HOME | RSS FEEDS | SITEMAP | CLIENT ZONE | CONTACT US
Velocity: The B2B Marketing Blog - A Joyride Through The Mean Streets of B2B

Topic results for "Marketing"

Exploiting your tacit knowledge

We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.

Tacit knowledge, first conceptualised…

Read more…

Gesu Baroova | March 2nd, 2010 | 5 comments

Why clients hate marketing agency folk

I just stumbled over a piece from Canada’s Marketing Magazine called “ Here’s to 2010: Industry experts share predictions for the year ahead” and read this, among other forecasts. Thought I’d…

Read more…

Stan Woods | February 4th, 2010 | no comments

Why Ronald Reagan is the Spitting Image of an internet pioneer

Presidents are all the rage.  Obama and Nixon, in their own ways, are the toast of the Hollywood glitterati.  And Ronald Reagan has emerged as a genuine internet pioneer.

Okay, okay. …

Read more…

Neil Stoneman | February 6th, 2009 | no comments

Zappos’ culture: paying employees to leave is great marketing

Saw a fantastic video online today that I thought I’d share.

It’s a presentation by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the US online retailer famous for shoes. He talks about…

Read more…

Stan Woods | December 5th, 2008 | one comment

Customer Value Propositions in B2B Markets

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…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | December 3rd, 2008 | no comments

Tech marketing trapped in Plato’s Cave

Will we ever learn?

The hilarious spoof of Microsoft’s attempt to re-label the iPod packaging appears to focus on a modern marketing issue.  But Plato, the pick of Greece’s golden generation…

Read more…

Neil Stoneman | October 14th, 2008 | no comments

Playing in the creative sandbox

Despite living in a ‘creative’ world, most agencies are pretty linear.  They take the brief, then they do the creative.

Velocity is a bit different.  When we do consulting engagements –…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | September 16th, 2008 | no comments

The C word: the importance of confidence in B2B marketing

A great website. Lots of white papers and thought leadership content. Case studies and customer testimonials. Great campaigns and creative. Awards, editorial coverage and analyst attention. They’re all important to…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | September 4th, 2008 | no comments

Guerrilla video: VNL thinks beyond B2B

We blogged a while back about the idea of guerrilla video for B2B websites — foregoing expensive video productions to just go out and get the footage you need to…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | July 22nd, 2008 | no comments

The 4 steps to a B2B sale: rational meets irrational

My old boss Steve Trygg (a great copywriter) used to talk about the role of marketing in business decision-making by breaking down every purchase decision into four steps — the…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | July 10th, 2008 | no comments

Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

We’ve been beavering away over the past few weeks on an important new campaign for one of our shiny new clients in the mobile internet space.

It’s a fascinating area -…

Read more…

Roger Warner | June 6th, 2008 | one comment

New Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter Available!

The latest edition of our semi-regular newsletter update is now available. It’s packed with goodness inside, including our star new white pager, Marketing, Meet Sales, which offers eleven ways to…

Read more…

Roger Warner | May 23rd, 2008 | no comments

The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

We’ve been working on a number of ‘web engagement’ programs lately, where we’ve been helping clients to increase their web ‘footprint’ in order to improve their general SEO and awareness…

Read more…

Roger Warner | May 21st, 2008 | no comments

B2B lead generation with thought leadership content: ditch the web-to-lead forms and win

Here’s an experment for you to try.

Open your web stats app and check out which pieces of content are your top performers over the past month. (By top performers, I…

Read more…

Roger Warner | May 16th, 2008 | 4 comments

Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

OK, Listen Up

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…

Read more…

Roger Warner | May 1st, 2008 | 3 comments

ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

We’re proud to say that shipserv.com launched successfuly this morning. May all who sail in her find reasonably priced shipping supplies from a broad (and competitive) selection of maritime vendors….

ShipServ…

Read more…

Roger Warner | April 15th, 2008 | no comments

New White Paper Available: How to PPC in B2B

Hey!

We just published a new web marketing white paper on the thorny subject of how to do PPC properly in an B2B environment.

Here’s a snippet:

If your goal is to generate…

Read more…

Roger Warner | April 4th, 2008 | one comment

The power of “You”: the 2nd person singular in B2B copywriting

Most B2B technology copywriting is so boring because its so neutral. The best copywriting looks the prospect squarely in the eye and says, “I’m going to sell to you and…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | April 4th, 2008 | 3 comments

Why ‘Web-to-Lead’ Forms Suck for B2B Lead Generation

I just returned from a great week away in the Inner Hebrides - the small cluster of islands to the west of Glasgow. The single malts were stunning, the weather…

Read more…

Roger Warner | March 18th, 2008 | 2 comments

How Steve Jobs (and Dick Hardt) wows the crowds

Our friend and client John Watton, Marketing Director of ShipServ, recently shared with us a Business Week article that dissects and analyses Steve Jobs’s latest keynote at Macworld (the one…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | March 12th, 2008 | one comment

Fighting Inertia: the toughest competitor of them all.

Most B2B technology companies have a clear set of competitors they’re battling. But for some (usually early stage) tech companies, there are no other companies to fight: they’re inventing a…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | February 29th, 2008 | one comment

Keywords: how to build an effective strategy in B2B

We’ve just completed a number of SEO strategy projects for various clients. Part of our work here is to help folks understand what they’re getting into and why - to…

Read more…

Roger Warner | February 23rd, 2008 | no comments

Empathy and foreplay in B2B Marketing

I don’t know how else to put this: nobody gives a shit about you. Your software or service or widget may be the center of your world but the people…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | February 7th, 2008 | no comments

Whose Tipping Point is it Anyway? A B2B Perspective…

There’s a great piece in this month’s Fast Company that asks if Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling notion of a ‘Tipping Point’ is fundamentally flawed (see: Is the Tipping Point Toast?)

The conclusion…

Read more…

Roger Warner | February 1st, 2008 | 2 comments

Tweakonomics: Why B2B Marketing Agency Retainers Suck

Tweakonomics is what you should be using to pay for your marketing services - it’s what we advocate for all our clients.

Let me explain….

This post hereby announces the death of…

Read more…

Roger Warner | January 25th, 2008 | one comment

The difference between B2B and B2C… in one New Yorker cartoon

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between B2B versus B2C marketing. Thought maybe I’d write a white paper on it. Then I came across this cartoon in the…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | January 23rd, 2008 | no comments

7 ways to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in B2B marketing

Every marketing communication has two parts:

•    The Signal – your message; the thing you want people to take away
•    The Noise – everything else; the things that distract, delay and get…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | January 22nd, 2008 | 2 comments

The ‘Big Mo’ in B2B technology marketing: are we listening to Gartner?

As we seek to build our business and capture the ‘big Mo’ (the winning momentum that every US Presidential candidate is droning on about at a town hall meeting near…

Read more…

Stan Woods | January 18th, 2008 | no comments

Building a B2B case: 8 tips from criminal lawyers

We B2B marketers are in the business of building cases. We’re advocates. So it pays to look at how other professional persuaders ply their trades. I started with a little…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | January 16th, 2008 | no comments

Pico-Branding: New Rules for Marketing


UPDATE
: this post has been kindly featured on BtoB Magazine’s ‘Blogs of the Week’. (Thanks guys!)

I’ve been mulling on this one for a while: how does Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, blogging,…

Read more…

Roger Warner | January 15th, 2008 | 5 comments

Your 2008 marketing plan: the B2B Svenn Diagram dilemma

Aside from tinsel and cheap booze offers, it’s that planning time of year again. A special place where you need to create futurama fireworks out of Powerpoint.

Co-incidently, it’s also time…

Read more…

Roger Warner | December 8th, 2007 | one comment

Widgety Goodness: Widgets and Social Media - WTF?!

Today’s ‘Widgety Goodness’ conference in Brighton brought together some in-the-know folks and some much-needed clarity to the hoopla that is social media and widgets.

Organised by the good folk at Snipperoo…

Read more…

Roger Warner | December 6th, 2007 | 3 comments

The Rise of Clean Technology

The National Venture Capital Association (US) reports that Clean Technology is the hottest thing on Sand Hill Road. During the first three quarters of 2007, VCs poured $2.6 billion into…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | December 2nd, 2007 | no comments

No such thing as B2B

Anil Raj, mobile industry heavy-hitter (and a new client in an exciting venture) hates the term B2B. He’s sold at the highest levels of the mobile industry (as Head of…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | November 28th, 2007 | no comments

What’s the freakin’ (Power)point!!??

What’s the point of Powerpoint?

A crutch to help you through an uncomfortable challenge (public speaking)?

A useful visual aid to convey stories?

A pain in the butt, killed to death, hackneyed, eyesore,…

Read more…

Roger Warner | November 26th, 2007 | 2 comments

How many agencies does it take to change a light bulb?

The answer of course is 57. There’s the SEO guys, the branding guys, the PR guys, the viral guys, the advertising guys, and so on…

The fact that there are simply…

Read more…

Roger Warner | November 24th, 2007 | 9 comments

Hot potato: the holy trinity of technology marketing

To celebrate the launch of a whole new Velocity, Doug (our Creative Director) has put pen to paper to get a bunch of important stuff off his chest…

Read more…

Roger Warner | November 18th, 2007 | no comments

Abbreviations, Acronyms & Jargon

We just got an email shot from Savvion, a company that does a good job in its marketing…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | October 20th, 2007 | no comments

Going vertical: you can’t fake authenticity

We’ve seen a bunch of companies try to take generic software into specific vertical markets.

They succeed to the degree they can achieve authenticity.

So instead of looking, feeling and sounding like,…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | October 10th, 2007 | no comments

Customer-guided marketing: is yours?

Everybody in technology companies thinks they’re ‘customer-centric’. In our experience, few really are, in the sense that they start almost every process with the customer.

In the marketing department, starting with…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | October 6th, 2007 | no comments

Pecha-Kucha: the future of Powerpoint

Pecha-kucha is the only way powerpoint should ever be used.

Twenty slides, twenty seconds each. Done.

Invented by a pair of architects in Tokyo. Pecha-kucha is pronounced to (almost) rhyme with tchotchke.…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | September 3rd, 2007 | one comment

A letter from Mr Al Fayed. It’s how you say it that counts….

I was doing some long overdue filing this morning and came across the following letter….a response to a misguided mass mailer that inadvertently invited Mr Al Fayed of Harrods to…

Read more…

Roger Warner | August 13th, 2007 | one comment

Marketing whole products

Just unpacked my new Apple MacBook Pro.

A great example of a whole product: the hardware, operating system, bundled applications (about 30), utilities, web & phone support, set-up wizards, web-based services…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | June 30th, 2007 | no comments

Earning the right to sell to CIO’s

We just produced a powerful piece of high-end direct mail for BT Counterpane.

The piece was sent to 150 select prospects — CIOs and CSOs of Fortune 500 companies in the…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | June 18th, 2007 | no comments

Recent papers

The B2B Content Marketing Workbook

Content Marketing is probably the single most important weapon in the B2B marketing arsenal. This eBook takes you through velocity’s approach to the art. Download it and see what you think…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | June 9th, 2009 | 14 comments

A B2B Social Media Checklist

You’ve just published a great piece of content. Don’t just stick it on your website. Use social media to drive people to it (and vice versa). Here’s a one-page checklist to help you socialize your content, driving traffic and downloads…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | March 12th, 2009 | 2 comments

The Benefit Hierarchy in corporate positioning & corporate message development

Managing the relationship between value and credibility is the key to good corporate positioning and corporate message development…

Read more…

Doug Kessler | November 25th, 2008 | 9 comments

Riding the Hype Cycle

Gartner’s Hype Cycle maps a curve that describes the way new technologies become adopted by the marketplace over time. Here’s how you should ride it to your advantage…

Read more…

Roger Warner | July 10th, 2008 | 5 comments