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

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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

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Rupert Murdoch still struggles to accept the Internet’s fundamental truth:

Anyone can distribute great content, for free, in a web-powered world.

While others accept that, the glory of net liberation blinds them to the fact that:

Even great content does not distribute itself in a web-powered world.

This applies particularly if you write about the glories of enterprise software. If you create “What the Fuck Is My Social Media Strategy?”, you might, might go viral with no effort. Trust me: You’re not going to make that. You’ll need to think distribution.

What do I mean by distribution? In pre-digital days, it was your mailing list, your postage, your deal with a trade magazine to ship your magazine with it, your press release distribution partner, etc. Now I mean everything that gets the content you publish online, in front of the people you want to see it.

And it’s a real problem. Perhaps the biggest problem in content marketing.

In surveys, marketers most often complain of the challenge of creating quality content, not distribution. Why? My theory: Marketers are measured on their output. How many blog posts were published? How many email newsletters sent? How many press releases issued?

Even in those companies where marketers are expected to produce sales-ready leads, the axis of praise-blame revolves around quantity or quality of content. Seldom distribution.

But distribution’s often the problem. So I’ve invented…

The Two Pillars of Content Marketing

After long rumination and multiple attempts, I have finally constructed an accurate model of content marketing:

I know, I know. It kind of takes your breath away. Give yourself a second or two. Collect yourself. Dry your mouth, if you must. Then let’s proceed. (By the way, feel free to share this model, with the accreditation “This model was created in a moment of divine inspiration by Ryan Skinner”).

How can you recognize crap distribution in your content marketing?

Basic Diagnosis of Poor Distribution
Your vital signs are low. You’ve been doing this content marketing thing for months and nothing’s happening. No visitors to your site. No retweets. Little press coverage. No mentions in social media. No email opens.

Advanced Diagnosis of Poor Distribution
Compare two relatively recent, major pieces of content you’ve published where one was clearly a massive investment of time and money (read: quality) and the other was, well, not. They achieved almost exactly the same success in the “content market”.

Anecdotal Diagnosis of Poor Distribution
Next time you speak with a client, any client, ask them if they saw the most recent company blog post. Ask them if they’ve read any. Ebooks? Newsletter? Anything?

None of these are certain to mean poor distribution, but they’re good signs. Sometimes the content you spent a fortune to commission, just blows. Some clients just don’t read. These are facts of life. But the above are good signs of poor distribution, which is the death of many an otherwise grand content marketing program.

How do distribution problems crop up?

As I mentioned, marketers generally think of content creation only, because they’re not measured in terms of distribution. They suppose that content fails because of intrinsic quality issues. It was poor, therefore no one read it.

That may not be the case. There may be other forces at work here tainting the program.

First of all, good distribution requires long-term investment. Building up a viable blog, for example, taking ownership of it, ensuring its quality, its regularity, interaction with other bloggers, etc. All of this requires a longevity and far-sightedness that is often lacking in client-side marketing organizations, where this quarter’s numbers hoover up all the focus.

Many content marketers sign contracts with agencies, in the hopes that commercial incentive will ensure the viability of a distribution channel. Say, for example, we sign with a video production company to do case studies. They’ll gladly churn out the video, give you the video, even put it on YouTube for you. But they’d need a pretty unique contract over and above that to take responsibility for your audience seeing those videos.

Most agencies have built their business model on one of content creation (where they can exact a premium); they may be willing to help with that content’s distribution on an hourly basis, such as pitching content at bloggers, but it’s generally low-paid, low-status and low performance.

Many content marketing agencies will feed companies the line that great content will distribute itself. It’ll be linkbait! Google will surface it! Twitter will push it around! This just isn’t true. SEO is many things, but it’s hardly the distribution parmesan to your content pasta.

So how do you go about improving your distribution?

A story: Neil, my fellow AD here at Velocity, last year developed an eBook for a client. He made sure the content itself was quality stuff, and it was. And the client asked to precede any promotional campaign by cleaning their email list – something Neil helped them do with an opt-out e-blast. Then he engineered a gentle, but systematic and persistent e-mail and landing page-driven campaign to distribute the eBook. Of something like 10,000 remaining on the list, I think 2,000+ read the eBook. Ask any digital marketer and they’ll tell you 20% is a scorching result. Neil’s methodical like that.

Examples like these are the exception in content marketing. That an agency so carefully manages distribution, and that a client demonstrates a real interest in the long-term viability of a channel. Most would say: Damn it all, fire it to everyone in the western hemisphere! And most agencies would do the eBook, hand it over and more or less call it a day.

We in Velocity are not shining knights of distribution, but we do think about it a good bit.

I told myself I wasn’t going to make this a how-to, but it would seem remiss to quit without sharing a few of our best practices and tactics for helping clients build and maintain distribution.

The Golden Distribution Rule
Do not open up a new channel to the market (be it an email newsletter, twitter feed, microsite, eBook) without being damn certain you have the resources for it. And, from day one, invest time thinking about how to build your audience there.

Do not rely on organic distribution.
If your only distribution strategy is the serendipity of Google searchers, retweets from strangers or email forwarding, you’re doomed to failure. A distribution channel should grow, but it’ll be a while before your followers crave, and push, your content without incentive.

Share the love.
We advise clients to stay active in their industry verticals or business area. Read blogs. Comment. Retweet. Share. Not speculatively, but out of interest. This does a few things: It teaches the client what’s shareable, it earns some industry love and it builds credibility.

Involve influencers.
We make it a point to find out about our content market before we produce content. Who’s already said interesting stuff? Generally, we’ll ask them to contribute to our own content, or quote them. Afterwards, they’re more likely to share, and the content’s better for it.

Tip people off.
There’s always a half-dozen or so people whom you know will love a particular piece of content. Simply let them know about it when you’ve published it. They’re likely to read, likely to share and likely to give you honest feedback.

Shrink your audience.
Ironically, you can improve your distribution by decreasing your scope. If you make it clear from the start who is NOT likely to be interested in your content, you are more likely to hit upon content and distribution ideas that suit those who will.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: content distribution, Content Marketing, content strategy, distribution

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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 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

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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 just simple data charts (bars & pies) made pretty. Or they take a bunch of different data points, give them to an illustrator and turn them into an editorial-like page with big, fat numbers, twitter birds, logos and lots and lots of explanatory text. The data didn’t really have to be visualised. The chunks of stats don’t really hang together or interact or contribute to each other. It’s just a pretty page that might as well be text.

For us, a great information graphic is one in which:

• The visualisation actually adds value – it’s not about making data attractive to children; it’s about making data sing
• The picture tells the story – or many different stories; very little text is needed
• That story is BEST told in graphic form – it’s not just text & data with colours and shapes
• One glance makes you lean forward – making you want to know more & dig deeper
• The graphic combines many dimensions – change in a single value over time is a chart; great B2B infographics have layers
• But there is almost no ink that doesn’t contribute – no twiddles and bar-chart-as-city-skyline (what Tufte calls ‘chartjunk’)
• The final effect is beautiful – they can’t help but be so

The Chartball posters by Andrew Garcia Phillips, Senior Graphics Editor/Programmer at the Wall Street Journal, tick all these boxes and are an absolute delight. (Joel Avery, the newest hire in our design department turned us on to these. And we’re really glad he did. The Chartball posters are fantastic.) Here’s a small detail on the pitching staff of the 2009 Yankees, strikeouts against walks (pardon the png quality):

Andrew clearly loves data (not just illustration) and that passion leaps off the page. You could spend hours with any one of his poster-sized summaries of a single sports team’s season. And as you absorb the data, the season actually comes to life. You can see, touch and feel the texture of the season. Star players pop out. Winning streaks emerge and fade back to normality. And, best of all, the data sub-plots relate to each other, adding insight and suggesting causation as well as correlation.

We’ve seen very, very few B2B infographics that do all this (and we’ve struggled with it ourselves). But this is what we aspire to.

Anyone out there have any great examples in B2B?

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B design, B2B infographics, B2B marketing agency, Content Marketing

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If you haven’t yet, check out the first Hackgate post to see why this content marketing skill matters, and who uses it.

The Hackgate Technique takes a page from the best content marketers of all: leading digital publishing houses. These outfits elegantly bundle their own, and others’, topic-based content in an easy-to-navigate (and easy-to-index) way. The result pleases readers interested in the topic, and search engines.

This is all well and fine, you say, but how do I do it?
Initially, and at the core of any content marketing effort, there is the need for some content. The beautiful side of this technique: You can do Hackgate for beginners with little more than an eBook or deck, three blog posts and a handful of interesting links about a topic near and dear to your business.

I’ve used Mockingbird – a very slick little wireframing tool – to draw this simple and straightforward Hackgate-style content marketing page:

To anyone with even a passing familiarity with digital publishing or blogs (and particularly blogs built on WordPress) this basic layout is no stranger. You have a few core elements, easily and elegantly presented:

A. The topic at hand in big letters at the top (obvious? Maybe. But important.)

B. A marquee piece of your content, such as an eBook or deck, on the topic. In time, you may have more than one. Here you’ll put the most recent. And you can link to a separate page with all of your reference items on the topic.

C. A clear categorization of blog posts on the topic. Visitors will immediately see one attractive blog post on the topic. Then click-through to a list of them. Or perhaps we give a few sentences on the most recent post here, then just a few titles of older posts on the same topic.

D. A final bucket for excellent third-party content on the topic. You may not want to share the eBooks or posts of your direct competitor, but – it’s a big world – surely someone else has said something remarkable on the topic too?

At this point, it’s important to make a distinction about content marketing. It’s about creating a destination about a topic. If you focus this page well and update it, people may click away, but they will come back. And it’s that return traffic that builds trust, builds brand and builds business.

Even the most elementary web designer can create this simple page. The three content buckets are effectively just RSS feeds (streams of content), and new items are added to these streams based on tagging or categorization.

Obviously, the more care you pour into updating and qualifying your content, the better the results will be long-term. But, as a content marketing initiative, you should start to see search engine traffic pick up considerably in a matter of months.

Want to see one site that’s gone whole hog for this kind of digital publishing approach: Check out MobiThinking’s global mobile statistics page [DISCLAIMER: We developed this site]. What’s lost in ease of navigation is gained in depth.

An advanced Hackgate technique for content marketers
For the more advanced content marketers, an interactive tool is another excellent route. This can take a number of forms, but essentially you ask the site visitor to enter something about themselves and you provide custom feedback. People love that sh*t.

Here’s a très simple wireframe demonstrating how that can work:

You ask a few questions, and then you can tell them something about the respondent. You can put the visitor in to a relevant taxonomy, give customized advice, whatever. The sky’s the limit. And you team it up with your topic-based content.

Web 2.0’s full of these kinds of sites. Consider either SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer or Pingdom’s site optimization tool. Enter your URL and we’ll assess you. The same kind of thinking can be applied to content marketing, but based on taxonomies as opposed to real-time monitoring.

The last piece of Hackgate-inspired digital publishing advice we’ll give you simply relates to proportions: What’s the right amount of stuff for such a page?

There are around five essential buckets for this kind of digital publishing, which include the interactive element (mentioned above), marquee items (eBooks, decks, etc.), blog posts, curated content (3^rd-party) and social content (twitter or facebook feeds).

Four is probably a maximum to put on one page, before it starts looking cluttered. At least one should always be some content with some gravitas (a lasting demonstration of topic expertise), and at least one should be easily updatable like blogs or social feeds (to keep the page fresh).

In terms of screen space, the field is open:

Use the Hackgate Technique to slice and dice your content marketing pie however you like it. Just, please, be sure to monitor site visits so you know what’s happening (and call us if you’re wanting more content marketing ideas).

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content Marketing, curated content, digital publishing, online reputation management, Thought Leadership

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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 people just do it for themselves and cut us out of the picture?”

Here’s how we address this understandable but misplaced concern:

• You know far more than you think– If your success really rests on a body of knowledge that can be captured in a white paper, your business is already built on sand. it can’t and it isn’t. Information is only source of the value you deliver. Experience,expertise, intellectual property and methodology all play a role.

Take some time to map the richness of the expertise that lives inside your company. Then think about which areas will be of most value to your prospective customers. That’s your sweet spot.

• Knowing something isn’t the same as doing it – We can tell someone everything we know about how to write a fantastic eBook. But we’ve been doing this a long time and we can still do it better than anyone we teach. If we didn’t have confidence in that, we’d stop letting people download The Content Marketing Workbook.

Realise that your company has a depth of expertise that can’t be replicated with a bit of book-learning. Knowing how to apply that learning is a much harder thing to replicate.

• People don’t WANT to do what you do, they want to find someone who’s great at doing it – Your prospects have a day job. They don’t actually have a secret desire to become experts at video distribution or application management or cockroach prevention. They just want to find someone who is an expert. That’s the power of content marketing: it doesn’t just claim expertise, it demonstrates it.

Understand that your area of expertise is only a small part of your customer’s world. It means everything to you but is only one pain-in-the-arse of many to them. It may be critically important but it’s still not their universe.

• Sharing your expertise doesn’t mean sharing ALL of your expertise– Deciding to engage in content marketing does not forfeit your right to decide exactly what to share and what to hold back.  If you believe you’ve got some proprietary knowledge that gives you a competitive advantage, don’t spill it all over the web. But you can still allude to it and discuss the insights that inform your special sauce.

Decide exactly what knowledge in your company represents precious intellectual property. The list will be shorter than you think. But protect it with your life. Often it’s in the specifics of methodology and delivery rather than the principles that inform them (and the principles are the stuff people really want to understand).

• Your weakest competitors will copy you anyway– That’s why they’re so weak. People can tell the difference between an authentic expert and a wannabe. And by the time the also-rans have ripped off your latest insight, you’ll have moved on to the next one. This isn’t to say you should let the competition see everything that makes you special – just don’t worry so much about it. They’re not that good.

Keep an eye on the competition but don’t obsess about them. Leaders lead.

• You have no choice– If you decide to clutch all of your expertise close to your chest like a greedy gambler with a full house, your competitors will share theirs and market circles around you. They’ll get the interest, the leads and the new business. Because people will see them as the expert and see you as just another company.

Bite the bullet and capture your company’s crown jewels, then put them to work, helping your prospects do their jobs better.

That last point is really the bottom line. Content marketing is the portion of your marketing plan that actually works. The rest is window dressing. You can be shy about sharing your company’s brilliance with the world and wonder why nobody cares about you; or you can be generous with your goodies and watch the world beat a path to your door.

What’s your experience? Do you come across this concern a lot? Are you effective in overcoming it? Let us know, below.

————————–

photo: creative commons: kwhitten

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Thought Leadership

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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 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?

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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

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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 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

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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 and paste the posts here — that would create duplicate content and we’d get Google-slapped. But maybe we could just let our readers know about some recent posts out there, in case they want to check them out.

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of four recent posts we did on Econsultancy, the world’s greatest digital marketing community, training company, research house and event organiser (ok… and client of Velocity):

Targeting by psychographics instead of demographics
We all consider the mindset of our target audiences but do we ever actually segment our audience and target campaigns accordingly?

Help – I’m being stalked by a clumsy ad retargeter!
The marketers at Fuze Meeting have been retargeting our whole company — and any of our clients who attend one of our web meetings hosted on Fuze. I complained. Was ignored. And posted about it. I then got a very strange response (offline) from a crazy person claiming to be the head of marketing at Fuze. Ask me about it sometime.

Website governance problems are eroding effectiveness
Ryan actually wrote this puppy but it’s under my byline due to the guest posting rules. It’s all about the importance of proper web quality management, especially for companies with big, global web estates. How do you monitor the quality and compliance of 25 sites?

Why B2B marketers need to be revenue marketers
Why accountability is the new B2B mission — and why owning the revenue pipeline is essential.

There. I feel much better now that these posts are also being shared with our immense, loyal — dare we say passionate – Velocity blog readers. And I think I did it in such a way that Econsultancy doesn’t lose any Google juice (in fact they get the backlinks).

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Photo: a.dombrowski flickr creative commons

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B Blogging, B2B content marketing, Content Marketing, SEO

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