I just got back to the desk the day after Marketo’s Revenue Rockstar event in London so I thought I’d file a quick report on it.

The event was fantastic. A buzzing, interesting, challenging day full of best-practice insight on demand generation and marketing automation. Not to mention the chance to meet lots of people who are at various points on the learning curve.  It was a room full of a new kind of B2B marketer: the kind who are ready to take responsibility for their company’s revenue pipeline.

I couldn’t help but feel I was witnessing the tipping point for marketing automation and revenue performance management in Europe (it feels like it tipped a while back int he US).

I only made the afternoon sessions, but they were excellent:

By way of disclaimer: it opened with a new video we produced for Marketo – I’ll link to it once it’s posted.  Then:

Fergus Gloster on The Secret Sauce for Revenue Growth – Fergus took us through Marketo’s own processes to show how good it can be. I love the way Marketo not only walk the talk but also share their own experiences so openly.

Case: Billy Boyle, Owlstone Co-Founder – Billy’s a great speaker and a convert to marketing automation. He showed how his company uses Marketo to automate marketing for a product that’s a bit off-piste for the company but has lots of potential. They didn’t want to throw sales resources at it, so they automated the pipeline – including some cool new features like integrating web chat with Marketo.

Liz Smyth on The Secret Sauce for Measurement & Analytics – Liz started by asking what you would do if they came to cut your marketing budget by 10%. She then proceeded to show how, with proper revenue performance management in place, you could defend that budget by showing exactly how much revenue would be lost due to the cut.  Very powerful stuff.

Rockstar Panel – (including Stan Woods, our intrepid MD) a Q&A session on the ins and outs of marketing automation and content marketing.

Then drinks.
Then more drinks.
It all went blurry after that.

Marketo raised another $50 million yesterday. Their European operation is ramping up fast. Marketing automation has hit our shores in a big way. If you’re a B2B marketer and you’re not doing it… you’re not doing it right.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Demand Generation, marketing automation, Marketo, Revenue Performance Management

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Taking the theme “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to heart, let’s talk first impressions: Landing pages. For many of your potential leads, they’re the first meeting with your company. Either you win enough trust to introduce yourself properly, or they’ll bounce right out.

This 11-slide presentation is all about first impressions: Some of the best product landing pages in the business.*

After the slideshow, look for the list of resources. In the slideshow, either use the arrows at the bottom to navigate or simply press right-arrow on your keyboard.

The Landing Page Resource List

♦ Google tells you how to ensure lightning quick landing pages: How can I improve my landing page’s load time?

♦ Landing pages should have a strong, clear and easy call to action. Check out Smashing Magazine for best practice in design of call to action buttons. For copy, Quora tells you what kind of text works best.

♦ Michael from SAP’s Integrated Marketing tells you how to shorten the B2B buyer cycle with landing pages.

♦ Brendan tells you just how to create a secondary call to action.

♦ Stan and Doug nailed it in the Content Marketing Workbook: You need to make yourself useful. A good landing page screams utility.

♦ Landing pages should be regularly experimented with using A/B testing. Try Google Website Optimizer for an easy way to do this.

♦ Landing pages often make a simple, sharp and absurdly ambitious promise. Many combine imperatives (“go here”, “do this”, “start that”) with a bold claim in the new naive style.

♦ Oli of Unbounce, the landing page specialists, provides a gorgeous 12-part landing page rehab program.

♦ If you like spending money on A/B testing (that is, if you want help to get it right), Visual Website Analyzer is a smart place to put it.

*The landing pages used as examples in this tutorial were pre-selected by the legendary UX (user interaction) community at Quora. The pages were offered as “killer landing pages for products“. As most are B2C, they may need tweaking for B2B purposes, but the principles abide.

What’s your take on the 11 landing pages? Drop a comment.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B lead generation, Demand Generation, design, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Web Marketing

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This 22-slide presentation is all about first impressions: Some of the best product landing pages in the business*, and a somewhat slanted visual introduction to me – all paint pretty arresting pictures. If one topic doesn’t churn your butter, maybe the other will.

After the slideshow, look for the list of resources. Just click on the thumbnail below and away you go; either use the arrows at the bottom to navigate or simply press right-arrow on your keyboard.

The Landing Page Resource List

♦ Google tells you how to ensure lightning quick landing pages: How can I improve my landing page’s load time?

♦ Landing pages should have a strong, clear and easy call to action. Check out Smashing Magazine for best practice in design of call to action buttons. For copy, Quora tells you what kind of text works best.

♦ Michael from SAP’s Integrated Marketing tells you how to shorten the B2B buyer cycle with landing pages.

♦ Brendan tells you just how to create a secondary call to action.

♦ Stan and Doug nailed it in the Content Marketing Workbook: You need to make yourself useful. A good landing page screams utility.

♦ Landing pages should be regularly experimented with using A/B testing. Try Google Website Optimizer for an easy way to do this.

♦ Landing pages often make a simple, sharp and absurdly ambitious promise. Many combine imperatives (“go here”, “do this”, “start that”) with a bold claim in the new naive style.

♦ Oli of Unbounce, the landing page specialists, provides a gorgeous 12-part landing page rehab program.

♦ If you like spending money on A/B testing (that is, if you want help to get it right), Visual Website Analyzer is a smart place to put it.

* The landing pages used as examples in this tutorial were pre-selected by the legendary UX (user interaction) community at Quora. The pages were offered as “killer landing pages for products“. As most are B2C, they may need tweaking for B2B purposes, but the principles abide.

If you want to share the landing page content, but not the Ryan Skinner content, I won’t hold it against you. Here’s the landing-page only content.

Got your own observations on these landing pages, or landing pages in general? Drop a comment. Or leave your guesses about the location of that big chicken….

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B lead generation, Demand Generation, design, Landing pages, Lead Generation, Web Marketing

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Gotta love Twitter...

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

The Campaign
The above tweet is Exhibit A.  We ‘pimped’ our recent B2B Content Marketing Workbook on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups and with some judicious (and always relevant) comments on blogs we like. We also blogged about it ourselves, put out an online press release and featured it in an email newsletter to our own list.

The tweets got lots of re-tweets. One of these got us invited to guest blog on Savvy B2B Marketing and to do an interview on Connect the Dots by ClickDocuments.  And David Fideler, founder of the B2B Lead Nurturing group on Linked In, gave the book a rave review — (“The single best overview I’ve yet seen on strategic B2B content marketing…”).

All this activity then got us on the B2B Marketing Magazine radar.  They invited us to do a Webinar on Content Marketing with them (with hundreds of attendees) — you can watch it here (it’s about half way down the listings).  And a followup article (out soon).

The eBook itself took a few days to write (but a few years to be able to write). Design took less than a week (not counting Stuart’s faffing around) (bloody Stuart) (worth it though).  Pimping took about 10-15 hours over the course of a few weeks.

The Results:

• Over 600 downloads to date. About 60% are from other marketing agencies or freelancers (never a bad thing). But lots are from B2B marketers we didn’t know before and are happy to be connected to.
• About seven new business conversations – that came straight off the back of the workbook. Some are rather exciting (and all are warmly welcomed).
• An invitation to design an eBook for Marketo – we’re big Marketo fans and Laura Mishima was a pleasure to work with on The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing. Our work on this also generated interest from other companies.
• A tangible piece to use in new business meetings – it’s nice to leave something behind that captures our approach to what we do best.
• Proof that we take our own medicine – it’s hard to recommend content marketing to clients if you don’t practice it yourself.

So, all in all, a successful campaign built on the exact principles that we discuss in the eBook itself: create something that your prospects will find useful; present it in a clear, compelling way; promote it all around the Internet, especially on relevant social media; and stand back.

(BTW… Got the eBook yet?)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, LinkedIn, Online PR, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Twitter, Web Marketing

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An illustrious panel

Stan Woods will be taking part in what’s shaping up to be an excellent webinar on Innovation in Demand Generation and we thought you, as a loyal Velocity blog reader, might like to drop in (register here).

John Watton will top the bill with a short case study on how ShipServ created 75% more sales opportunities without extra budget or headcount.

Then a panel discussion and Q&A on how to turn inbound traffic into leads and revenue by:

* Making the most of marketing tools – including marketing automation and CRM
* Using social media to maximize your demand generation efforts
* Creating the right content to attract the best leads
* Lead nurturing and scoring to ensure sales follow-up at the right time with the right message

Go on…register (this one’s a good one).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, Lead Generation, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing

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Once again, ShipServ has ‘scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine.  ShipServ, piloted by CMO John Watton, won a CRM Elite Award given to customer implementations that push new boundaries.

The judges recognised ShipServ “for its holistic use of Marketo, Salesforce.com, and social media” — including viral video, eBooks, Twitter and a LinkedIn group (we’re kind of proud of our work on all these).

We don’t know of any other B2B marketer who uses the Marketo/Salesforce integration so effectively. Add in the content marketing and social media aspect and ShipServ does pretty amazing things on very little budget.  This is how B2B marketing should work. It maximises the power of digital marketing to create a real marketing funnel that nurtures and scores leads before turning them over to the sales team.

The result is a completely different relationship between marketing and sales. Instead of mutual recrimination, the two teams at ShipServ work closely together to drive revenues.  And it’s working.  Well scooped, John.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, LinkedIn, technology marketing agency, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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Choose your B2B patients wisely

The most respected surgeons in the world have the best survival rates.  But they don’t have the best survival rates because they’re better surgeons.  They have the best survival rates because they choose their patients very, very carefully.

Great surgeons know exactly what variables in the patient’s history correlate to successful outcomes. They then avoid patients who don’t fit the profile and focus their energy on the patients most likely to survive.

To show why this is really relevant to you as a B2B marketer, I’d like to start with how it’s relevant to us as a B2B agency.

At Velocity, we apply the ‘patient screening’ idea when we’re meeting prospective clients for the first time.  Some agencies hoover up every bit of business going. They’ll say whatever they need to say and be whoever they need to be in order to win the business.

To be honest, we’ve been guilty of this in our time.  And it invariably ends in tears (the equivalent of the patient dying). We’ve been seduced by exciting projects that really didn’t play to our strengths and we’ve usually regretted it — even if the client ended up happy.

The fact is, we know exactly what we’re good at. And while it’s okay to go a bit off-piste, we have to recognise that doing so will, over time, lower our hit rate.

More to the point, the time and energy we put into these tangential projects are invested at the expense of projects that are right in our sweet spot. The ones we slam dunk every time.

So we’ve learned over the years to spot real, Velocity-shaped holes in prospect companies. And we’ve learned to spot projects that really don’t need what we do best. When we respectfully decline the latter, we spend more time on the former. So our hit rates go up. Our clients say nice things about us. And we attract more of the projects we love.

The exact same principle applies to all B2B marketing. The idea isn’t to attract every prospect who has a passing interest in what you do.  The idea is to generate sales-ready leads that hit smack in the middle of your sweet-spot; the projects that need exactly the dimensions your products excel at.

To do this, you need to know the precise size and shape of your sweet spot. You need to not only know who you are and why people should care, you need to know how you stack up against competitors and substitutes.

Only then can you isolate the dimensions that set you apart and build your marketing around them.  When you do this, you’ll be generating and nurturing contacts that lead to great sales conversations — instead of meetings where your sales people are bending over backwards to fit a brief that really isn’t suited to your business.

More ‘perfect fit’ projects means more successful projects, more happy customers, more recommendations.  Fewer perfect fits means… the opposite.

Our eBook, The Holy Trinity of Tech Marketing, talks about the three questions that will help you identify your company’s sweet spots. This is where we start when we take on new clients. Because if you get this right, the success rates rise for everything else you do.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B Demand Generation, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Demand Generation, lead nurturing, Sales

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We go into it in more depth here, but if you’re in a bit of a rush, here’s the Digital Velocity offer in 8 tweets of no more than 140 characters:

Tweet 1
B2B Web Lead Generation Insight
Where we map your place in the web universe. Your keyword footprint, SEO power & social media presence.

Tweet 2
B2B Web Start
Fast track web design and build, from personas and wireframes through design, content & CMS implementation.

Tweet 3
B2B Content Factory
Core content to drive traffic and incite response; papers, eBooks, videos, webinars – content that moves markets.

Tweet 4
Digital Engagement and B2B Demand Generation
Campaigns to drive downloads, visits and sign-ups – PPC, search arbitrage, outbound, social…

Tweet 5
B2B Lead Nurturing and Scoring
Automated campaigns that score leads by behaviour and demographics; feed hungry sales beast

Tweet 6
B2B Online PR
Buzz campaigns that harness the power of social media, engage key bloggers and create backlink storms.

Tweet 7
Analytics & Reporting
A powerful toolset to show how you’re doing, campaign-by-campaign, hour-by-hour.

Tweet 8
B2B Web Training
Bring the expertise in-house. We’ll show you how to work the web, create campaigns and nurture leads.

Again, you can drill down into each of these right here, but that’s not a bad start: eight tweets worth of Digital Velocity.  To put it to work, all you have to do is click.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: analytics, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing campaigns, B2B technology marketing, CMS, Content, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, metrics, Online PR, reporting, Social Media, web training

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In our bumper edition Xmas newsletter, you’ll find:

A super-shiny new White Paper, ‘The Hierarchy of Benefits‘, which identifies one of the most important phenomena in B2B marketing: the inverse relationship between credibility and perceived value.

A recap of an old favourite, ‘Marketing Through the Hype Cycle‘, which explains how to work within the ‘Hype Cycle’ framework described by those clever boffins at Gartner.

A ‘best of the best’ roundup of Velocity blog posts from the past couple of months, including:  a discussion about Microsoft’s (strangely odd) ‘I’m a PC’ ad campaign; a hitchiker’s guide to essential web marketing tools; help on naming things properly; and some good excuses to create a social networking platform in a B2B environment.

In addition, we introduce you to all the new faces here at Velocity HQ – including nice guys Neil and Lee; plus a quick roundup of all the client love we’ve been generating lately (hint: great things happening at dotMobi, Psion Teklogix, and Secerno.

Excited!?  hell, we are!  Go grab it now…

Meantime, happy holidays one and all.  Have fun.

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Copywriting, Demand Generation, digital marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, Online PR, Web Marketing

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© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Demand Generation, digital marketing

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