Content Marketing

We must in fact change the world

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Content marketing’s disrupting…everything. Either you’re part of the disruption, or you’re chasing irrelevance

B2B Content Marketing Roundtable

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Doug joined Joe Pulizzi of the CMI and Jim Burns of Avitage on this Marketing Made Simple TV show. Check it out.

Using Piktochart: a marketing technology review

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A friend alerted me to Piktochart, the online Infographics creator so I thought I’d give it a try. Here’s my first impression after making two infographics, the one you see above (which took about 7 minutes) and a spoof Content Marketing Strategy infographic I cranked out last week and shared on Pinterest (yes, it did [...]

B2B Marketing Research: content marketing goes mainstream

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A quick bit of B2B marketing research: a comparison of ‘Content Marketing’ compared with the general Advertising and Marketing category search volumes and with other related terms. From Google Insights for Search.

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 [...]

How to use Prezi for B2B content marketing

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Prezi is the cloud-based presentation software that’s like Powerpoint on LSD. Its ‘zoomable user interface’ (ZUI?) with swoopy transitions and infinite drill-downs make it a sexy alternative to boring old slides. Here’s how and why you should put it in your B2B content marketing toolkit…

How to build a B2B content marketing team

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Great B2B content marketing is teamwork. But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so here are the ten types you need on your team…

Salesforce Social Success case study

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Kieran Flanagan has written an excellent summary on SEOmoz of the Salesforce Social Success content microsite. He tells this B2B content marketing case story so well, I won’t try to re-tell it here.  Just wanted to share my favourite graphic from it: Says it all — the sweet spot for all B2B marketing is where [...]

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).

Viral videos? First have a B2B video marketing strategy

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A client asked for a bit of help in putting together a video strategy for next year’s marketing plan. In writing a reply, we realised that there are so many different ways of using video in B2B content marketing – not just the obvious video demos and viral videos…

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.

Social Success: a new content site for Salesforce.com

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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 [...]

Now THAT’s an infographic (most B2B infographics aren’t)

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We’ve been huge fans of information graphics at Velocity ever since Edward Tufte self-published his brilliant ‘The Visual Display of Quantitative Information‘ book. But as the B2B marketing world has gone B2B infographic crazy in the last year or so, we’ve been much more likely to be disappointed than delighted. Most B2B infographics are really [...]

Why you should give away the very thing you sell

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As content marketing gains momentum, we find that we’re not having to work quite as hard explaining the principles to prospective clients. But one objection does keep popping up that we thought would have died off by now: “Why should we give content away that tells people exactly how to do what we do? Won’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In case you missed these B2B marketing guest posts

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We’re big believers in doing guest posts on other marketing sites. It reaches new audiences, builds backlinks and boosts our page rank and overall search rankings. The only bad thing: our regular blog readers don’t get to see them unless they happen to follow the blogs we’re posting on. We wouldn’t want to simply cut [...]

Three content marketing vital signs

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Does your site have a pulse? Here are three content marketing vital signs you should look at. Stat. The Dead Cat Toss. The Hourglass Figure. And the Jesus Pizza.

B2B chalk talk videos: capturing your best experts

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Even the smallest company has at least one guy who can tell its story really, really well. He’s the guy you always want to bring to important sales calls and meetings. The one who can make your story seem so simple, clear and compelling. This guy is a priceless asset – but the one thing [...]

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 [...]

LinkedIn Maps: your network visualised

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We’re big infographics fans so when LinkedIn launched their new LinkedIn Maps tool, we were first in the virtual queue to have a play. The tool generates a colourful, dynamic map showing all your connections and how they’re related to each other. It colour codes the clusters it identifies and lets you assign your own [...]

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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

A stop-motion movie for ShipServ

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My oh my have we been having fun over here recently! Long-term Velocity client and all-round legend John Watton from ShipServ asked us to produce a video to promote Pages, the maritime ‘Find Engine’.

Cleaning up your B2B product portfolio

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A lot of our consultancy engagements involve helping companies structure a product portfolio that makes sense. Usually that means organising a long list of products or services into a few sensible buckets. It can be kind of tricky and isn’t always intuitive but putting in the time to get it right is well worth it.

We explain ourselves – in infographics

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As you’ll know if you got our newsletter we’re big fans of infographics over here. We got inspired by all of these and decided to have a go ourselves. This is our first, hand-made infographic explaining the Velocity process. It was a lot of fun, so maybe we’ll do some more soon. It was certainly a [...]

‘Margin Killers’ eBook reaches 600 downloads

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We didn’t mention this? We’ve been working with IBS, the wholesale distribution software experts, to produce a content series on the five big success drivers in wholesale distribution. To kick the whole thing off we wrote and designed an eBook called The Six Margin Killers of Wholesale Distribution. If you want to know what I’m [...]

You can have it done right, cheap, or quick. Pick two

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Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

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.

The rise and rise of B2B content marketing

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Content Marketing is rivaling social media marketing in the hype stakes — and for good reason. It may not be particularly new, but in the age of the informed buyer and zero-cost distribution (the Internet), it’s what works in B2B marketing. The 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey by Junta 42 confirms the trend (though anyone with a passing acquaintance with Twitter, LinkedIn or any B2B marketing blog won’t need it confirmed)…

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?”

Should free B2B content hide behind a form?

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The debate rages on: is it better to ask people to fill out a form to download your content (chasing shy people away) or maximise downloads and go without a form (losing the list-building benefits)? A recent post by Kim Cornwall Malseed on MarCom Ink argues that reg forms are ‘killing B2B software marketing’ and [...]

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 [...]

Low-tech videos for a high tech product

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We love these Google Features videos on YouTube. Most tech demonstration videos are all high-tech flash with little icon men and screen shots and slick animations.  These are the opposite: just simple ideas demonstrated with hand-made stuff (a slingshot, a crocheted rug, black ink in water…). More of this please, B2B marketers: it’s time for [...]

Velocity client John Watton wins B2B Marketer of the Year

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John Watton, Chief Marketing Officer for ShipServ, last night won the prestigious B2B Marketer of the Year award presented by B2B Marketing Magazine. Watton beat formidable competition, winning recognition from the judges for the way he transformed the fortunes of ShipServ on a limited budget. Joel Harrison, editor of B2B Marketing magazine, commented, “the quality [...]

You can’t have a conversation when you use a megaphone

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Most B2B marketing organisations are set up for interruption-based, broadcast style communications and this traditional approach to marketing consumes 80-90% of the budget. This is strange in a world where there’s been a dramatic shift from megaphone marketing to listening and engaging in conversations. There’s need for a new type of marketing professional called a content strategist. Do you agree?

Quick Case: when content goes social

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It’s been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we’d report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It was the first time we’ve used social media as a vector for our content marketing and so makes a nice case study.

Ghost in the machine: who should write your blog?

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There’s a debate in the blogosphere about whether it’s right for a blog to be ghost-written, particularly one advertised as being written by a particular author. Rather than get exercised about whether this is right or wrong, the question is: can it ever work effectively? Find out what we think.

Why ShipServ won a 2009 CRM Market Award

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Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine. ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries. The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

The Web Form Wall

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It’s a perennial debate: give your content away with no registration (web form), or force people to give you their details to get the goodies. Both arguments are compelling and both approaches have penalties…

V Shortlisted for Glittering B2B Gong

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We’re pleased as Punch to have been shortlisted for a B2B Marketing Magazine Award for our recent work with ShipServ.  It’s hard to come over all surprised about it – after all, we did complete the rather arduous application process – but we’re still really encouraged when good work gets some recognition.  Not for ourselves, [...]

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…