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, Engage, Nurture and Convert. It’s organised by Econsultancy, so you know the content (and lunch) will be top-notch.

Here’s a list of delegates already registered (you’re in good company).

This will be worth a day out of the office for anyone serious about B2B marketing. Pretty much guaranteed.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B Events, B2B marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, marketing automation, Revenue Performance Management

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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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There are lots of ways to build your content marketing strategy:

Around personas – with content for each type of buyer.

Around the stages of the buying journey – with early stage videos, mid-stage ebooks and late-stage case studies.

Around your product portfolio – making sure each product has its content support.

Around organisational structure – with each division having its own content stream.

Around media types – balancing videos, slideshares, ebooks, infographics, microsites, white papers…

We’ve seen all of these approaches and more. But I’d like to suggest another way to go: build your content around your most important buying triggers.

What’s a buying trigger?
A buying trigger is an event in the life of a prospect that suddenly makes them receptive to your story.

• For a client that makes enterprise middleware, one of the big buying triggers was a merger or acquisition. When a bank buys another bank it needs to integrate the IT as smoothly as possible. The right middleware can help.
• For App-DNA (the daddy of all application compatibility tools), a big enterprise’s decision to migrate to Windows 7 is a major buying trigger.
• For Reevoo, the social commerce experts, a prospect’s change of ecommerce platform is a great trigger for reconsidering the ratings & reviews system.
• For PressRun, the tablet publishing platform, a magazine’s decision to develop an iPad edition is a massive trigger.

Notice that all of these triggers are discrete events; they’re all in the buyer’s world, not the vendor’s; and they all involve the abrupt opening of a window of opportunity. Trigger moments put the prospect into a period of change. That makes them a bit uncomfortable with the status quo and a lot hungrier for information. Perfect.

Clear buying triggers are an important part of a B2B company’s success. We’ve seen dozens and dozens of technology players with great products but very fuzzy buying triggers. It’s hard to market this kind of solution. You have to wait for the prospect to recognise the need and hope they can find you at that moment.

So how can you exploit buying triggers?
Buying triggers are a natural dimension to build your B2B content marketing strategy around. Using the above examples:

• The middleware guys should do content around the IT challenges of mergers & acquisitions.
• App-DNA should do stuff around Windows 7 migrations. Like this Windows 7 Migration Checklist.
• Reevoo should do ebooks around ecommerce platform change. (Watch this space).
• PressRun needs content on tablet magazine publishing. In fact, they dedicate a whole blog and newsletter to it.

Sometimes the buying triggers don’t feel very central to your story. That doesn’t matter. If it’s a real buying trigger, there’s a real opportunity to create some good content around it.

Some Trigger Marketing content tips
Marketing that targets specific buying triggers is not much different from good content marketing. But there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Target one trigger at a time – it’s tempting to combine the minor ones but it defeats the purpose.
2. Nail the implications of the trigger event – a trigger event raises new issues for prospects. Master these issues.
3. Draw a direct line from the trigger to your door – don’t be shy about this. Tell people exactly why someone in their new situation needs your solution.
4. Think about how the triggered prospect searches – keyword research around triggers is of prime importance. Many triggered prospects aren’t on your lists yet. You need to make it easy for them to find you.
5. Get those trigger keywords in your titles – you need this content to rank on the trigger terms.
6. Be open to new media and channels – trigger marketing often takes you to new websites, social media groups and marketing partners. Embrace that.
7. Create content clusters – a single ebook on a trigger topic may not be enough to rank on the engines. An ebook, white paper and video hanging off a blog on a microsite (all SEO optimised) will multiply the value.

Done right, Trigger Marketing (hey, I coined a phrase!) can be the most powerful Huskie in your B2B marketing dogsled.

Today, everyone does personas. Tomorrow, we’ll all be doing Trigger Maps, too.

———-

Photo: flickr creative commons by .void

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B social media, lead nurturing

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“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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We’ve been working with Marketo, the biggest cheese in B2B marketing automation, to design and sub-edit their new eBook ‘The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media’. It’s the latest in the series of Definitive Guides (you can read the first one on Lead Nurturing here).

This new eBook provides a complete overview of B2B social media, giving you all the important information you need to leverage social media. Social media in a B2B context is still relatively new, so the eBook starts from the basics and gives you practical, jargon-free insights into how you can use social media in your business. The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media includes worksheets with some completed examples so you can see exactly how to fill them in and apply them to your business.

We teamed up with talented illustrator Olly Montagu to draw us a figure to be a visual representation of the reader. He accompanies the reader as he or she progresses through the book.

As well as the illustrations, we tailored the eBook to follow the design style of the Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing (created by our own design guy Stuart Rothwell), and did some subediting to improve the flow.

Lots of B2B companies are using social media as a cost-effective way of raising their profile and starting a dialog with potential customers. Download the new Definitive Guide and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B marketing, B2B social media, Copywriting, lead nurturing, Social Media, Thought Leadership

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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 the latest trade show. It’s about how many sales-ready leads you can generate. That’s where Lead Nurturing comes in.

We’re huge fans of Lead Nurturing because it:

• Closes the gap between marketing and sales – connecting us directly to revenue
• Never wastes a lead – moving the cold ones forward while acting on the hot ones
• Creates opportunities that the sales team really values – stopping them from cold calling (or ignoring undifferentiated leads)
• Makes it easy to treat people differently – based on their demographics (job title, industry) and their behaviours (web visits, downloads, email opens…)
• Automates a lot of boring tasks – like creating landing pages and linking them to emails and analytics

Brian Carrol, CEO of InTouch has a great 5-step way of thinking about lead nurturing:

1. Refine – work with the sales team to hone a definition of what  a ‘sales-ready’ lead really means. This entails lead scoring and prioritization (50 points if they download White Paper X; 100 points if they visit us at an event…).
2. Qualify – centralise all data about leads, offline and online.  Then decide who’s worth the effort. (Authority, Time Frame, Need, Budget). There’s often a non-automated, human aspect here (remember the phone?). But do it right and sales conversion rates double.
3. Nuture –work the early stage leads until they’re sales-ready; drip feed them emails, content & contacts and score their behaviours; It’s about a relevant ongoing dialog with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy.
4. Define – create a defined hand-off process for moving leads from marketing to sales; CRM integration of your lead nurturing system will help.
5. Close the loop – via monthly sales/marketing meetings; get their feedback on the leads you’ve delivered; discuss what’s working and what’s not…

The upshot of all this: more effective selling time for your sales people, focused on people with a real business need – and more revenue for the business.

With lead nurturing process like this, you can track Cost per Opportunity (the ones the sales force is actively working on) instead of the clunkier, less enlightening metric, Cost per Lead.

There are an increasing number of Lead Nurturing systems that support this kind of process and automate a lot of the activities that go into it.  We’re getting up to speed on Marketo (pioneered in Europe by John Watton, CMO of ShipServ) and think you should be too.  This is where B2B marketing is going: actually generating business instead of undifferentiated names and email addresses.

(photo credit: Bram Reinders, Creative Commons)

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring

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There she is. 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?”

The answers are pretty enlightening. As Ambal says, “It’s a first-hand look into the future of content marketing from the people that live and breathe it every single day.” It’s also packed with over 100 recommended resources. All sponsored by our pals at Marketo — the daddy’s of lead nurturing.

Click for free download now and see the future…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Lead Generation, lead nurturing, Social Media, Thought Leadership, Web Marketing

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The debate rages on: is it better to ask people to fill out a form to download your content (chasing shy people away) or maximise downloads and go without a form (losing the list-building benefits)?

A recent post by Kim Cornwall Malseed on MarCom Ink argues that reg forms are ‘killing B2B software marketing’ and Roger Warner, writing in this blog two years ago, agreed.  Kim refers to a recent survey by Spiceworks that says “More than 75% of IT professionals DON’T sign up for white papers requiring registration”.  If that’s true it certainly argues for doing without the forms (Spiceworks decided to risk it: you can get the survey but have to fill in a form).

At Velocity, we tend to advise clients to get the best from both strategies:  Make the vast majority of content available free (and atomise it on other sites like Slideshare and LinkedIn); but require a brief form (name, email, maybe company name) for the highest-value pieces.  For top-value content, we feel the vendor has earned the right to ask for the data. It helps to let people know up front that you won’t be using the data to spam them to Kingdom Come.

We follow this plan for our own web marketing. All of our goodies are free (with an option subscription form) except for our Content Marketing Workbook, a 50-pager that, we feel, is worth leaving your name for (or a fake name and email as some have done — we don’t reject false emails).

The Content Marketing Workbook has been downloaded nearly a thousand times powered by a marketing budget of bupkis (no cash but a bit of time). One might say that this proves the web form is working, but of course, we have no control group.  We can’t say how many people decided not to download the eBook due to the form — our web analytics gives us evidence but no proof.

Clearly, the only way to analyse the pros and cons is to run an A/B test.  Two landing pages, one with and one without a form.  Spray people randomly at either one and measure.  Next time, we’ll do that and report back.  In the mean time, we’re thrilled with 1,000 new names on our database and try not to think of the 4,000 who got away.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Content, Content Marketing, digital marketing, lead nurturing, Web Marketing

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Inspired by Neil’s resolution “to eat breakfast every morning”, I got everyone at Velocity to give me their B2B marketing resolutions. So here are the new year’s resolutions from the heavyweights (especially after Christmas) at Velocity:

Speak at more B2B industry events - To get the message out there that the old way of marketing is running out of steam

Target prospects that are really right for Velocity - Work with great marketers that really value what we do and how we approach marketing problem solving

Grow (sensibly)! – To meet demand while keeping service levels up.

Do more web video - This is a great way to get complex stories across quickly and clearly. We already do a lot of it but we will do lots more.

Spend less time (but better time) on social media - It’s not really social, it’s for work*.  But it can really eat up the time.

Write a smash hit follow up to the Content Marketing Workbook - We’re approaching a thousand downloads! Next time we’ll try to beat that.

Put more time and effort into website conversions - Otherwise what’s the point?

Use more lead nurturing tools i.e. Marketo - Better bait for catching clients

Create effective ROI metrics for social media campaigning - So we know what to focus our energies on

And mine:

Write one great headline a week
So Doug doesn’t have to keep grimacing like that

Be able to explain cloud computing to my mother
If I can make her get it, I’ve arrived…

This year we’re going to stick to them. Definitely.

*He says ‘work’ but I’ve seen him playing Scrabulous on Facebook.

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, lead nurturing, Technology Marketing, 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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