To content marketers, every problem looks like a case for content. Sometimes it just isn’t. Know when to say no.
Lead Generation
19 verbs that help to build your new marketing team
Written by Stan Woods |
All about the shape and tasks of the modern B2B marketing team and the 19 verbs that tell you what you need to do.
Experiences from High-Velocity Tech Marketing
Written by Ryan Skinner |
Tech marketing can move very, very fast. Here are our own experiences from a fast-moving project.
Citrix
Written by Ryan Skinner |
Sometimes you do your best work when you have the least time to do it. Follow 5 intense weeks for Citrix Services.
Crap: the single biggest threat to B2B content marketing
Written by Doug Kessler |
Why the content marketing deluge will force all B2B marketers to raise their game and build a great content brand.
The editorial calendar for content marketing: a round-up
Written by Doug Kessler |
As B2B marketers get serious about content marketing, they’re starting to bring together the people, processes and technologies needed to run a continuous content-generating machine. An editorial calendar is central to this new discipline and the core of a marketing plan. To call it best practice is like calling breathing a best practice technique for [...]
How to build a B2B content marketing team
Written by Doug Kessler |
Great B2B content marketing is teamwork. But it’s rare to have all the necessary talents in one person, so here are
The problem/solution structure in B2B content marketing
Written by Doug Kessler |
When it comes to structuring a B2B marketing argument, it’s hard to beat the good old ‘Problem/Solution’ structure. It’s stood the test of time for some very good reasons: It gets the target audience nodding in agreement – if they recognise the problem you’re describing, they’re much more likely to lean forward and give you [...]
Is B2B content marketing jumping the shark?
Written by Doug Kessler |
‘Jumping the shark’ is one of my favourite expressions. Wikipedia tells us it means “the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality that is beyond recovery. The phrase is also used to refer to a particular scene, episode or aspect of a show in which the writers [...]
Content Differentiation: Doug Does Mad Marketing TV
Written by Doug Kessler |
I was honoured to be invited to be Jeff Ogden’s guest on Mad Marketing TV, the excellent series of interviews with
Are you coming to FUNNEL?
Written by Doug Kessler |
FUNNEL is a great idea (well, we did help develop it). It’s a B2B marketing event that covers the entire sales/marketing pipeline. It happens on 1 November at the Lancaster Hotel in London. As a friend of Velocity, you get a 20% discount to the event just by using this code: FLD508. Four tracks: Attract, [...]
Why you should give away the very thing you sell
Written by Doug Kessler |
As content marketing gains momentum, we find that we’re not having to work quite as hard explaining the principles to prospective clients. But one objection does keep popping up that we thought would have died off by now: “Why should we give content away that tells people exactly how to do what we do? Won’t [...]
The A/B and Multivariate Testing Resource Map
Written by Doug Kessler |
Testing is the single best way to improve your conversion rates and turn more traffic into customers. Here’s help.
Nine companies B2B marketers should know about
Written by Doug Kessler |
You’re a marketer, we’re marketers. It’s good to share the things we like. Here are nine companies you ought to know about. They all help marketers make more money for their companies; they’re all great at what they do; and they’re all Velocity clients – which says a hell of a lot about their judgement [...]
12 Lessons from the Manifesto Campaign – Project Open Kimono 13
Written by Doug Kessler |
We’ll be wrapping up the results of the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign soon, but here’s a quick tour of some of the lessons learned as we brought the Manifesto to market. There’s some yadda-yadda to go with it but you’ll probably get the idea… 12 Lessons from the B2B Marketing Manifesto Campaign View more presentations [...]
On first impressions and landing pages
Written by Ryan Skinner |
[This article derives from another blog post, called "First Impressions: On landing pages and landing in general"]. 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 [...]
First Impressions: On landing pages and landing in general
Written by Ryan Skinner |
I’m the new guy, freshly landed at Velocity Partners, and this is the new guy post. 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 [...]
Do the British prefer ‘muddling through’ to evidence-based B2B marketing?
Written by Stan Woods |
I was at a meeting the other day with the CMO of a leading cloud-based software vendor. Why, he asked, was it so difficult to get the lead machine working here in the UK. Three reasons sprang to mind.
Project Open Kimono 8: email follow-up and promotional defense barriers
Written by Doug Kessler |
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 [...]
B2B Marketing Agency campaign in a scribble
Written by Doug Kessler |
We were mapping out the B2B Marketing Manifesto campaign on a sheet of A4 lined paper and this is what was left behind on the meeting table. Pretty much all there.
B2B Content Marketing Trends and Spends
Written by Lucy Longhurst |
Marketing Profs and Junta 42 haven’t half been busy lately. They’ve produced a report into content marketing, surveying skills, resources, and trends. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive report of its kind, surveying 1100 American marketers in May 2010. These are some of the highlights. All in all it’s a bit of mixed bag: content [...]
The B2B Marketing Manifesto: hot off the press
Written by Doug Kessler |
“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 [...]
Ten Tips for Cross-Promoting your Content, Part II
Written by Doug Kessler |
As B2B marketing content libraries start to grow, we all need to think about how we cross-promote our content to people who have already engaged with us.
IBS campaign shortlisted for B2B Marketing Awards 2010
Written by Lucy Longhurst |
Ice the champagne: our ‘Margin Killers’ campaign for IBS has been shortlisted for the Best International Campaign category in this year’s B2B Marketing Awards.
Calnetix Power Solutions gets a dose of Velocity
Written by Lucy Longhurst |
The problem: how to sell a ground-breaking innovation to one of the world’s most conservative industries. Calnetix Power Solutions has invented a technology that captures waste heat from engines, boilers and industrial applications and turns it into electricity. The process is called the Organic Rankine Cycle, and has been used in large-scale, big footprint applications [...]
Making the sales team irrelevant
Written by Doug Kessler |
Roger Warner, online PR maestro, sent us a link to this Doug Richard video. It’s a two-minute extract from one of his start-up seminars, this one on the relationship between marketing and sales. The quote we like: “A great marketing campaign is defined by the irrelevance of the sales people who follow.” We’ve always like [...]
Velocity gets medieval
Written by Lucy Longhurst |
I have to confess to having no real reason for this, except that it’s spring and I always think of these lines from the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales whenever it’s April and it’s sunny.
The power of B2B Lead Nurturing
Written by Doug Kessler |
The sales team owns the sales funnel. But as a B2B marketer, you feed the top of their funnel. So you own your company’s revenue pipe. The success or failure of your company depends entirely on the quality and quantity of opportunities you generate. This isn’t about how many business cards your team collected from [...]
2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions
Written by Doug Kessler |
Drumroll please… Introducing The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s top B2B marketers, e-mail marketers and social media gurus” (including, erm, me). Ambal Balakrishnan, the tireless ClickDocuments founder, asked each of us a straightforward question, “What are key marketing trends and predictions for 2010?”
Quick Case: when content goes social
Written by Doug Kessler |
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.
Join us for a Demand Generation Webinar
Written by Doug Kessler |
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.
The Web Form Wall
Written by Doug Kessler |
It’s a perennial debate: give your content away with no registration (web form), or force people to give you their details to get the goodies. Both arguments are compelling and both approaches have penalties…
The Content Marketing Workbook
Written by Doug Kessler |
It’s here. The book of the webinar of the movie: The Velocity B2B Content Marketing Workbook. Over 45 breezy pages of good, solid advice about thought leadership and content marketing for B2B marketers like you. Come and get it!
Velocity announces free B2B Content Marketing Workbook
Written by Doug Kessler |
Velocity, the B2B marketing agency specialising in technology companies, today announced the publication of a free 49-page eBook called The B2B Content Marketing Workbook…
The Content Marketing Workbook
Written by Doug Kessler |
It’s here. The book of the webinar of the movie: The Velocity B2B Content Marketing Workbook. Over 45 breezy pages of good, solid advice about thought leadership and content marketing for B2B marketers like you. Come and get it!
Watch the Velocity web seminar on Content Marketing
Written by Doug Kessler |
Stan just presented our web seminar with B2B Marketing magazine, called “Content Marketing: Thought Leadership in a Web 2.0 World”. Seemed to go really well. Over 130 people attended and the feedback was excellent. The seminar is based on our imminent Content Marketing Workbook, which you’ll be able to download from this site very, very soon…
Velocity and B2B Marketing Magazine announce new webinar
Written by Doug Kessler |
Velocity, the B2B marketing agency specialising in technology markets, and B2B Marketing magazine announced a new webinar for B2B marketers about Content Marketing.
The 20-minute webinar is free and runs on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 3:30pm London time.
Zappos’ culture: paying employees to leave is great marketing
Written by Stan Woods |
Zappos, the online shoe retailer, takes a distinctive approach to company culture that delivers real marketing and brand benefits. Check out his excellent presentation from O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit here…
Customer Value Propositions in B2B Markets
Written by Doug Kessler |
Andrew Findlater from Reed Business Information recently turned us on to an excellent article in the Harvard Business Review (back in 2006 but still daisy-fresh):
Its called Customer Value Propositions in Business Markets and it makes a compelling case for what the authors call “Resonating Focus”…
The Benefit Hierarchy in corporate positioning & message development
Written by Doug Kessler |
People believe the unimportant things you say and disbelieve the important ones. You need ‘vines’…
The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map
Written by Roger Warner |
This Mind Map gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and – once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site – follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations…
B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win
Written by Roger Warner |
For B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages – your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages – the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits. Here’s why…
Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing
Written by Roger Warner |
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…
New White Paper Available: How to PPC in B2B
Written by Roger Warner |
Hey! We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment. It’s hot, hot, hot! Here’s a snippet…
Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation
Written by Roger Warner |
I just returned from a great week away in the Lower Hebrides – the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather bracing and the walks heartening. I’m missing it already. None of this, of course, has anything to do with B2B lead generation, but I did have one holiday experience that made me realise how wide of the mark we are when it comes to using ‘web-to-lead-forms.’
