Lots of B2B marketers are fully paid up members of the I ♥ Analytics club, but not everyone’s convinced. One of the reasons for this is that there’s often a surfeit of information that isn’t very informative. B2B marketers drown in too many numbers and statistics, and decide therefore that analytics is a waste of time (thus throwing a very useful baby out with the bathwater).

There are some things you can do to sift the gold nuggets from the river mud:

Don’t just look at the short-term

Short term reporting is quite useful, but you need to keep an eye on long-term trends. As any statistician will tell you, you can’t infer generalizations from snapshots. If you react to some spike in your stream without thinking about its context and the longer view, you’re likely to end up with a knee-jerk reaction that may actually damage your campaign. In fact, the bigger the volume of data, the more accurate your results will be.

Keep it regular

Analytics is like a pint of Guinness – it just can’t be hurried. That means they’ll just have to wait if they want anything approaching accuracy. So don’t grab data at random, even if someone is breathing down your neck about a report they want by yesterday.

Analytics takes a little planning. You need to timetable a regular round of data collection from each stream. This must be done consistently: say, always at 11.30 on a Tuesday morning. That way you’re comparing like with like, as far as possible.

It’s true, analytics can be a huge waste of time if you don’t do it properly. But that’s not the fault of the system, it’s the fault of the operator. So if your analytics isn’t playing ball, it’s probably because you’ve done something wrong. As comfortable to admit as a wooden clog up the jaxie, sure, but that’s the way it goes. B2B marketing can be cruel.

Photo credit: Munksynz

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Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, SEO, web analytics

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That about sums it up.

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 every street in the land.

Of course, with enough effort, even this simple imperative can be screwed up:

The death of clarity

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, persuasion, writing

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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 offline come together.

Econsultancy called us in to help create a high-impact introduction pack for the cream of the guest list: big marketing cheeses from the UK’s top brands.

The pack we designed and wrote included a welcome letter, an invitation to JUMP and a special ticket to encourage our chosen few to invite their colleagues.

The last thing was to come up with a gift to go with the rest of it. It had to be eye-catching and encapsulate the whole point of JUMP. We found the perfect thing: little hugging salt and pepper pot people in the JUMP colours: green and white. We wrote a tag to go round their little necks with the strapline “Online and offline: playing nicely together since 2010”, which we think sums up the whole idea.

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The pack was high impact but not-so-high-cost thanks to a plain, white box, branded with a big, green Jump sticker. A nest of wood wool kept the ceramic guys from chipping.

The result: a lot of buzz, tweets and responses from marketers (including people at Nokia and elsewhere) and a new event that’s landed well and truly on the map.

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© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Branding

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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’.

Plaque clogs up your life, degrading its quality without ever actually demanding your full attention. Like barnacles on a hull, plaque slows you down but never stops you dead in the water.

A smashed windscreen is an emergency. A slightly cracked windscreen is plaque.

A gushing pipe is a call to action. A dripping tap is plaque.

Some people have a low plaque threshold and spring into action the moment something happens to make their toaster or doorknob or light switch sub-par. I happen to have a very high plaque threshold. I can ignore almost anything until it’s a genuine emergency — except I’m not really ignoring it at all, I’m registering it, logging it, making that tooth-suck sound about it and regretting the hell out of it. (I tell myself that this is because I ‘have a life’ but really it’s because I just can’t be arsed.) (Is an American allowed to use the word ‘arse’ twice in one blog post without some kind of UK tax kicking in?) (What about three times?).

Anyhoo: here’s where I segue towards some semblance of relevance for B2B marketers like you: every B2B marketing department suffers from an accumulation of plaque.

The About Us page on  your website doesn’t reflect what you do any more. The last press release in the News section was dated 1987. The logo on the powerpoint template is WAY too intrusive.  The list goes on and on. And, here’s why all this kind of matters: while no single bit of plaque will seriously undermine your performance or cripple your KPIs, Gartner estimates (or surely will one day estimate) that, taken together, accumulated plaque can suck away 10-20 hard-earned Brand Mojo points. Fact.

So here’s a Velocity Two-Step Action Plan™ for your own personal War Against Plaque:

1) Every time you notice a bit of plaque, write it down on a whiteboard, flip chart or wiki page for all to see.

2) On the 3rd Friday of every month, spend one hour removing plaque – you can call it Floss Friday if you really want to.

Are you with me? I hope so — because I visited your website recently and there are some howlers on there. No offense.

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Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by kate*

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B, B2B marketing, digital marketing, Web Marketing

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The buying process is long and complex in B2B tech markets. Usually, the bigger the company, the more people are involved and the longer it takes. So where can a B2B salesperson trip up in this drawn out process? We’ve worked with some of the very best B2B sales people in the business and these 5 mistakes often come up in our conversations:

1. Failing to engage all stakeholders: Typically there are a number of people involved in the buying process – those who write the specs, those who control the budget, those who influence the decision, those who actually use the product and finally the ultimate decision makers – usually the CTO or the CEO. You have to identify who these people are in your prospective client and make every effort to meet them and strike a relationship with each one of these influencers. Countless salespeople have failed because they didn’t take the time to meet the people who specified what the product needed to do or managed to engage with everyone involved in the decision. Often your main contact may not want to give you this access — your job is to earn it.

2. Failing to leverage conversations with one stakeholder when talking to other stakeholders: If you’ve learned from  the product user why he likes your product over that of the competition, you’d be foolish not to mention it when you’re talking to the buyer. It’s obvious but you’d be surprised how many people fail to leverage every conversation. The sales people we admire most are always listening, assessing and using their conversations to their advantage.

3. Failing to manage internal disagreements within the prospect: The people involved in the buying process are bound to have disagreements about which product or service to go for.. Don’t wait for things to sort themselves out; they probably won’t and you’ll lose the sale. If you’ve spent your time well in the initial phase, getting to know the people involved in the buying process, then that’s your map for managing internal conflicts. Don’t leave this to your ‘champion’.

4. Failing to keep the prospect engaged: Sales cycles are long and slow, so it’s easy to lose focus. Are you allowing too much time to pass by between phone calls or visits? Keeping the momentum even if the prospect is slow to respond to you is important especially if competition is high. Our favourite sales people have a way of keeping the energy up and sounding like it’s a new sales call even if it’s in the ninth month.

5. Failing to make the value argument: If you find yourself haggling on price, you probably haven’t been effective in making the prospect understand your product’s value. Price should be one of the last things to be discussed not the first (as it often is). Good marketing can really help in defining the value proposition and communicating it clearly and simply. Too often tech companies disconnect marketing messages form sales conversations – the fastest way to get dragged into price haggling.

Of course, there are hundreds of ways to lose a B2B sale, but these five seem to lead the pack.

-      Photo credit: Tim Green

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Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, B2B selling, Sales

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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’.

We needed to get brand marketers and their agencies to start using the mobile web and the .mobi domain name. Marketers didn’t seem to realize that the mobile web is different from the desktop web: users want different things, mobile devices do different things, and the staggering diversity of devices means that you can’t just squash your old content into a mobile-friendly site. It has to be thought of as a mobile experience from the start.

To add to the challenge, there was enormous confusion over the different naming conventions used for mobile websites. dotMobi needed to inject a little clarity.

Clearing some space

Our response to the brief was to differentiate between ‘.com thinking’ and ‘mobi thinking’. We portrayed .com thinking as clumsy and heavy, compared to mobi thinking which is lean and agile. This image appeared first in some of our creative roughs, but the client liked it so it made it all the way through:

.com thinking just isn't as nimble as mobiThinking

What we did next

In order to get the show on the road we designed, wrote, and built a new website for marketers with plenty of the usual Velocity specialities: thought leadership, video, interviews and .mobi site tours. We also did a load of case studies, best practice advice, e-newsletters, eBooks and set up a mobile marketing blog, edited for us by journalist Andy Favell.

Andy’s editorial approach gave the site an independent tone, so users knew they could trust it. He got straight to the heart of the industry in record time, and built links with all the head honchos in the business. He’s got a genuine interest in mobile internet issues and it shows: he’s produced some great stuff.

We also created new identities for all dotMobi brands including mobiThinking, mobiForge, and mobiDomain, designed campaigns for mobiThinking, and created content that drove traffic.

The website is constantly evolving with new content, blog posts, interviews and short pieces. It’s built around key pieces of content that have proved extremely popular including The Best and Worst of the Mobile Web and The 2009 Top Ten MobiThinkers.

And it worked

The results were excellent. The press gave the site masses of coverage, vendors want to be part of it, industry people are queuing up to write for dotMobi for free, they got over 24,000 mentions on Google in the first few months alone, they’re invited to speak at events and they’ve recruited some big names to the .mobi fold: Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Reuters. The site also achieved the best indicator of success: Barack Obama created one of the most popular .mobi sites ever to track his presidential campaign (and he used the .mobi domain name!).

In a very short time, mobiThinking.com has become one of the leading sources of best practice advice for mobile marketers, with traffic topping 7,500 views a week.. From a standing start, that’s not bad.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Identity, Mobile Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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The company offers the best Microsoft .Net CMS on the planet (running nearly 10,000 websites worldwide for almost 3000 customers), along with tools for social media, eCommerce, marketing and sales and event and meeting management. The result: some really impressive numbers over recent years:

–Average growth of 35% per annum over the last five years

–License revenue growth of 49% in 2009 in the teeth of the downturn

–Revenues a spit away from $30m.

The company entered the US market in mid-2009 and has developed a huge community of partners providing add-on apps, plug-ins and extra functionality via its EPiMore programme and an open-source-like community with over 8500 members, called EPiServer World. Best of all, they are really top people that we’ve enjoyed working with on positioning and messaging and thought leadership over the last couple of years.

If you’re looking to move your web estate onto a new platform, you should check EPiServer out.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Social Media, Technology Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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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.

As part of this process they needed a swish new website and some fast thought leadership content and campaigns.

The Project:

The Consulting Bit:

We came in, made a lot of notes, drank a lot of their coffee, and listened really hard to what they (and their customers) had to say. Then we:

· Simplified and focused the story – to position the company as leaders in the distribution business

· Gave IBS a new language – so they can talk about their products and services clearly ad compellingly – including their new category name: Distribution Resource Management

· Rationalized their product portfolio – so customers know exactly what’s on offer

The Web Bit:

As the first step in getting the new story to market, we:

· Ran analytics and content audits – using personas to develop the site navigation, architecture and SEO

· Wrote and designed a new website – to work as a lead generation platform – all in 6-8 weeks. Which isn’t bad.

· Helped move to a new CMS – by EPiServer, the best CMS on the planet (and a Velocity client)

The Thought Leadership Bit:

Leaders share their views on the marketplace with their customers and prospects. We’re helping IBS with a range of content marketing campaigns including:

· Web pages that are more than just product descriptions – they offer opinion and views on the market

· A series of eBooks –the first one on ‘margin killers’ in wholesale distribution is just the start

· Web video –our perennial favourite — in this case for a user conference series. With more on the way.

The Future Bit:

The foundation is in place. Now it’s time to build:

· Lead nurturing – we’re exploring using tools like Marketo to automate campaigns, and build a marketing funnel

· A customer portal – a mini-Facebook for customers to share their ideas with each other

· Blogging and social media – to promote IBS and engage in the web conversation

· More video – because it really is a fantastic way to tell stories. Just ask George Clooney

The bottom line

It’s too early to report hard results but the new story is getting real traction in the market, the website KPIs are all trending (or leaping) up, and Neil can’t stop smiling.

We have to say this is our ideal kind of project –plenty of tough challenges to get our strategic and creative teeth into, working with great people who are really on our wavelength.

‘’As always with a website project, it wasnt just a website project. I wanted it to be the catalyst for lots of things; yes, a new website, but also a new message, to re-energise people, and to bring us into the 21st C. The Velocity team have been great. They quickly got under the skin of the market, helped us craft a crisp story, oh and yes they built a great website too.” –Andy Bailey, CMO

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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There she is. 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?”

The answers are pretty enlightening. As Ambal says, “It’s a first-hand look into the future of content marketing from the people that live and breathe it every single day.” It’s also packed with over 100 recommended resources. All sponsored by our pals at Marketo — the daddy’s of lead nurturing.

Click for free download now and see the future…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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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 running out of steam

Target prospects that are really right for Velocity - Work with great marketers that really value what we do and how we approach marketing problem solving

Grow (sensibly)! – To meet demand while keeping service levels up.

Do more web video - This is a great way to get complex stories across quickly and clearly. We already do a lot of it but we will do lots more.

Spend less time (but better time) on social media - It’s not really social, it’s for work*.  But it can really eat up the time.

Write a smash hit follow up to the Content Marketing Workbook - We’re approaching a thousand downloads! Next time we’ll try to beat that.

Put more time and effort into website conversions - Otherwise what’s the point?

Use more lead nurturing tools i.e. Marketo - Better bait for catching clients

Create effective ROI metrics for social media campaigning - So we know what to focus our energies on

And mine:

Write one great headline a week
So Doug doesn’t have to keep grimacing like that

Be able to explain cloud computing to my mother
If I can make her get it, I’ve arrived…

This year we’re going to stick to them. Definitely.

*He says ‘work’ but I’ve seen him playing Scrabulous on Facebook.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, lead nurturing, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing

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