Have you seen that picture of a glass that’s been going around? This one:

There needs to be, like, way more awesome in B2B. We could be totally running the show, you know?

I mean, technology is just technology, but we’re after love. The iPhone didn’t cut and paste at all, but who cared, you know? We loved it. Awesome!

When we’re talking about tech stacks and cloud instances, let’s just turn up the volume on that shit. Sure, there’s the “80% more efficiency on your TCO”-talk; Let’s do the “we give you like a billion percent more awesomeness across the board!”-talk! How awesome is that!

You want product benefits? Like reduced maintenance expenses, swifter enablement and better ROI? Hell, our product will give you a longer life, sex appeal like a Cannes starlet, VC stickiness and a Porsche in the drive! Awesome!

Let’s advertise on that sexy little blog that writes about our industry. Let’s invite the blogger for oysters at the top of the Ritz. No, wait, let’s do a microsite with him. Or maybe we could pay him to, like, write on our site. Oh, fuck it, let’s just buy his whole site, then he’s writing for us anyway. Awesome!

Our funnel is, like, totally empty. You know what that means. The world is ours. We can get like 1000% growth with just one new prospect. Let’s make a viral video or something. One of those abandoned shopping cart things. Totally awesome!

No one’s following us on social media. Let’s retweet some shit. Let’s retweet like everything for a week! Let’s get some conversational marketing going. Let’s respond to every mention of us with one word: “You’re awesome!” Wait, that’s two words: Double awesome!

Our case studies are, like, getting totally ignored. No one really cares why a little widget factory in Rochester chose our technology. So let’s do a fictional case study about how Richard Branson put our technology in all his space ships. Let’s make shit up. Maybe Branson will notice and just do it. It’ll be like suggestion. The jedi mind trick! Awesome!

Our website ain’t converting. Let’s slap some site optimization tools on that sucker, pour in some marketing automation, phatten it up with some social media feeds (could we replace the corporate feed with @Beyonce, you think?) and buy a couple gallons of content strategy. Let’s…pimp…it…out! Awesome!

Let’s just sit around and, like, talk about some stuff. Like who’s fun in our industry. And who’s lame. And let’s just record that bad-boy and throw it up on YouTube. Let’s record our CTO’s laugh into a podcast, because he’s got a sick funny laugh. If people start with that, maybe they’ll want to listen to his cloud compression story, too. Awesome!

Let’s disrupt some shit. I mean, none of our competitors are packaging a product that some nobody could start using tomorrow. Let’s do some SAAS infrastructure management product stuff with free sign-up. Like twitter for plant management. Facebook for enterprise security. Wicked awesome!

I’m totally into inventing a new industry! Today we’re doing scalable enterprise-level management tools. Tomorrow we’re doing, like, rainbow-chasing, lean-as-you-like, profit-cocaine-as-a-service enablement! Awesome!

I’ve totally gotten excited about B2B marketing and what we’re doing now. And you’ve read this whole thing. That must have taken you, like, three minutes! That’s awesome! Now go out and do some B2B shit and kill it and feel awesome about yourself! Because B2B should feel good. How about that? ISN’T THAT AWESOME??!!

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: awesome, awesomeness, B2B marketing, Copywriting

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But content marketing is different. The best content marketing tends to be narrowly targeted, focusing on a very specific audience. That’s how we maximise relevance, earn downloads and reward engagement.

Of course, there’s no need to be too narrow. and if a single piece of content can cover more than one target audience, why not go for it? It saves time and money and raises your Return on Content. Unfortunately, it’s not always a good idea to try to kill two birds with one content stone. In fact it’s rarely a good idea. Here’s why:

Different people ALWAYS have different perspectives, agendas and issues

• A board member has a different view of the world than a junior manager (where seniority is the dimension of differentiation)
• A test engineer has a different set of challenges than a sales director (the target’s discipline is the dimension)
• A hospital administrator cares about different things than a high school administrator (market sector)
• An existing customer has a different view of you than a cold prospect (degree of familiarity with your company)
• A Chinese manufacturer has different concerns than a French one (region)

Pick almost any meaningful dimension and you’ll find your prospect base starts to divide itself up along that spectrum.

The key questions are:

– How important are these differences in the context of the story you want to tell?

-- What are the penalties for addressing more than one target audience in the same piece?

Let’s go to the whiteboard please, Janice.

Here are two targets – Persona A and Persona B.
They have some things in common but lots that are not shared:

You’ve got a few options for targeting A and B with content:

• Aim for the common ground– keeping your story in the lavender zone; this is good if that zone is still compelling enough to both A and B. The downside: you’re often forced to leave out really good parts of your A story or your B story.

Tip: Signal the scope of the piece in the title and the introduction, then tell people up front who it’s for and why: “This piece is for A and B — we know you’ve got a lot of differences but here’s what you have in common and why this piece is great for you.”

• Try to tell the whole A + B story– signalling to the reader that ‘this bit applies to A’ and ‘this bit applies to B’. The downside: B people get bored during the A bits and vice gets bored during the versa.

Tip: Sidebars that clearly signal “Hey Mr A! Read this bit!” can help you balance your agenda without boring the pants of of one target or the other.

• Do a piece of content for A and another for B– This lets you tell your best story to each audience. The downside: it costs more and takes more time.

Tip: Use broader, more generic content to buy time while you develop your targeted, persona-specific stuff.

Of course, it’s great if your target audiences have a lot more in common, so the middle ground contains most of your goodies:

But sometimes, you cant fake it. Your two targets have so little in common that almost every paragraph contains a fork in the road and every sentence needs a conditional:

B2B Content Relevance & Alienation
There are two tests to help determine if the piece you’re developing really ought to be two pieces:

The Relevance Test – lumping two audiences together means each will have to wade through things that are not relevant – that’s a negative experience and can lose readers.

How much of your content is actually irrelevant to A or B? Can you make it relevant by explicitly building bridges? If a third of your content has no relevance or resonance for one target or the other, it’s probably time to split the piece.

The Alienation Test – Even if there’s lots of common ground, a single message that’s gold dust for A can be a major turn-off for B. One example: when marketing some kind of media (trade show, magazine…) one audience (the exhibitor or advertiser) is selling to the other (the visitor or reader). In this case, talking all about how the former will enjoy a ‘captive audience for your sales team’ will be perfume to A and skunk juice to B.

Is there any important message to one audience that will actually alienate the other? These need to be managed carefully — and lumping both targets together is rarely the answer.

Of course, sometimes — like on the home page – you have to address the issue and find the most compelling common ground. But if there are significant relevance or alienation issues, you want to stream people off of that common ground home page as quickly as possible so you can look them in the eyes and sell to them without fear.

Why this matters
As a reader, you know when you’re reading a great piece of content: it seems to almost have your name on it. It’s aimed at a spot right in the middle of your forehead. It uses the language you use to describe the challenges you face in terms you recognise.

You also know when a piece is not quite aimed at you. It uses unfamiliar language; is pitched at the wrong level (too techie, not techie enough); talks about problems you haven’t experienced and skips over ones you have.

The penalties of badly targeted B2B content marketing
Making a piece to target two different audiences forces some bad things to happen:

– You’re forced to use generic language – instead of language that’s specific to one of the audiences.

To a hospital administrator, “increase asset utilisation” is a bore, but “double your operating room throughput” resonates. But you can’t say that if you’re also targeting high school administrators with the same piece.

– You talk about abstract ideas – instead of concrete realities.

To a marketing director, ‘improve process efficiencies’ is ho-hum jargon while ‘get more campaigns to market faster’ is lean-forward stuff.

– You’re forced to ‘couch’ your killer messages – instead of letting them fly.

‘For people like A, this widget halves costs and for people like B it’s doubles revenue.’
‘Finance guys love it because it saves money; engineers love it because it improves performance.’

Yuk.

The Bottom Line
(because all lines have bottoms have and all bottoms, alas, have their lines):

Non-specific, abstract, couchy talk sucks. While specific, concrete and direct talk moves mountains and blows away molehills.

‘All things to all people’ results in boring work. While relevant points told in familiar language feels ‘just for me’.

Great content hits people between the eyes. And mediocre content falls at their feet with a pffffttt.

The time to discover which of the two piles your next piece of content marketing  falls into is at the outline stage – where the problem will leap off the page and kiss you full on the lips (but in a bad way).  That’s reason enough to always do an outline stage.

The Reco: do occasional broad-brush content marketing but, as a rule, do more pieces and make each one highly targeted, with a persona so clear you can talk to it.

How about your own experiences? Any pieces you wish you had split into two or three? Any that spanned different audiences but worked just fine?
We’d love to hear about it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, Copywriting, persuasion, Thought Leadership

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And there’s a time to be blunt – when you’ve got the opportunity to close the deal.

Considered coolly and dispassionately, most of us can recognize the difference to these two moments. But then why do we confuse them?

I recently tweeted a loud Bravo! to Carsonified and their FOWA event for a little throwaway piece of copy on their event page. There, they offered visitors a “Convince your boss PDF”.

How fresh! How direct! How ballsy!

They could have called it “Event Features” or “Attendee Benefits”. Thank god they didn’t.

Visitors to the FOWA site are plainly already showing some interest in the event. Doubtless most wish they could go but fear they could not justify the time and expense. Carsonified bluntly offers to help out.

Readers will thank the writer time and again, and reward them by reading their shit in the future, when the writer cuts to the chase, acknowledges the desire that is so latently there and offers just that.

Websites miss this kind of thing.

Isn’t it nice to see on a website when, next to an FAQ and a long list of email addresses, a line says “Talk to a human” and the number?

Or when a company says “this is how much our stuff costs”?

Or even imagine one of those agonizingly long forms (just to download your specs – the nerve!) that said, somewhere towards the end: “Sorry about this. You’re almost done. It’ll be worth it. If it isn’t, tell us.”

Talk to people. Acknowledge them. Recognize obvious emotion.

That’s communicating to people.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B copywriting, Copywriting, web copy

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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?

———————————-

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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We’re big believers in the power of a great FAQ section on a B2B website — not just for customer support but for marketing.  So here’s our FAQ on FAQs:

What’s an FAQ?
For some, it’s a list of questions that people really do ask a lot. For others, it’s more like a list of questions you wish were frequently asked.

What’s it good for?
An FAQ does a few things that other forms of communication don’t do quite as well:

1) Let you tell your story in an informal, conversational  way from the user’s perspective

2) Address some common objections – without having to bring them up in the main ‘product’ copy

3) Provide a level of customer support – helping customers use your products and helping prospects make the right decisions

Who should use them?
Every website can justify an FAQ section but not every site needs one. We like FAQs for companies that are introducing a new category or new application because these tend to generate lots of questions about where the new thing fits into people’s lives. We did one for PressRun because they were pioneering a way to turn print magazines into tablet apps.

What makes a good FAQ?
I’m glad you asked that. A good FAQ is clear, well-organised, gives short answers, uses an open, conversational voice and links a lot to helpful content (on your site and — god forbid — elsewhere).

How many questions should I include?
Twelve. Unless you’ve got a really complicated story, then put in as many as you like, organised by topic for easy navigation.

How promotional should I be?
Go ahead and promote, but don’t be crass. The beauty of FAQs is that they feel like a friendly, open, honest view of your business. If you ask stilted questions like, “Why is your widget so popular among IT departments struggling to stay on top of power consumption ?” people will probably figure out that this is not really a list of questions that are frequently asked. It is a brochure in very poor disguise.

Why do so many leading technology brands choose to work with Velocity?
See what I mean?

Can I use my FAQ to pimp some of my content?
Indeed you must. You’ve produced lots of content that’s useful to your target audience. It would be malpractice not to steer people to this content in their hour of need. Again, don’t be crass about it. Make sure the content is relevant to the question.

Can I use my FAQ to bring up sensitive issues I’d rather not flag in the main web copy?
Yep. FAQs can be a really good place to raise and counter a common objection without broadcasting that objection to on your home page. For AppCentral, the enterprise app store folks, we covered issues like, “How is Mobile App Management different from Mobile Device Management?” and “Why can’t we just use the iTunes App Store?”

What if I can’t think of twelve good questions?
It doesn’t matter. Nobody counts.

Really?
Really.

You sure?
Well, some people do. So you might as well make a few extra ones up.

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

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One of the toughest hurdles: the email subject line. Just like any B2B marketer, their subject lines have to meet a few critical criteria:

• they have to attract attention
• they have to deliver the main benefit
• they have to vary so recipients don’t feel they’ve already deleted this one
• they have to avoid words that clearly signal spam
• they have to inject a sense of urgency

Sound like a familiar set of criteria?

Well, maybe we B2B marketers can learn a few things from the resourceful, highly committed folks peddling (mostly fake) Viagra.

Here are some of the compelling subject lines I’ve received in the last 60 days, grouped by strategy, with a few illuminating notes. In the immortal words of the first legitimate Viagra marketing campaign, let the dance begin:

The brand appeal
High quality Pfizer  [Simple but a bit dull -- and doesn't Pfizer make other drugs too?]

The medical approach
Dr Max make your penis on 3cm more!    [No offence, Dr Max but could I see that Med school diploma?]
For sure, you will feel more pleasure after of a short course of enhancing.

The caveman
Become the carnal monster     [I want to please my partner, not EAT her]
Increase your phallic strength     [Not sure heavy lifting is the point, but the towel trick does impress]
Larger bone today  [A personal favourite. It's got it all.]
You need Blue-Pill    [“Tarzan be back in moment. Jane don’t move.”]

The say what?
If there will be only girls around, will you be ready?     [Form an orderly queue, ladies, I'm just off for a short course of enhancing.]

The Top Gear appeal
Full control of your love stick.    [I'd settle for partial control]
Empower your pollinator.      [New meaning to the term 'deflower']

The highly personal
Your wife take deep.     [Hey, back off buddie.]
Your wife need your attention? Solve all the problems with IT. [How can the techies help?]
You want to impress your girlfriend tonight?  [I thought this was about my wife]

Translated by Google
Does your cock renounce to work? Bring through him to this illness!      [From Chairman Mao's little blue book?]
Any, even the most dirty desires will come true with our male enhancing set
Your private xxx life will be so good that you wont help from boasting it.

The poetic
Become master of amorous genre     [You and Kahlil Gibran]
Empower your body for love        [Julio Iglesias lyric]
Turn your bedroom life into a volcano of pleasure    [Rubber sheets recommended]
Add more spice to your bedroom life
Have Great Long Spicy Nights in Bed!
IT consultant of perfect love making art  [Again with the IT guys…]

The nudge-nudge, wink-wink
Back-and-forth all night!
[This could have been spam for ping-pong tables – I didn’t open it]

The endearingly enthusiastic
This is what you need for sex!    [bless]
Solving ALL love making problems in a matter of few minutes

FUD
Your weekend will not be good without good nights
Make sure that you made your woman happy tonight.
Over 10 million men made their women happy, and you?  [As long as 10 million men didn’t make MY woman happy]
Impotency has broken thousand of families. Protect your home!    [You know, you're right. I want to be a responsible father.]
What’s Your Hall of Shame.     [Hmmm... the hall... never thought of that.]

The playground taunt
Hey, are you the guy who cannot make love?   [Okay asshole, step outside]

And these are only from the last 60 days.

The B2B Principles of Viagra Spammer
What have we learned here? Well, there’s so much to take away but here are some pre-digested principles for the lazy:

• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again – Viagra spammers never give up
• Keep that thesaurus close to hand – if you have a hand free
• When in doubt, use an exclamation point! – it always creates excitement!
• Refrain, at all costs, from using the term “love stick’ – even if it is one of your SEO keyphrases
• It’s okay to sell through fear – but try to stop short of outright public humiliation of your target audience

Onward and… um… upwards.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Copywriting, Email marketing, persuasion, writing

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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 yet talked about one of the most important implications of all this; the new challenge facing every B2B marketer: the need to create urgency.

In today’s multi-threaded, multi-tasking multi-verse, it’s no longer good enough to make a clear, compelling case about why someone should do something. You have to make a case about why they have to do it NOW.

It’s no longer good enough to change someone’s mind (difficult as this is); now we have to change their very next action. We need the click NOW or we’ll never get it. We need the download NOW or the chance is gone. We need the engagement NOW or they’re off into the ether (or to a competitor). And ultimately, we need the sale NOW or we have to start all over again.

Of course, part of this is about identifying the people most likely to be urgency-sensitive — the ones who are ready to move to the next stage but need a nudge (or, let’s face it, a kick). If we’re talking to a tire-sniffer with a 3-year timescale, no amount of urgency-injection will make a difference (that’s where lead nurturing comes in). But if we’re talking to someone already leaning forward, already swaying back and forth to our plaintive ballad, already tripping towards the next step in the rocky road to revenue, then a sense of urgency really, really matters.

Here are five ways to inject urgency in your B2B marketing, starting, well, now.

1) Make the cost of delay tangible
This is probably the single most important thing you can do in the urgency-injection process: show people how much their dithering is costing them.

One of our clients, Reevoo, can show exactly how much a prospect is wasting every month they delay their decision. Their service improves conversion rates for e-commerce sites. They know exactly how much that means to each prospect, based on their traffic, current conversion rate and average transaction value. So they do the math(s) and show how delay is quite simply burning money.  They can make powerful statements like “If you do this now instead of in three months, the extra profits you make will pay for the whole service. It will be free.”

Every B2B marketer needs to do these calculations. If your product or service saves people time and money, then delaying the purchase loses that time and money. If you can help people seize profitable, new opportunities, then delay means losing those opportunities and that profit.

You can’t be shy about this. If you believe in your product, you can look anyone in the eye and show them the cost of delay.

2. Drive down the sense of risk
People won’t overcome their inertia if they feel they might get a smack in the head for doing so. It’s safer staying on the sofa. Part of injecting urgency is reducing perceived risk. And that means leveraging all the risk-reducers and credibility-builders in the B2B kit-bag: killer testimonials, great cases, awards, reviews, analyst endorsements… (we list 17 of them in this B2B credibility-builders blog post).

3. Turn the big leap into mini-steps
Instead of asking for one big jump into a new world, ask for a step. Instead of asking for a 10X-sized commitment, ask for a 1X-sized one.

One example: we helped App-DNA create a Launch Pad product that lets prospects taste their fantastic application compatibility software on a few apps instead of the entire estate. It’s a hit.

4. Create a time-limited offer
Creating artificial scarcity is an oldie but still a goodie if done properly (and crass as a brass bidet if not).  The key is to have a good explanation for why the offer ‘must end by December 21st’. If it’s just an artificial, marketing-driven offer, the B2B buyer will just roll his eyes and make that vulgar hand gesture that refers to self-abuse. He knows he can get the deal on December 22nd too. But if you’re about to do a major product release, offering a discount on the old release, and time-limiting the offer, makes sense.

5. Show how fast your solution gets to payback
It’s easier to delay things that you feel will take a long time to deliver benefits. If your marketing says, “Get on the 90-step, five-year road to salvation NOW!” you’ll be on the list called ‘One Day, Maybe’. If you can say, “Start now and be swimming in money in two weeks!’ you’re in with a shot.

So when you right the next piece of content or design the next campaign, ask yourself: have you done enough to add urgency to your story? To make people act NOW?

Any thoughts about how you do this are most welcome.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, Copywriting

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.

Well, I’m moving on to work for Thomson Reuters (the siren call of being able to walk to work proved to be too strong to resist), and I thought I’d get all reflective and try to sum up some of the (many) things I’ve learned at Velocity.

.

Sometimes it is worth fighting your corner – usually I take the path of least resistance, which means I tend to let people have their way particularly if it avoids conflict. But sometimes clients have plans that just aren’t right for them, and rather than rolling over and going along with it, sometimes it’s a good idea to push back. Ultimately clients usually respect your independence, even if they don’t agree with you.

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Headlines are difficult – I hate writing titles or headlines. I’ve got better at them over the past few months but we’re never going to be friends. In fact, this point could be ‘the shorter the word limit, the harder it is’. I used to think I was pretty good at pithy, but the more pared down the text is, the more difficult it is. But it’s a fun challenge.

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Don’t believe the hype – it’s a truism that the internet is full of twaddle, and I don’t mean videos of dancing kittens. People write all kinds of tripe. That means that winkling out the nuggets of gold in all the dross is difficult, but worth the effort. It also explains why writing quality content really matters, and why people really, really appreciate it.

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A hideous website is bad PR – fugly design, poor spelling and grammar, clichéd images… you might think company websites are just there to give people a bit of information and some contact details so it doesn’t matter what it looks like. But you would be wrong. Websites don’t have to be complicated, or with expensive glossy design. But they do need to be good looking, and they do need to sound human. And they really do need to be spell checked. Otherwise you’re letting your own side down.

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Curb your Briticisms – slap my thigh and call me Nancy. Apparently sounding too British is distracting, and actually I think that’s true. I love all the ‘Cripes Jeeves!’ type of expressions and idioms but they can be at best ridiculous and at worst alienating. So while attitude is good, too much British English slang is as bad as kick in the Alberts*. Know what I mean?

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The credit for learning this doesn’t go to me. It goes to Doug, Stan, Neil, Stuart, and Mel for showing me what ‘good’ means.

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*Albert Halls. I’ll give you one guess what that rhymes with.

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Photo credit: Barbara Bessa

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Content, Copywriting

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It’s from an SEOmoz survey and simply asks people how they choose what they read. The slide says it all:

It still amazes me how many companies get so much right – a great product, compelling logic, an air-tight ROI case – then fall down at the final, most critical hurdle: putting the story into words that attract and convince. Fuzzy, jargon-packed copy alienates buyers. Clear, compelling copy attracts them.

Thanks for sharing this Joe and Jeff.

(BTW – Jeff’s white paper, “Moving from Transactional to Conversational Email” is also worth a read).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, Copywriting

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