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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In case you missed last week’s Content Marketing & Marketing Automatation webinar put on by DemandGen’s John Sweeney, here’s a link to the archived talk with slides.

In it, Bob Apollo of Inflexion Point and Hubspot takes you through his principles of content marketing and Doug Kessler from Velocity shares Twelve Lessons learned from our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign.

Bob also gave people links to two very valuable downloads that we wanted to tell you about. They’re two templates to help you focus your own content marketing efforts:

The Stakeholder Profile / Buyer Persona Template – this helps you map out exactly who you’re targeting in your next piece of content, including job titles, roles and the key influencers, motivations, concerns, constraints, success measures and trigger events that shape each persona’s world.

This template captures a best practice content marketing in a pdf.

The Ideal Prospect Profile – a short template that helps you and your sales people define the perfect prospect – not just by demographics but by the things that really drive interest: structural, environmental and behavioural dimensions that tell you you’re on to a great prospect.

Thinking about personas in this way adds a ton of value. Because it’s often someone’s attitudes,beliefs and culture that determine their likelihood of loving what you do.

Bob knows his stuff and these templates capture a good chunk of his formidable experience.

The webinar is a great introduction to the ‘why’ and the templates show you how.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, digital marketing, personas, Thought Leadership

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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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It was only at a recent Econsultancy web project management course (yes, I can definitely endorse it) that “agile”, a meaningless piece of jargon to me before, gained meaning. It’s actually something I’ve known and practiced for years without knowing the name or theory.

For those that don’t know agile project management, it’s a way of getting things done based on repeated executions that steadily gain additional functionality. Imagine a spiral. You have a complete circle. Then you draw a similar but different (larger) circle. And continue.

It’s opposed to waterfall approaches, whereby all of the functionality of a project is the only target, and each part of the project is unlocked by completion of what (needed to) come before it. The waterfall approach gains its name from the look of the GANTT charts that it uses.

Most pieces of marketing collateral proceed, hand-in-hand with a happily obliging agency, as a waterfall. A project is established with a closed-ended contract for Z, and a project is established to get from A to Z. Ideally, Z is the end-all, be-all and everyone will be delighted when Z is delivered.

One of the big problems with this approach is that life intervenes. Somewhere between B and Y, things change. Or things get held up at D, and E can’t even get started. Many projects simply fail, far short of Z. Nothing is shipped. All is lost.

An agile approach would say “the simplest implementation of what we’re after is D. Let’s deliver that first.” Then, all stops are pulled out to deliver D – a fully functional, high-quality product that can be shipped. The client can start enjoying it. It doesn’t have E, F, G….Y or Z, but it does a job.

Then, once D is live, you reassess. Maybe E doesn’t make sense anymore after D is alive. Maybe you find that D is a huge success, but skipping straight to S makes more sense.

Let’s escape the alphabet soup and imagine an example: A company wants to create a demo for a new product. Why not do this in complete iterations? The first executions would be based on a series of professionally commissioned sketches, and used in the blog and on the web-site. Feedback to this demo subsequently influences the product’s development. The second demo is an improvement on the first, and demonstrates the change in the product. And so on and so forth, for a number of iterations.

This way of thinking has boisterous supporting arguments, among the best being Mark Suster’s brilliant JFDI defense. How many marketing departments freeze under the influence of analysis paralysis? Get something good enough out there. Ship it. Then study it. Reprioritize. Renew. Republish.

Even progressive journalists are adopting this kind of thinking. The most influential among them may be the Jeff Jarvis’s and Mike Arrington’s of this world – both of whom argue that journalism works best in an iterative, dynamic process. A news story remains dynamic and is edited and improved again, and again, and again, as facts come to light and understanding grows.

I’m applying this methodology in my work as a digital marketer, and not just on web-site builds. How? By developing fully-formed products that fit the bill (you have to keep clients happy), but then – crucially – studying the product’s performance, reporting on it and coming back with a reprioritization. “Based on what we know now, here is what we do next. Here is how we make things steadily better.”

Critics/competitors will say that this leads to sub-optimal results. “If Z is wanted, why not go for Z?”, they’ll ask. For some things, yes, like the annual report or something. You’re not going to iterate that product too many times.

Most marketing ideas and pieces of collateral, however, would benefit from a project design that delivers what is needed and no more, shipping it, then reassessing before you proceed.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: digital marketing, iteration, Web Design, Web Marketing

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There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea…

More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

Project Open Kimono Part 12 – Re-purposing and atomising your content

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B social media, digital marketing, Lead Generation, SEO, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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Why, he vented, was it so hard to persuade the Limeys to implement cohesive marketing programmes that had been proven to work elsewhere? Why did we find it so difficult to do the hard yards of building a solid database of customers, prospects and suspects, segmenting them every which way, targeting them with creative campaigns and measuring results?  And then doing more of what works and ceasing to do what doesn’t?

His justified spleen reminded me of criticisms of British public policy in the post-War era. We denizens of Blighty have long suffered from politicians taking the non-strategic, easy choices. We prefer to muddle through rather than making decisions on evidence-based analysis. We have a long history of simply firing and calling what we hit the target.  Is this malaise also affecting B2B marketing too? And, if so, why?

As part of the download process for our recent B2B Marketing Manifesto we asked people to complete the sentence, “The hardest part of B2B marketing is…” (You can read the full results of the survey here). An eye-popping finding was that the hardest part of B2B marketing was convincing other people within the company to do the right things.

So, why? Two factors, I think, are key. British firms are either sales-led or engineering-led. Hardly any are marketing-led

Lead by sales

Much of the British tech industry happens to be entirely sales-dominated outposts of American technology companies. Or run by people who earned their spurs at such companies. American firms love the openness of the UK market and the fact that we speak the same language (though after 20 years, Doug is still confused by the difference between the top or bottom of a road. And he insists on bringing things when he should be taking them and vice versa. We’re hoping Velocity’s newest star striker Ryan Skinner, (born in Portland, OR, but brought up and educated in the Peach State) isn’t cut from the same Yankee cloth.)

American tech firms most often choose guys (and it’s nearly always guys) with stellar sales track records (usually from other American firms) to lead their Redcoat subsids. These people invariably cut their teeth in the pre-digital age. By and large, they see marketing as made up of people who make the arrangements, rather than the ones who make the rain. As our survey showed, most B2B marketers spend a lot of their time trying (and often failing) to persuade their boss to do the right thing. This was OK (though definitely not optimal) when we were locked into the broadcast, print-centric world of a few years ago, where the marketing pinnacle was launching Version 3.1.6, organising the next industry piss-up (I mean, exhibition) and inviting some  trade press to the company’s latest product launch. But in the new science-based marketing world, where you need to blend multiple tactics to move individuals through a complex sales funnel, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Sales fixated managers often don’t get that.

Lead by engineering

By contrast with the sales-led invaders, many indigenous tech firms were begun by engineers and techies. While these folks should  be open to the science-based arguments marketers can make today, most have experienced marketing as a discipline that dumbs down their products and solutions, reducing them to white noise benefits. This has largely been the fault of B2B marketers themselves, too many of whom have been happy simply to be the marcoms person, rather than getting so close to their company’s technology they can smell the benefits, let alone articulate them clearly and concisely.

A dearth of world-class product marketing

There’s a third reason that British B2B marketing is so hard. The obsession with sales and the preponderance of engineers has led to a dearth of true product marketing in the UK.

Product marketers are the people who are responsible for conceiving and defining a new product (based on customer interaction and insight), for developing and improving the product through its lifecycle, for its application in new market segments and solutions, and for, should the time come as it inevitably must, deciding to kill it. They tend to be people who are as comfortable talking to engineering as cutting edge customers. They are people who are responsible for the success (and failure) of any product. They are vital to any marketing department. They have been largely invisible in perfidious Albion.

Doug and I have been in the business a long time and have met many, many brilliant product managers in the US tech firmament. Many have become CTOs. But we can count the number of great ones in the UK on our fingers – and a good proportion of those were American in any case. This is not, despite what he says, because Yanks are inherently superior. It’s actually a painful symptom of the other two issues: an obsession with sales and engineering. And it really hurts B2B marketing over here.

The good news for my American CMO is that the situation seems to be changing. Most of our clients (and an increasing number of the people we run into out there) are embracing analytics and lead nurturing. And most are throwing their weight behind complex, mutli-thread content-led campaigns that motivate prospects to move towards a sales conversation. They understand the importance of the right positioning and messages (and keeping these refreshed in the light of changing marketing circumstances.) And they value creative that incites action.

It is true that Brit B2B marketers have found it traditionally difficult to earn an equal place at the sales or engineering table. In future, and in the best companies, that will not be the case.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, Branding, Content Marketing, Corporate Positioning, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Technology Marketing

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This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more work.

Here’s an example. Our B2B Marketing Manifesto has had a great run (Neil will summarise just how great in an upcoming post) but traffic and downloads have started to settle down. Similarly, our Content Marketing Workbook went gangbusters for a while and is now a steady earner rather than start performer.

So here’s where the re-purposing comes in.

The Manifesto ends with the Six Staples of B2B Marketing (seven actually, there’s a bonus staple thrown in). So now the plan is to turn each of these into a short piece where we can drill down a bit more than we could in the Manifesto itself.

The first effort is The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial, a highly visual, interactive guide to a best-practice content marketing workflow. We did it as a Prezi to vary the media a bit (it would be great to do all seven in seven different media — if we can come up with seven). Take a look — but make sure you view it in fullscreen mode and use the play button to advance.

We hope The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial is more than an excerpt or simply a reshaping of existing content (you’d all get bored with that pretty quickly). Instead, it’s a new spin on a smaller topic within a larger piece: in this case, a guide to the HOW part of content marketing instead of the WHAT and WHY covered elsewhere.

Here are some principles of content re-purposing:

Zoom in – take a single chapter or topic from your big eBook and make it the whole subject of the next, shorter piece.

Complement – the Manifesto was strategic, so the Tutorial is tactical and practical.

Morph – change formats to keep things interesting. We’ve turned eBooks into checklists into videos into webinars into slideshows…

Connect – make an explicit connection between the pieces. Make them feel like a family. The Tutorial is in the Manifesto ‘spray paint stencil’ style. (It’s also connected to the Content Marketing Workbook, but we changed styles since doing that one).

Atomise – the Tutorial is on our site and the Prezi site, too. If it was, say, a deck, we’d put it on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc, too. If a video on YouTube, Vimeo and beyond.

Cross-promote – the Tutorial promotes the Manifesto and CM Workbook. And we’ll update those pieces to promote the Tutorial. Makes sense. Of course, we’ll also blog about it (like, um, now) and tweet about it and post it in LinkedIn groups and bookmark it and send it out to our e-newsletter subscribers (sign up using the form on the right)…

Open the gate – the Manifesto had a short form for data capture. The Tutorial doesn’t. We discuss that here.

Measure – this is essential on of any list of B2B principles. All links in the Tutorial are tagged for analytics and for Marketo, so we can watch our honoured audience as they poke and prod around our soft bits. (Ooh. That tickles.)

It’s early days — we only just posted the thing – but we’re getting lots of hits, some really good comments – and downloads of the Content Marketing Workbook and B2B Marketing Manifesto are spiking again. It’s like B2B Viagra.

Don’t just relegate your latest content piece to the dusty digital shelf. Give it a new spin, a quick squeeze and a zotz of energy.

More Project Open Kimono, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Kimono Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

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

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The project name inside Econsultancy was LALP for ‘Long-Ass Landing Page (or Long-Arse for the Brits among us) and boy does it live up to its name. The page is over 400cm deep, which is longer than the wheelbase of a firetruck, taller than the average totem pole and higher than Neil standing on Stan’s shoulders.

It’s got six bright red calls-to-action after every chunk of text. It’s got two videos, 36 member logos, ten testimonial quotes and twelve bright, green tickmarks. It’s written in a fairly hard-sell tone but with a few winks to keep it within the Econsultancy brand voice.

Why did we want to go all long-ass on this one?  Partly because Econsultancy has a hell of a lot to tell prospective members – and there was nowhere where all this value was stacked up for all to see. But mainly because we studied a lot of landing pages (especially membership-focused ones) and believe it will sell more memberships. The idea is to test everything, so this hunch won’t be a hunch for much longer.

Here’s the page in all it’s glory, but to actually read it, you’ll have to visit the real thing. While you’re at it, become a member of Econsultancy – it will be the best career investment you ever make.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Conversion, digital marketing, Landing pages, web analytics, Web Marketing

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A cool example from the consumer world:

The Coca-Cola Happiness Truck

Can Business-to-business do this kind of thing too?
I don’t see why not.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B social media, digital marketing, Web Marketing

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One of the experiments we ran in our B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign was to send a simple, quirky text email as a follow-up to our sexy HTML email announcing the Manifesto. In the spirit of Project Open Kimono, here’s what we’ve learned.

What we did
To announce the publication of the B2B Marketing Manifesto, we sent an HTML email to two segments of our database: people who downloaded our previous eBook, the Content Marketing Workbook, and people who didn’t. That’s normal for us.

Then, a week later,  we sent a simple but quite personal text email to everyone who didn’t open the first email. (Neil automated this flow using Marketo but he’ll tell you more about this in another Open Kimono post).

We wanted to test two things: the value of a follow-up and the value of a more personal, text-only approach (the body of the email is below).

What we found

1) It’s definitely worth doing a follow-up email to non-openers
29% of people who previously downloaded our last eBook, the Content Marketing Workbook, opened the first Manifesto (HTML) email. That’s about par for our e-newsletter shots.

A week later,  2o% of those who did not open the first HTML email opened the next email.

So just sending another mail earned us an extra 29 opens on top of the 50 from the first mailshot.

For the rest of the database (people who did not get the Content Marketing Workbook), the numbers were similar. The second email got an extra 85 opens (bigger list).

So even though the second email was hitting a less receptive subset of our database (the cold-hearted bastards who ignored the first email) and even though it was a second attempt, the open rates were not nearly as dire as you would expect. The follow-up was definitely worth doing (especially as we got no unsubscribes from either mailing).

The text-only converted better!
The ‘clicked to opened’ ratio results held a surprise: people opening the second, text-only (but quirky and more personal) email were MORE likely to click through and download the Manifesto than people who opened the HTML promotional email.

This was true of both lists but most pronounced for the previous Content Marketing Workbook downloaders: 56% clicked through from the HTML mail while a whopping 69% clicked through from the subsequent text email. (They all hit the same landing page and download rates were the same, so think of these as downloads).

Hypothesis: Promotional Defense Barriers
This is just a scrap of data and not even a proper A/B test (the mailshots were sequential not simultaneous) but we never let that stop us from leaping to a hypothesis (if not a conclusion):

Maybe text emails, especially quirky, more personal ones, often do better than slick
HTML emails because the slick stuff triggers the recipient’s Promotional Defense Barriers.

Neil suspects that the answer is probably to combine both types of email in any given campaign. He’s probably right (annoyingly, he usually is). But would you do things differently if you found that simple, compelling text emails performed as well or better than colourful, well-designed HTML mailshots?

The relationship of less to more
I remember, back in the days of meatspace marketing, the simple sales letters would often out-perform the expensive, glossy brochures (gloss was in back then).

Neil says, “Yeah, but if you didn’t do the glossy stuff, the letters might have flopped over time.” (Will he EVER shut up?)

It’s a good point, actually. Remember the insurance company (the one that wants to ‘Quote Me Happy’), that cut its TV advertising because its online marketing was doing better — only to find that online returns dropped fast without the related air support? (Me either but Neil does).

This is not just about extracting the text
Remember: the text-only mail was not the same text as the HTML one. It was written differently (see below). Next time, we might try using the exact same text to really isolate the HTML variable. This time we were testing writing style and content as well as presentation — which is quite a muddy thing to do.

What do you think?
Does anyone out there have any experience with text-only versus HTML emails? Or with the power of follow-ups?

————–

The text-only email copy:

Subject: The raving lunatics of B2B

Text:

Hi Doug

Do you suffer from hairballs?

We do.

As we go about our day-to-day B2B business in the Velocity office, we find ourselves accumulating little frustrations. It’s not always with clients, it’s with ourselves and our suppliers too.

And it usually comes down to the nagging suspicion (or complete conviction) that we’re all still doing things the old-school, pre-Internet kind of way.

As these frustrations build up, they become a kind of hairball in our throats.

And every once in a while we have to inhale deeply and cough the suckers up.

Well, we just had a major hairball and it’s called “The B2B Marketing Manifesto: five imperatives and six staples for winning the battle of attention”.

It’s a big, fat, in-your-face ebook that tries to make sense of all the changes that are buffeting B2B marketers – plus some concrete advice about navigating through it all.

The reason I’m telling you this is that our sophisticated data analysis tools and real-time modelling engines tell us that you, like us, are a B2B marketer. So you’re facing the same challenges and opportunities that we face every day.

And that’s why we thought you might like to download the free eBook now.

You won’t have to fill out any forms but we would ask one favour: come back to the landing page and leave a comment for us.  Read the Manifesto and you’ll see why.

Want the full Open Kimono picture? Say no more:

Project Open Kimono Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Kimono Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Kimono Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Kimono Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Kimono Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Kimono Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Kimono Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Kimono Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Kimono Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Kimono Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

————-

Photo by Amy Loves Ya: Creative Commons

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

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