Ever wanted to see two B2B marketers in an honest-to-goodness slapping competition?

Curious which of Velocity’s clients was recently named one of the 9 hottest startups by CIO magazine?

Wondered what it sounds like in Velocity Towers when no one knows you’re listening?

Would you like to hear Velocity’s unedited and uncut comments and ideas about B2B marketing?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you’re going to like what we’re trying to do with our new Facebook page. All these things are already there, and more is on its way…

I’m calling it “Unfiltered Velocity”, and the idea is to share all things Velocity without as much varnish as you’d find elsewhere. It’ll still be B2B marketing, more or less, but more immediate. Without any polish. Warts and all.

We’ll share pictures of stuff we see. Record ideas and thoughts that we have. Share posts and pictures and videos of things we find important.

At least, we’ll do it for a while, then we’ll see how it’s going.

So drop by on Facebook and like us. And see our zits and warts and stuff. (And once we’ve got 100 “Likes” Doug will write and produce another R-rated Xtranormal video!)

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, Facebook

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Your web site is not your field of dreams. Build it and most likely they will not come.

Nope, once it’s built your goal is to make it work as a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles – YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc – so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ – using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking – the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note – the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

• Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
• A direct continuation of your sales discussions
• The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
• A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

• Average page views per month
• Average time on site
• Average bounce rates
• Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

© Roger for Velocity Partners, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: , B2B marketing, Blogging, Content, Facebook, Lead Generation, Marketing, Online PR, pico branding, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Relations

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A few years ago, as an experiment, I joined LinkedIn because lots of the people we worked with seemed to have. But I stopped receiving invitations about three years ago. Now, suddenly, I’m being deluged by them again.

And as part of that process an old friend, Tony Morris, popped up (we first worked with him at one of our oldest clients, Argogroup). Tony’s a serial entrepreneur, strategy consultant, and private investor working exclusively with technology-based growth companies. Serendipitously while we were all musing on social media, he pointed out Guy Kawasaki’s pretty compelling list of 10 ways to use LinkedIn to increase its value. It’s a good list, but for B2B firms, improving your Google page rank and enhancing your search engine results feel the most important. Over eight-and-a-half million business people use LinkedIn, including people from each of the Fortune 500 (and 499 of them are represented by director-level managers).

That’s a pretty good resource. Albeit one that only works today one-to-one. It’s when you start to think about what B2B firms (as opposed to individuals) should be doing with social media that it starts to get confusing. On the face(book) of it, social media should already be really important: experts everywhere from Seth Godin to Richard Branson tell us that future winning brands will be the ones that can build innovative or novel online relationships with customers. No doubt there are real attractions and benefits in communicating with a prospect group online in ways that competitors haven’t tried yet. Particularly when most B2B buyer segments run to a few thousand companies at most and many are no more than a few hundred (think about companies selling into mobile operators…).

But before we all run off and start building widget utilities that allow clients to relay time sensitive, high value information to business customers via Facebook or iGoogle (see Roger’s recent blog on that), consider how most tech companies communicate with customers today.

Most times I yearn to eat my own spleen rather than read another sentence from the press release announcing a company’s latest piece of highfalutin’ middleware or the product brochure about the sexiest wireless gizmo on the planet. Imagine the impact on a company’s reputation if they were to take this type of deathless prose onto Facebook?

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2007. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Social Media

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