B marketing copy guilty of any of them?

Analytics can be fun, honestly.

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Ok, fine; maybe not as much fun as driving a speedboat up the Thames, but it can be extremely handy and oddly satisfying –if you get it right, that is. If you get it wrong, it’s less “fun” and more “total bloody nightmare”.

Why government and SEO don’t mix

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You can practically hear the moral outrage screaming between the lines:

“Four government departments spent almost £6m ensuring their websites appeared on search engine results pages in the last two financial years, according to newly released figures.” (BBC)

B2B marketing jobs in London

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We want your body. And your brain. We’re looking for talented copywriters, designers and project managers, so if you’re looking for a job in B2B marketing, come and talk to us.

B2B marketing’s virtuous digital circle: Spin Cycle

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At Velocity we believe in making our content work harder than we do. Find out how just a little bit of joined up thinking can make you the toast of your management team in just three months and still have spare time to enjoy the sunshine.

Bite me, Michael O’Leary

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Photo credit: Le Scribbler I’ve never flown Ryanair before. And now I never will again. If I’d wanted to raise my blood pressure, I could have done that for free by reading the comments section of the Daily Mail website. To anyone contemplating a journey with Ryanair, I suggest you shut yourself inside a biscuit [...]

How to structure a B2B argument

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B2B marketing always comes down to building an argument; telling a story that leads to an inescapable conclusion: ‘You need to buy this, now.’ If your argument isn’t solid, the creativity of Björk and the budget of Nike will not move your business.

Real women don’t sell

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Ultimo, the lingerie maker, has launched a new line of evening dresses. Interesting bit of diversification there – I suppose it makes sense for company that makes bras to also make outer garments. Hopefully the dresses will be designed with the logistics of bra-wearing in mind…

The power of beliefs in B2B marketing

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Check out this great TED Talk by Simon Sinek on the power of beliefs in marketing. Great leaders and great companies start with beliefs not facts, policies, products or services. People don’t buy WHAT you do they buy WHY you do it.

B2B Copywriting: hitting the sweet spot

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There are four kinds of B2B copywriting and they fall into the neat little quadrants formed when two important axes intersect: Clarity and Authenticity. If you can get both in your writing, you’re in the Sweet Spot and wonderful things will begin to happen to you…

Calnetix Power Solutions gets a dose of Velocity

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The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries. Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and industrial applications and turns it into electricity. The process is called the Organic Rankine Cycle, and has been used in large-scale, big footprint applications [...]

What hugging cruets and joined-up marketing have in common

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Answer: Econsultancy. Let me explain… Econsultancy have a brilliant new event called JUMP (which we helped launch a few months ago). It’s the most exclusive “online meets offline marketing” event of the year, and it brings together senior marketers to learn about best practice integrated marketing – all the innovations and developments where online and [...]

Avoid marketing intranet pitfalls

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Here’s an eBook we’ve written and designed for our friends SmallWorlders, the people who create fun and social intranets for marketing teams. Since it’s been up on the SmallWorlders website they’ve seen traffic increase 10 to 20 times the usual, which is pretty damn impressive.