B2B

We’re looking for a writer

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Writing is at the very heart of Velocity. Now we need a strong B2B copywriter to help us do great things.

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.

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”.

B2B summed up in two words: the writing’s on the road

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B2B is a lot simpler than the gurus would have you believe. After all the e-tomes and blog posts and webinars it really all boils down to two words — and you can see them painted on almost urban street road in the land. When in doubt: look down.

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 [...]

When was the last time you flossed?

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In B2B as in life, there’s a whole genre of pains-in-the-arse that nobody ever talks about: things that are really annoying but not quite annoying enough to actually force you to do anything about. This class of arse-pain needs a name. I hereby suggest ‘Plaque’.

Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

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Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet players, including Microsoft and Google. Essentially, .mobi is the only domain name that tells users, ‘This site will work on your phone’.

EPiServer uses market momentum to go public

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We just learned that our client EPiserver is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The company offers the best Micorosft .Net CMS on the planet and has delivered some really impressive numbers over the last few years.

IBS injects Velocity into turnaround

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When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions

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Drumroll please… Introducing The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s top B2B marketers, e-mail marketers and social media gurus” (including, erm, me). Ambal Balakrishnan, the tireless ClickDocuments founder, asked each of us a straightforward question, “What are key marketing trends and predictions for 2010?”

Our New Year’s B2B Marketing Resolutions

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Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are the new year’s resolutions from the heavyweights (especially after Christmas) at Velocity: Speak at more B2B industry events - To get the message out there that the old way of marketing is [...]

In Which The Hero Helps SmallWorlders Sell Intranets To Marketers

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We’ve been working with a great company called SmallWorlders. They produce smart, sociable intranets for marketing types. Their Sandbox™ platform, hosted model and marketing-savvy service teams combine to deliver the best marketing intranets on the planet. When we started working with them they knew who they were and what they did but only a select [...]

The Velocity B2B Marketing Tube Map

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We’ve always loved Harry Beck’s legendary design for the London Underground Tube Map, so thought we’d do our own version mapping out the B2B marketing landscape. Kind of makes sense if you give it some time. The junctions were the trickiest bits…

It’s Time For The Corporate Galactico

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The football season is here. But it’s not just football superstars who’ll make waves this year. Corporate comms teams are also looking for their Galacticos.

All CIOs (or CEOs) are not the same

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We’re often asked s for creative ideas that target ‘the C-suite’ – CEO, COO, CFO, CIO and so on. It’s natural because these guys are usually the ones to sign the cheques, particularly for significant purchases. But the question implies that these people are pretty much all the same in what they do and how they think and behave. In our experience, this isn’t true.

The white paper is dead…or is it?

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I presented a webinar the other day where I stated that while white papers are still the staple of content marketing, they’re getting really stale as a communications vehicle for B2B. A few people were so incensed they contacted me to say I was talking nonsense. So click here to find out whether they changed my mind…

New media frenzy: the medium is just the medium

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It’s an exciting time to be in the communications business. It’s not just that there are so many new ways to reach people. It’s also that we get to watch as each of these new media gropes for its place in the communications ecosystem. But all this new media is still powered by the same thing…

Wordle Does Velocity

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James Pearce and his mobiForge blog turned us on to Wordle, the online toy that turns any text into a word cloud.

We pointed it at the Velocity blog and this came out:

Guerrilla video: VNL thinks beyond B2B

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

The 4 steps to a B2B sale: rational meets irrational

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My old boss Steve Trygg (a great copywriter) used to talk about the role of marketing in business decision-making by breaking down every purchase decision into four steps — the four things buyers do before they buy…

Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

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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…

ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

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We’re proud to say that shipserv.com launched successfuly this morning. May all who sail in her find reasonably priced shipping supplies from a broad (and competitive) selection of maritime vendors….

The power of “You”: the 2nd person singular in B2B copywriting

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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.” Part of this is the 2nd person singular voice. I’m talking to YOU…

How Steve Jobs (and Dick Hardt) wows the crowds

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Our friend and client John Watton, Marketing Director of ShipServ, recently shared with us a Business Week article that dissects and analyses Steve Jobs’s latest keynote at Macworld (the one where he launched the MacBook Air). This ‘ten point framework’ will make your PPT’s hum…

Fighting Inertia: the toughest competitor of them all.

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Most B2B technology companies have a clear set of competitors they’re battling. But for some (usually early stage) tech companies, there are no other companies to fight: they’re inventing a market. The only competitor is the inertia of the target audience. At first glance, it sounds like a great position to be in. Never facing a head-to-head competitor. Being free from the never-ending features arms race. But in reality, these can be the toughest marketing challenges of them all…

Keywords: how to build an effective strategy in B2B

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We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why – to explain what separates a good keyword strategy from a stinker. I thought I’d share a bit of the thinking with you…

Champions and the Siren Effect: how early wins can mislead

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Early stage tech companies would do anything for those first few big wins — especially from blue-chip companies. But we’ve seen more than a few companies who were steered off course by these early wins. The early ‘champions’ were dream customers. They bought into the vision. They loved the product. They ‘got it’. How can that be bad?

Empathy and foreplay in B2B Marketing

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I don’t know how else to put this: nobody gives a shit about you. Your software or service or widget may be the center of your world but the people you’re selling to have better things to think about. Once you accept this simple fact, your marketing will get a lot better – because you’ll realise that your first and toughest job is to stop people in their tracks and offer you a small flake of their most precious, scarcest resource: their attention.

Whose Tipping Point is it Anyway? A B2B Perspective…

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There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed. It’s compelling stuff, but what’s the point of ‘tipping’ and the pursuit of ‘influencers’ in a B2B environment..?

Tweakonomics: Why B2B Marketing Agency Retainers Suck

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This post hereby announces the death of the good old monthly agency retainer. Tweakonomics is what you should be using to pay for your marketing services – it’s what we advocate for all our clients. Let me explain…

7 ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in B2B marketing

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Every marketing communication has two parts:

• The Signal – your message; the thing you want people to take away
• The Noise – everything else; the things that distract, delay and get in the way of the signal

Most B2B marketing – especially in technology businesses – is so full of noise, the static drowns out the music.

The ‘Big Mo’ in B2B technology marketing: are we listening to Gartner?

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As we seek to build our business, we’re meeting a lot of B2B tech firms. Pretty much every one of them says their own momentum is intimately connected to what leading industry analyst Gartner (which just happens to be a Velocity client, BTW) thinks about their company…

Building a B2B case: 8 tips from criminal lawyers

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We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So I did some research into how lawyers do what they do, focusing in on the summation to the jury, where the whole case comes together into one clear argument…

The Rise of Clean Technology

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According to the The National Venture Capital Association (US), Clean Technology is the hottest thing on Sand Hill Road. During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into clean tech startups, compared to $1.8 billion for all of 2006, and a mere $533 million in 2005…

No such thing as B2B

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Anil Raj, mobile industry heavy-hitter (and a new client in an exciting venture) hates the term B2B. He’s sold at the highest levels of the mobile industry (as Head of Ericsson India for instance) and is convinced that businesses don’t buy from businesses…