“This is without a doubt the most exciting time in history to be a B2B marketer. It’s also the scariest.” That’s how our new eBook, The B2B Marketing Manifesto begins. It’s a lunatic rant, a call to arms and a plea for ambition in B2B marketing — with eleven specific recommendations for rising to the new challenges we all face.

The eBook is our attempt to make sense of a whole range of disruptions to the once-cozy world of B2B. Clearly, we’re no longer in the business of making brochures and exhibition graphics. We’re now in the business of filling sales funnels and we’re more accountable for it than ever before. Which is either a really, really good thing (if you’re confident and ambitious) or a really, really bad thing (if you just want a quiet life).

Now here’s what we’d love you to do: download the eBook; read it; then come back and comment, ideally on the landing page (though you can use the comment form below if you prefer). The end of the Manifesto makes clear why we’re asking.  So thank you in advance for that.

We’ll be blogging about the progress of our new baby in a living case study called ‘Project Open Kimono’ over the coming weeks and months, including sharing our goals, the tactics we’re using and the results (warts, winces and all), based on Neil’s ace analytics. So do come back.

We’re also happy to guest blog, speak or contribute to webinars on the topics raised in the Manifesto. Just ask!

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, SEO, Thought Leadership, web analytics

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That about sums it up.

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

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

The death of clarity

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

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Roger Warner, friend of Velocity and all-round PR guru, has flung open the doors to the Museum of Social Media. Before you all start planning an office field trip to see it, it’s actually online – you can visit it here (and no, it doesn’t have a gift shop).

Conceived as a repository for the good, the bad, and the just plain baffling, it charts the meandering and sometimes hiccupping progress of social media marketing.

Take, for example, the bizarre decision to promote Skittles by posting a load of ker-razy videos and ask people to share them. Unlike their previous Twitter-based campaign, this was a campaign that deserved to have a loud raspberry blown at it. So, there it is in a virtual glass case, preserved for posterity.

We decided to interview the esteemed Professor Warner, to see if he had any pearls of wisdom to impart about the development of social media marketing.

Where did you get the idea for the museum? Why did you start gathering the stories together?

It’s a ‘keeping perspective’ thing. What’s going on today is very similar to what happened 10 years ago… Social Media, like the first promise of the Interweb, has become near-mythical. Having lived through round one, I’m keen to keep a scrapbook this time. When I look back, discussions about bricks vs clicks were almost irrelevant. The real winners were the ones who rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in – and we need to remember this right now.

Grand concepts and frameworks didn’t work well (e.g. Boo.com); whilst more randomly organised, iterative services did (eBay, Flickr, etc…). This is very close to my heart. I run a new(ish) Social/Online agency and I’m building a services business around doing pragmatic stuff now. So having a museum means I can put the futurology that bugs me (and also all the great stuff) into a box and keep it close by for future reference. As such, it’s a pet project.

Why do you think even big brands with such a lot of marketing clout get it wrong?

Often they’re taken in by the glamour of it all and get blinded. A common request is ‘I’d like to do a Twitter campaign.’ This is bit mad. Brands have to ask themselves ‘why?’. If they don’t have a very concrete answer then they should have a lie down and/or read up a bit on some history.

In other words, it should never be about the Social Media-ness of it all. My feeling is some brands get so lathered up that they lose context. They just get strung out on the *possibilities* and the *concepts*.

Today, the world needs to understand that just because YouTube lets us upload video, this doesn’t mean a million people want to create mini feature films for brands in exchange for a gong.

Social-for-Social’s-sake campaigns fail because they ignore the basics. And it’s not Social’s fault… it’s more to do with human nature and the way we use things. We *really* need to remember the lessons of the past and to keep reading our little blue book of effective marketing. The psychology of DM still applies. Good old content is even more critical. And Google is still huge, huge, huge.

Social Media changes *how* these things are important… but they certainly don’t go away. Also, a little research never hurt anyone. We should all do more of it before we get excited.

Do you think we’re now entering a more egalitarian age of marketing, where the consumers can get involved?

We ought to be asking: can Social fulfill the promise of a mega conversation with all of the marketplace? Probably not, unless more Twitter-friendly sales people are employed. There’s a fundamental tension that we need to figure out. Generally, marketing is about NOT TALKING TO PEOPLE in the physical sense. Talking is the job of sales. Good marketing reduces the amount spent on sales people and processes. In this context, the promise of Social gets a little messy…

We need to de-focus on the promises, concepts and the channels and start thinking about the core value of it all. Right now, lots of marketing departments see Social as a must-have. Near term this may not be the case – unless they can prove that it helps marketing to do better marketing.

Marketing has changed for good I think. Today, the campaigns and content that work best aren’t Marketing with a capital ‘M.’ They’re conversational pieces, support things, widgets and whatnot. Gone are the days of Ridley Scott TV spot blockbusters. Brands need to be helpful, memorable and available and figure out how their customers are using Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc in this context.

Any particular favourites?

I love Converse’s domination campaign. It’s not particularly Social, but it’s so pragmatic and smart it hurts. I wish we’d done it.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, Branding, Corporate Message Development, Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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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.

A well-considered portfolio makes your company look cohesive and focused. A messy portfolio structure makes it look like you just kind of accreted new products and services on a drunken bar-crawl (“For all your fish and bicycle needs.”).

The goal is simple: make it quick and easy for prospects to find solutions to their problems as they describe them. Of course, you don’t want to leave any product or service out and you don’t want too many buckets (people won’t wade in, they’ll just waddle off). A few tips:

• Use the buyer’s perspective not yours – you may like to organise your life and your products by department or line of business; they don’t care about that. They come to you with problems in their head. Organise around that.

• But don’t forget the spiders – your product page and its copy, URLs, tags, headings and subheads should generate major search mojo. Make sure you integrate this important web section into your overall SEO strategy.

• Don’t hide your hot products – the more specific a product, the more relevant it’s likely to be. Don’t bury your discrete offers far below the top line categories. If one of your popular products logically lives beneath the surface, bend your logic and get it on top for all to see.

• If you do have to bury a hot product, compensate – by promoting it in feature boxes, sidebars and web banners

• Make your labels descriptive – cryptic, cool or evocative labels may sound good but if it isn’t instantly clear what’s inside, you’re losing eyeballs (and the eyeball-bone’s connected to the wallet-bone).

• Keep lists parallel – it’s kind of annoying to have a portfolio consisting of three nouns and a verb, or three vices and a versa.  Makes you look tone deaf.

• Don’t be a slave to alliteration – don’t bend over backwards to present ‘The 6 Rs’ if it doesn’t work.  Having said that, Velocity is starting to present our services in four buckets that all really do start with C (as does ‘coincidence’): Consulting, Content, Campaigns & Creative.

Unwieldy portfolios are usually a function of a company’s history. Re-organisations, acquisitions, aborted strategies and weed-choked routes to market all leave their mark. If yours is starting to feel clunky, start over with a fresh sheet of paper — or get some advice from people who don’t know (or care) why things evolved the way they did.

—

photo credit: flickr creative commons: curiousmess

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, digital marketing, SEO, Web Marketing

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Ghost-writing almost certainly happens a lot in B2B – after all copywriters are used for pretty much everything else  - web pages, brochures, white papers, ad copy… – so we shouldn’t be surprised they’re used for blogs.I’m focussing on blogs that purport to be from a particular individual, rather than generic company blogs written by multiple individuals.

There are a few arguments in favour of ghost-writing such a blog:

– The purported author can’t write – or at least not in the right way. She  may have a lot of important and interesting things to say, along with insight about her customers’ needs, trends in the market, predictions about the future and so on, but just can’t write entertainingly, coherently or engagingly. We’ve all met senior executives who are great talkers, managers and salespeople whose written offerings don’t reflect their charm or insight. Making a blog interesting enough so that visitors come back time and time again, feel engaged enough to leave comments and tweet and re-tweet  is frequently as much about creating an attractive, distinctive voice as it is about the subject matter. Lots of people find it hard to inject  energy, humanity, wit and fun into their prose. For them – and for their readers  - ghost-writing makes sense.

– No time. The person simply doesn’t have time to polish her prose twice-weekly, but can spend the 15 minutes or so on the phone required to download her thoughts. Having said that, there’s usually nothing more deathly than the PR-Department-produced CEO blog – does anyone know of a single good one?;

– A great ghost writer. For great read understands the person, the company, the sector, the customers, the technology almost  (sometimes more) than the supposed author. This will often be someone that’s been writing for the company for a while or has developed their own domain knowledge in other guises.

Here are the reasons why ghost-writing doesn’t make sense:

–Authenticity. The best blogs have this in spades. I read Seth Godin’s blog because he knows what he’s talking about and that gushes from every line and word giving me an interesting perspective on marketing that takes my thinking forward. It’s hard for a ghost to be authentic if he doesn’t understand the subject area as well as his ‘name’, even if only by a fraction. Authenticity is a particular problem when the subject of the blog is deeply technical or experience-based (actually we think marketers should just get out of the way when techies need to talk to other techies). It’s hard to fake technology insight. It’s also hard to convince readers that your blog is authentic if, say, it’s about the ins and outs of running a global company when you haven’t been a CEO but have close access to one; or that your insights about IT restructuring are compelling if you haven’t been a CIO but talk to one twice a week. Having said that most B2B blogs fail the authenticity test, ghost-written or not.

–Ethics. I said above  that I wasn’t going to talk about this,  but it feels important when the blog stakes a lot on the name and personality of the author itself; and where the reader thinks he has an intimate, albeit virtual, relationship with the writer – because he visits daily, occasionally comments and receives responses back and so on. It would really piss me off for example if I found out that Seth Godin’s blog was written by an army of  assistants.

If you’d asked me in September 2007 whether Velocity would be ghost-writing a lot of client blogs, I’d have probably said an emphatic ‘yes’. Our social media work was just beginning and we were starting to experiment with online content marketing. Since we produce a lot of content for clients, I figured then that we’d do a lot of blog writing too. It really hasn’t turned out like that, and I think the authenticity issue is the reason. Of course we do write some client blogs – but only where we have real, proven domain expertise. There’s also a case for ghost-writing what we call the ‘grout’ of any blog (‘check out this white paper I discovered’, ‘we won this award and here’s why’…). Today though, our role is usually more strategic – helping decide the editorial content and future direction of the blog, promoting it, improving it.

It would be interesting to hear from other people what they think about this issue. Let us know.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B social media, Blogging, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Technology Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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But the question implies that  these people, having reached the giddy heights, are pretty much all the same in what they do and how they think and behave. In our experience, this members of this group are likely to be as different from each other – in motivation, outlook, experience and purchasing habits – as any other so-called homogenous group (like fans of  Abba, circus performers or members of the British Cabinet). And you have to treat them differently.

I came across a useful example of the problems of treating C-level execs as a single homogenous blob  in CIO Magazine’s recent State of the CIO 2009 report. They surveyed just over 500 heads of IT and characterised CIOs as one of three types:

1. A Function Head: These CIOs are focused principally on improving IT operations and systems performance, cost control, IT crisis management and security. They see their role as striving for IT operational excellence.

2. A Transformational Leader: Like the Function Heads above, these guys are internally focussed, but see their role as one of creating change for their company by working closely with business operations and cross-functional corporate departments. Their activities are centered more on process reengineering and automation, not just delivering the basic IT services. Business process re-engineering, implementing new systems and aligning IT with corporate business goals are their main drivers.

3. A Business Strategist: These CIOs focus most of their attention on driving business strategy for competitive advantage. They actively search for opportunities to differentiate their company using IT. They think about how to develop and implement new go-to-market strategies and they try to stay very close to customers.

Group 1 and 2 seem cut from the same cloth to me, but both are clearly very different for the business strategist group. The CIO analysis reminds me of Geoffrey Moore’s famous ‘Crossing the Chasm‘ hypothesis where he divided the world up along the technology innovation lifecycle saying that technology visionaries (or in CIO’s parlance ‘business strategists’)  are technology enthusiasts looking to use technology to tilt the market in their favour and pragmatists are looking simply for  productivity improvements.

Whether there are two groups or three is moot: the point is that marketing to these two groups is very different. (It’s likely  that these types of CIOs are emblematic of the companies they’re working for – it’s unlikely a visionary CIO would work for a pragmatic company and vice versa, or at least not for very long – so the rest of the board and the line of business decision-makers are often visionaries or pragmatists too.) Even within each group there may be gradations: we’ve come across visionary CIOs who understand the nits and grits of just about every leading (and bleeding) edge technology  at a deep technical level, as well as ones who last touched code in the COBOL era, but look and sound like Harvard Business School alumni.

So what about marketing to these different groups? Many of our early stage clients are looking for  visionaries and keep tripping over pragmatists. The CIO survey said that fewer than one in five of those surveyed were business strategists. In our experience visionary leaders tend to be super-information hungry and look to rub shoulders with like minded professionals. Social media marketing should therefore be an excellent route to these people, providing you have something to say that grabs their attention. If you’re operating in an industry dominated by cost cutters and process improvers, it’s probably best not to push content offering strategic revolution. Slow and steady wins the race for these guys.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Online PR, Technology Marketing

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It reminds me of the health, fitness & diet markets — trillion dollar industries that exist solely to peddle sophisticated alternatives to a simple, obvious truth: eat less, exercise more.

The simple, obvious truth in marketing is this: the Disruptive Idea takes all before it.  If you’ve got one, you’re half way to the gold ring.  If you don’t have one, you’re probably wasting your time.

A Disruptive Idea is just that. It’s a new idea that threatens the status quo.  It tells people that they’re looking at things all wrong, then suggests a much better way.  The Disruptive Idea has to have these qualities:

It has to be true – Loud, lame or lyrical bullshit just isn’t sustainable.  The more you can prove the validity of your idea, the stronger it is.

It has to be different – Big ideas incite riots. ‘Me-too’ ideas incite yawns.

It has to be controversial –  If everyone who hears it simply agrees, it’s not disruptive.

It has to generate value –Spiritual ideas are wonderful, but in B2B marketing, a disruptive idea has to make someone money or save them money.

A few Disruptive Ideas from tech marketing history:

Salesforce.com: “no software”.  They didn’t even push the (fairly generic) benefits of CRM — they just hammered home the big idea that you don’t need software to run it.

Google: “pay per click”.  A completely new ad model that had big advantages: it worked; it was completely transparent; and it didn’t commit the advertiser to anything up front.

Betfair: “the betting exchange”.  A new way to gamble, pairing buyers and sellers of risk. The value: better prices.

Skype: “Free calls over the Internet”.

Disruptive ideas are not the only way to build a successful business.  Sometimes just doing lots of little things better than the other guys is enough. But a disruptive idea is probably the single most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal.  And most marketers spend far too little time generating them.

Marketing machine work is easy. Anyone can do all those things that can be measured in an analytics package or poured into an ROI model. But take half the time you spend on campaigns or programs and put it into generating a Disruptive Idea and you just might hit pay dirt.

A lot of marketers don’t shoot for the big, disruptive idea because they don’t think they have the power to do it. They feel that they have to take the product as it is and sell it on its merits.  So they plough the usual furrows and nothing great ever happens.

We think it’s the marketer’s job to have big ideas and shake up markets.  If you’re products are boring, come up with something exciting.   If the company doesn’t let you make it happen — find another company.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Benefits, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, credibility, Mobile Marketing, Relevance, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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It’s a presentation by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the US online retailer famous for shoes. He talks about his goal to make Zappos stand for the very best customer service and customer experience on the planet. So far, so blah. It’s a hoary old claim many cynical CEOs make.

But Hsieh’s company sees this goal as a real crusade. And it’s based on belief in some traditional marketing values: do what you say you’re going to do; always strive to exceed the customer’s expectation; and, critically, only hire people who are passionate about these things, because if you don’t, convincing people will be like urinating into a particularly gusty Force 7 gale. His passion for customer service has seen Zappos grow way beyond shoes, achieve revenues of over $1 billion this year (from a standing start eight years ago) and attract more than three per cent of the US population as customers.

In this age of social networking, keywords and SEO, what’s really interesting is what Hsieh thinks about more traditional interactions, the ones using a device invented in the 19th Century: the telephone. Zappos believes that having a customer’s undivided attention on the phone for several minutes  is golden, the best branding opportunity a company can have. As a result, Hsieh aims to make that time as memorable as possible, a time, as he puts it, ‘to really wow customers’.

To achieve the wow factor,  Zappos is obsessive about the company culture and who it hires. Everybody who applies to join faces two stringent interviews, one to establish whether they can do the job and one for culture fit.

Once a decision to hire has been made, every employee faces four weeks induction training, during which time they can choose to leave in return for a $2000 one-off payment. Amazingly, only two or three percent of people take up that offer. Meaning the remainder are people who really, really want to work for the company and buy into the culture. And it cuts out the less committed ones before they have time to do damage. Getting a reputation for customer service is hard. Losing it is easy.

Once the call centre reps (called customer loyalty managers) get to work, Zappos wants customers to remember their interactions and tell all their friends. So there are no scripts, no measurement of average call times, no procedures to cut the cost of telephone calls, no recorded messages. Just  encouragement  – from the very top down – of highly motivated humans to talk to other humans and solve their problems. In the video, as a demonstration of how far Zappos’ people go, Hsieh tells a funny story about someone calling a rep and asking for help in finding a pizza at two in the morning and getting numbers for some local outlets.

Hsieh says that because the web makes every company and its actions totally transparent, a company’s culture and a company’s brand are now two sides of the same coin. Unlike in the TV advertising age, consumers today can quickly and easily see through companies that try to project an image that’s not really true to life.

We think that’s true in B2B too: it’s no good claiming to be the innovation leader  in a particular technology area when you’re not – just look at tech companies’ press releases to see how often they do this. Nor does it make sense to bang on about your commitment to the customer when there are countless examples out there proving the opposite. What Zappos shows is that there’s a huge gap between claim and reality. And that achieving the latter demands obsessive commitment 24/7.

It’s worth 15 minutes of your time to see what he says.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Technology Marketing, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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Its called Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets and it makes a compelling case for what the authors (James C. Anderson, James A. Narus and Wouter van Rossum) call “Resonating Focus”.

The paper identifies three kinds of value proposition: the “All Benefits” approach (list everything good about your product); the “Favorable Points of Difference” approach (list everything that’s better than the next best alternative); and the “Resonating Focus” approach (focus on one or two points of difference whose improvement will deliver the greatest value to the customer).

Like a lot of good business writing, this article brings together common sense ideas that are really rather uncommonly practiced by B2B marketers.  It’s about the hard work of building credibility and about making sure you’re building it where it will make a real difference.  Our recent paper on the Hierarchy of Benefits touched on this (one of the reasons Andrew pointed us at the HBR article).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BB2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, Lead Generation, Marketing, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing, Web Relations, writing

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It deals with the fact that most technology companies are run by smart, technical engineering types – and these folks are pre-disposed to take a running jump from tech-speak to Big Business Benefits when tackling their corporate positioning and corporate message development projects.

In doing so, they’re approaching things in the same way that Evel Knievel used to approach the Snake River Canyon — because they recognise how far away the Land of Really Meaningful Business Benefits is from the World of Technology.  And the result is predictable:  they fall down.

The truth is, companies can’t leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits when describing themselves.  They have to build a bridge between them.  Better still, they need to swing across this ‘benefits chasm’ on a Vine.

And that’s what this new Velocity white paper is all about. It’s a killer set of diagrams and best practice advice for slaying any daredevil message and positioning pretensions you may have.

You can download it today, FREE, via:
http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2008/11/25/tech-benefits-recipes-for-corporate-positioning-and-corporate-message-development/

About Velocity

Velocity is the consulting-led B2B marketing agency for the Interweb era, specialising in technology. Projects range from strategic consulting to marketing acceleration programs to digital engagement campaigns that include through-the-line content, creative, websites, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click advertising and web analytics. Clients include dotMobi, Gartner, ShipServ, Clearswift, ip.access.

For further information about Velocity, see:   http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Benefits, Branding, Content, Copywriting, Corporate Message Development, Corporate Positioning, credibility, Mobile Marketing, Relevance, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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