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

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

I don’t think any marketing activity rattles the B2B marketers’ nerves more than the company blog. It should.

If your business doesn’t blog at all, you fear that you’re missing a trick. Whenever somebody mentions a blog or blogging, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before the rationalizations stream forth.

If your business has a blog, you’re tangling with a beast. The dreaded blog monster doesn’t go away no matter how many times you’ve fed it.

Each post’s traffic, or lack thereof, is all too plain to see for anyone with access to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Those “tweet this”, “Like” and “LinkedIn Share” buttons with their overly optimistic counters – so everyone can share our stuff! – display for all to see how much sharing is really going on.

Also blogging lacks that surgical precision you get from tying off a brochure, advertisement, eBook or landing page. The blog’s never done. Never sent to the printers. Never finished.

The longing for the better post always nags. So often the great post you invested so much time and effort on, got so little traffic. Maybe if we did this. Or maybe that. The perfect formula is antagonizingly always out of reach.

Even when you manage to post three new posts to your blog in one week, the week ends with you thinking “and then?” You read a post over the weekend from a famous blogger who says you need to post daily. At least.

Should you blog about Justin Bieber (for the traffic) or follow the strict and serious party line (a “pain points” post that goes into excruciating detail)? How to judge readability, interest level, subject breadth, emotion and level of detail?

And, for all their appearance of ease and prolificacy, blog posts generate more internal critique and heartache than just about anything else. The same guy who says “psssh, it’s just a blog” one day, will berate you for a post the next.

If you, like most B2B marketing executives, choose not to produce or create your blog, but rather just want to manage it, those are only the beginning of your headaches.

For the professional digital marketing manager who wants their business’s blog to run unencumbered, there are countless difficult questions to ask, such as:

• • Do we work out our content plan ourselves, do we outsource the editorial plan, or do we work together with a supplier on it?

• • Do we work with one outfit to produce all of our posts, or many different suppliers, bloggers and/or freelancers? What is best in terms of money, consistency, manageability, quality and experimentation?

• • Do we share our blog’s analytics with the writer or agency, in order to help them improve, or do we hold these numbers for ourselves?

• • To what extent can we combine internally produced blog posts with externally produced blog posts? Will externally produced posts seem unauthentic and detached from the intricate nature of our business?

• • What happens when our CEO is asked about a series of blog posts produced by our agency, and he has no knowledge of them (because he hasn’t read them)?

• • How do we ensure that the knowledge and relationships created via blogging come into our organization, if the blog is produced out-of-house?

• • How much do we really need to pay in order to get quality? And what is must-have quality, versus good-enough quality? What are fair rates for those levels?

Marketers love to sort things out. They see a circular hole, and they seek a circular peg to fill it. Which is why blogging creates such a headache. It’s not a circular hole. It’s not square. Or trapezoidal. It’s not even fixed. It’s amorphous and always changing. How do you sort that out?

This all might lead the average marketer to think “then why do it?!” But if you’re serious about what you’re doing and you’ve learned a thing or two about web marketing, you know the answer to that. You must, and you must get it right. There can be no other way.

I have worked with countless companies on blogs – some here at Velocity and some in an earlier life. And I’ve blogged for over a decade, both here and elsewhere. Plus I’ve talked to, and listened to, countless other marketers bemoan blogging.

So I offer up this little post to say, I understand. I know. But the questions can be answered, and we can stumble along and pretty soon we’ll have something to look back at and say: “There was a there there. And – goddamn it – I think we’re actually getting better at this.”

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Blogging, B2B social media, Blogging, Social Media

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Blogging is an anxiety-inducing business. Business blogging even more so.

I don’t think any marketing activity rattles the B2B marketers’ nerves more than the company blog. It should.

If your business doesn’t blog at all, you fear that you’re missing a trick. Whenever somebody mentions a blog or blogging, there’s a moment of uncomfortable silence before the rationalizations stream forth.

If your business has a blog, you’re tangling with a beast. The dreaded blog monster doesn’t go away no matter how many times you’ve fed it.

Each post’s traffic, or lack thereof, is all too plain to see for anyone with access to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Those “tweet this”, “Like” and “LinkedIn Share” buttons with their overly optimistic counters – so everyone can share our stuff! – display for all to see how much sharing is really going on.

Also blogging lacks that surgical precision you get from tying off a brochure, advertisement, eBook or landing page. The blog’s never done. Never sent to the printers. Never finished.

The longing for the better post always nags. So often the great post you invested so much time and effort on, got so little traffic. Maybe if we did this. Or maybe that. The perfect formula is antagonizingly always out of reach.

Even when you manage to post three new posts to your blog in one week, the week ends with you thinking “and then?” You read a post over the weekend from a famous blogger who says you need to post daily. At least.

Should you blog about Justin Bieber (for the traffic) or follow the strict and serious party line (a “pain points” post that goes into excruciating detail)? How to judge readability, interest level, subject breadth, emotion and level of detail?

And, for all their appearance of ease and prolificacy, blog posts generate more internal critique and heartache than just about anything else. The same guy who says “psssh, it’s just a blog” one day, will berate you for a post the next.

If you, like most B2B marketing executives, choose not to produce or create your blog, but rather just want to manage it, those are only the beginning of your headaches.

For the professional digital marketing manager who wants their business’s blog to run unencumbered, there are countless difficult questions to ask, such as:

• • Do we work out our content plan ourselves, do we outsource the editorial plan, or do we work together with a supplier on it?

• • Do we work with one outfit to produce all of our posts, or many different suppliers, bloggers and/or freelancers? What is best in terms of money, consistency, manageability, quality and experimentation?

• • Do we share our blog’s analytics with the writer or agency, in order to help them improve, or do we hold these numbers for ourselves?

• • To what extent can we combine internally produced blog posts with externally produced blog posts? Will externally produced posts seem unauthentic and detached from the intricate nature of our business?

• • What happens when our CEO is asked about a series of blog posts produced by our agency, and he has no knowledge of them (because he hasn’t read them)?

• • How do we ensure that the knowledge and relationships created via blogging come into our organization, if the blog is produced out-of-house?

• • How much do we really need to pay in order to get quality? And what is must-have quality, versus good-enough quality? What are fair rates for those levels?

Marketers love to sort things out. They see a circular hole, and they seek a circular peg to fill it. Which is why blogging creates such a headache. It’s not a circular hole. It’s not square. Or trapezoidal. It’s not even fixed. It’s amorphous and always changing. How do you sort that out?

This all might lead the average marketer to think “then why do it?!” But if you’re serious about what you’re doing and you’ve learned a thing or two about web marketing, you know the answer to that. You must, and you must get it right. There can be no other way.

I have worked with countless companies on blogs – some here at Velocity and some in an earlier life. And I’ve blogged for over a decade, both here and elsewhere. Plus I’ve talked to, and listened to, countless other marketers bemoan blogging.

So I offer up this little post to say, I understand. I know. But the questions can be answered, and we can stumble along and pretty soon we’ll have something to look back at and say: “There was a there there. And – goddamn it – I think we’re actually getting better at this.”

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Blogging, B2B social media, Blogging, Social Media

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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 we’d produced focused on:

• How good we were
• What we had done, why we were number one
• Our products and features

We had absolutely nothing written on how we understood the pain points of our customers and prospects or how we could solve their issues”

If more B2B marketers did a similar exercise, they’d see the same thing.

Because if business is a cocktail party, the typical B2B marketer is the bore who traps you in the corner, blathering about his achievements and delighting you with his opinions.

It’s weird, because the vast majority of B2B marketers are actually, intelligent, polite people who would never behave like the party bore (or boor). But when they step on to their soap boxes, something changes. They assume that what they’re supposed to do is shill like a carnival barker — when most people would rather engage in a chat.

Maybe it’s because two-way engagements are harder than narcissistic warbling. You have to actually listen. You have to admit (at least to yourself) that there are people for whom your ‘solution’ is not a solution at all. And, most importantly, you’re forced to realise that your company and products and services and competitors actually play a very small part of your prospect’s work life — and an even smaller part of their whole life.

Most B2B marketing makes the fatal assumption that prospects think of little other than their data cleansing problems or their web security holes or their lift truck fleet efficiency. If someone with this assumption in their head approaches you, you’re going to do whatever you need to do to get away. Fast.

One good thing about the new inter-social-digi-marketing is that marketers are stepping off their soapboxes or coming out from behind their Oz-sized curtains and exposing themselves as people. People with names and hobbies and kids and pets. Not just zombies with straplines.

At the end of the day, there are thousands of ways to make lousy marketing. But there’s only one way to make good marketing: start with a realistic view of your target audience’s lives and attitudes and issues. Then show them you’re starting there.

I’m off to the bar, can I get you anything?

———————————-

Illustration credit – Creative Commons – By jimmyknows7

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Content Marketing, Copywriting

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Social Media, Pretend Friends, and the Lie of False Intimacy  via @jaybaer
Jay discusses the illusion of intimacy created by social media – as exemplified by the recent tragic death of Trey Pennington, a fellow B2B marketer and (we thought) a friend.

What ‘marketing automation’ means for the well-rounded B2B marketer @venturebeat
Bryan Brown of Silverpop gives an excellent, short outline of the essentials of marketing automation. The way Bryan sees it, it’s about Data Collection, Lead Management, Cross-Channel Campaign Management, Social Marketing, Tracking & Reporting. Nice one, Bryan. Clear, simple, comprehensive.

How Kinaxis uses Social Media via @tellallmarketing
A nice, short case study on how Kinaxis, the supply chain software company, started using social media. Refreshingly open and with results included. Thanks Kinaxis.

The Bad Science of Link Exchange Emails via @chrislake
Chris is the head of content at Econsultancy. His ‘worst practice’ advice on crappy, spammy link exchange requests is an excellent survey and a damning indictment to boot. We recently did a similar take on Viagra Spam and its irresistible charms.

The Great Twitter Unfollow Experiment of 2011 via @chrisbrogan
Chris Brogan had a LOT of followers. So when he decided to unfollow all of them, we knew it would be an interesting experiment. Check out his reasoning. We look forward to the results.

Does Content Curation work for you?
This post is a rather basic example of B2B Content Curation – trawling the web for relevant content that we think our readers would appreciate. The idea is simple: not every blog post you do has to be 100% original; you can still add value just by sieving some web effluent and pointing out the choice nuggets for people. (Note to self: mix metaphors more carefully). Work for you?

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Content Curation, B2B content marketing, B2B Marketing Automation, B2B social media, Twitter

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

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 vast majority of content from Econsutlancy, it’s free.

The Briefing covers a hell of a lot in its 46 pages, including:

Customer Centricity – user experience, customer experience management and ‘voice of the customer’

Channel Diversification – (think Mobile)

Data – measuring social, attribution models…

Social Media – social search, social commerce…

Content Strategy – the move to earned media…

Nobody boils down the complex world of digital marketing better than Econsultancy.

Highly recommended.

(Disclaimer: Yes, Econsultancy is a Velocity client but we don’t pimp unless we mean it.)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B social media, Content Marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Social Media, Strategy

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea…

More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

Project Open Kimono Part 12 – Re-purposing and atomising your content

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, digital marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

There are lots of ways to build your content marketing strategy:

Around personas – with content for each type of buyer.

Around the stages of the buying journey – with early stage videos, mid-stage ebooks and late-stage case studies.

Around your product portfolio – making sure each product has its content support.

Around organisational structure – with each division having its own content stream.

Around media types – balancing videos, slideshares, ebooks, infographics, microsites, white papers…

We’ve seen all of these approaches and more. But I’d like to suggest another way to go: build your content around your most important buying triggers.

What’s a buying trigger?
A buying trigger is an event in the life of a prospect that suddenly makes them receptive to your story.

• For a client that makes enterprise middleware, one of the big buying triggers was a merger or acquisition. When a bank buys another bank it needs to integrate the IT as smoothly as possible. The right middleware can help.
• For App-DNA (the daddy of all application compatibility tools), a big enterprise’s decision to migrate to Windows 7 is a major buying trigger.
• For Reevoo, the social commerce experts, a prospect’s change of ecommerce platform is a great trigger for reconsidering the ratings & reviews system.
• For PressRun, the tablet publishing platform, a magazine’s decision to develop an iPad edition is a massive trigger.

Notice that all of these triggers are discrete events; they’re all in the buyer’s world, not the vendor’s; and they all involve the abrupt opening of a window of opportunity. Trigger moments put the prospect into a period of change. That makes them a bit uncomfortable with the status quo and a lot hungrier for information. Perfect.

Clear buying triggers are an important part of a B2B company’s success. We’ve seen dozens and dozens of technology players with great products but very fuzzy buying triggers. It’s hard to market this kind of solution. You have to wait for the prospect to recognise the need and hope they can find you at that moment.

So how can you exploit buying triggers?
Buying triggers are a natural dimension to build your B2B content marketing strategy around. Using the above examples:

• The middleware guys should do content around the IT challenges of mergers & acquisitions.
• App-DNA should do stuff around Windows 7 migrations. Like this Windows 7 Migration Checklist.
• Reevoo should do ebooks around ecommerce platform change. (Watch this space).
• PressRun needs content on tablet magazine publishing. In fact, they dedicate a whole blog and newsletter to it.

Sometimes the buying triggers don’t feel very central to your story. That doesn’t matter. If it’s a real buying trigger, there’s a real opportunity to create some good content around it.

Some Trigger Marketing content tips
Marketing that targets specific buying triggers is not much different from good content marketing. But there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Target one trigger at a time – it’s tempting to combine the minor ones but it defeats the purpose.
2. Nail the implications of the trigger event – a trigger event raises new issues for prospects. Master these issues.
3. Draw a direct line from the trigger to your door – don’t be shy about this. Tell people exactly why someone in their new situation needs your solution.
4. Think about how the triggered prospect searches – keyword research around triggers is of prime importance. Many triggered prospects aren’t on your lists yet. You need to make it easy for them to find you.
5. Get those trigger keywords in your titles – you need this content to rank on the trigger terms.
6. Be open to new media and channels – trigger marketing often takes you to new websites, social media groups and marketing partners. Embrace that.
7. Create content clusters – a single ebook on a trigger topic may not be enough to rank on the engines. An ebook, white paper and video hanging off a blog on a microsite (all SEO optimised) will multiply the value.

Done right, Trigger Marketing (hey, I coined a phrase!) can be the most powerful Huskie in your B2B marketing dogsled.

Today, everyone does personas. Tomorrow, we’ll all be doing Trigger Maps, too.

———-

Photo: flickr creative commons by .void

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B social media, lead nurturing

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh