Why are so few B2B companies as good at naming things as consumer companies?

We all could learn a lot from beauty companies like L’Oreal, which uses naming to great, if insidious, effect. There can only be a few women of a certain age on the planet, for example, who haven’t heard of Boswelox, Pentapeptides or Nutrillium. (All, I think, purport to firm the skin and make it glow – which is real important of course if you’re Andi McDowell).

Ridiculous as the science  underpinning these products may be (that’s not for me to judge), the bottom line is that product or feature naming in the hugely competitive cosmetics industry really does work.  Millions of women (and, increasingly, similar numbers of men) are persuaded by the pseudo-science to buy pots and pots of gloop, simply because naming like this gives a reason to believe that it can really protect the skin, hair, eyes, lips or whatever from aging.

What does this mean for B2B? Well, pseudo-science is probably not the right route to take, because purchasing in B2B is essentially a completely rational process where scores of technical experts in big purchasing companies evaluate and then re-evaluate vendor claims. But that doesn’t mean B2B marketers shouldn’t put effort into proper, accurate naming.

There are three reasons that spring to mind as to why it’s important.

First,  naming things says they’re unique to you and it’s a good way of identifying the advantages and benefits you deliver to customers, the things that differentiate you from the competition.

Second, clear names make you stand out from the generic descriptions that pollute B2B tech and which are partly responsible for ever more (and incredible) claim inflation..

Finally, if you get naming right, it can make a real difference to SEO performance: particularly if you can capture terms that resonate in the market.

Interestingly we’ve just gone through an intensive process of positioning and messaging for one of our newest clients, Secerno, where naming was central.

Based in Oxford, Secerno has some wonderful, patent-protected technology for creating intelligent perimeters around enterprise databases to prevent unauthorized activities by outside attackers, as well as trusted insiders. (It’s a hot, hot company and if you’re a large enterprise that has vulnerable data, you should check it out at www.secerno.com)

As with a lot of our clients, the process has led to the creation of a completely new naming architecture covering what the company does, how it does it and the benefits it delivers.

What Secerno has taught us, though, is that while naming things is important, it’s really just the start.

We’re working with a really smart client on this one, the company’s marketing director, Emma Dunstone.  She believes in the new naming and she understands that for it to live and, more importantly, become part of Secerno’s DNA, it’s simply not good enough to have it just written down in brochures and on the website. You have to believe in it. You have to breathe it.

BTW (and as a concluding comment on naming), I recommend e3p skin protection spray from Clarins. You’ll get the benefit of its Magnetic Defence Complex which protects your skin from the ageing effects of Artificial Electromagnetic Waves. Looking at the pictures to the right of this post, I’d say that’s pretty vital.

A friend of ours who also happens to be a God of Branding just sent us an article he wrote ten years ago but could have been written yesterday.  He’s Axel Chaldecott, co-founder of HHCL, now the top creative on the global HSBC account at JWT.

The article is called Corporate Branding is Dead and its central metaphor is… well I’ll let Axel say it:

 ”Most CEOs don’t recognise that the way their company is visually represented is in fact the company’s body language.”

Any presentation coach will tell you that your body language speaks louder than your words.  But for most B2B companies, the visual side of their communications is the last thing they think about (if they think about it at all).

As a result, the typical B2B brand slumps into the room, mumbles under its breath, looks down at the floor, picks its nose and scratches its genitalia.

No self-respecting company would hire a salesperson who gave this kind of impression, but thousands are happy to have logos, websites, brochures, data sheets and business cards that do.

Design and visual communication is moving up the agenda at Velocity as we see the value it brings to our clients — especially in an increasingly digital landscape.  As we help our clients present themselves to the world, it would be remiss not to work on the body language, too.

Marketing is communication.

B2B marketing is bad communication.

That’s how your audience thinks about everything you put out.

Their expectations couldn’t be lower.

They’ve waded through thousands of case studies and brochures and web pages from people just like you and IT’S NOT FUN.

Wouldn’t it be nice to surprise them once in a while?

To actually have fun in producing something so people will enjoy reading it?

To take a deep breath (or a deep draught), let your B2B inhibitions slide away and just talk?

Your prospects are begging you: “Do anything you like but please stop BORING me.”

Re-think that email. Pulp that brochure. Reject that ad idea. Aim higher.

Being a nice chap, I thought I’d share a few of our secret web marketing tools with you. These are the apps and widgets that we use day in, day out to help our clients do wonderful things in SEO, PPC, and web content marketing in general….

Keyword Research Tools

Tools to help you understand which SEO/keyword markets to attack…

KGen
A sidebar that scans a web page and gives you a read on its keyword volumes and keyword density. Use it for snooping on competitors. If they’re good at their game, you’ll soon learn why.

Google Adwords Suggest
Type in whatever keywords and/or phrases you’re investigating, hit a button and this tool will tell you how many people have used the same verbage to search Google in an average month, and also how many competitors are out there bidding on the same terms as part of their PPC ad campaigns.

Wordtracker
Like Google Suggest, but provides (independent) data on keywords from a wider variety of search engines. In addition, it gives you a superb competitive index that tells you how many other web pages are optimised for your terms.

Competitive Keyword Tools

Tools to help you understand what your competitors are up to…

Keyword Spy
A very smart widget that shows you which other companies and/or sites are using your keywords for their PPC campaigns.

Keyword Page Comparison Tool
This tool enables you to grab a quick read on the technical composition of a web page by scraping its title, meta description, meta keywords, page copy, and top keyword phrases and presenting it all back to you in one place.

Keyword Density Tool
This is a variant on the Keyword Page comparison tool, but gives you a bit more flexibility to include and exclude certain paratmeters. Great to use to get a rapid view on how well your competitors are thinking about keywords and SEO.

SEO Analysis Tools

Things to help you understand SEO performance…

SEO Quake
A plugin for Firefox that sits as an additional toolbar at the top of your browser window. When you’re on a page, it’ll tell you (immediately) key things like Google PageRank, page index volume, volume of inbound links, volume of external links, and other essential data.

Xinu
A great little service that gives you an instant read on a site’s SEO performance across a wide range of metrics. At the press of a button you’ll see key indicators like social media footprint (how often a site’s been bookmarked), volume of backlinks (and their source), and number of pages indexed in key search engines.

Google Analytics
The daddy of analytics tools. It’s free. So use it!

Opentracker
Much like Google Analytics, but has a cool feature that shows you which companies are browsing your site in real time!

Google Webmaster
Provides lots of great tools to help webmasters understand how often their sites are being indexed by Google and which pages are being accessed.

Blog Research Tools

Things to keep you in the know and amongst the buzz and gossip…

Blogpulse
Kind of like a Google for blogs. Also free. Just type in a search term and it’ll give you back a ream of related (recent) blog posts. You can also do some neat ‘trending’ vs other keywords.

Twitter Search
A Google for Twitter. See who’s talking about you and your keywords.

Online PR Tools

Things to help you spread the word at very little cost…

I’ll make it a list. They basically do the same thing: distribute your press releases around the web at next to no cost.

PitchEngine
FastPitch
ClickPress
Sane PR
PR Log

Got any others? We’d love to know. Just post us a comment….

Velocity, the B2B technology marketing agency, is happy to welcome the newest recruit to its design department, Lee Hosford.

Lee is a talented designer and photographer with a great eye for type. He’s also a dab hand at Photoshop, Illustrator and all the essential tools of the digital design trade.

Lee comes to us with an honours degree from Southampton Solent University’s highly regarded design department. He also did an internship at Ryan Emo Design & Advertising in Southampton.

On top of all that, he’s a nice guy and a blues fanatic.

“To be honest, design used to be an afterthought at Velocity,” admits Stan Woods, Velocity MD, “The idea comes first.  But as the department grows, we’re discovering  the benefits of integrating design ideas at the very beginning of our thinking.  And we’re doing a lot more brand identity and web design work than ever before.  Lee’s an important part of all this and we’re really glad to have discovered him.”

I’ve been doing a stack of content optimisation for client web sites lately, so I thought I’d share some of my ‘how to’ notes with the interweb.

As I do this stuff I’m usually working side by side with a marketing manager/director/etc in order to make decisions about SEO strategies, and how to best plan for the future. Content can be a messy business at times, particularly if there are more than a couple of people producing it for a site… anarchy often rules in the shape of strange formating and styling and irregular usage of language.

So I find it helps to give people some guidelines to keep them on the straight and narrow. And in doing so, it’s usually best to strip out the blather and get them focused on just the handful of things they *have* to remember when creating a new web page (so that they can continue to build on a good SEO foundation without our help!)

So, here goes…. notes from my content optimisation scrap book:

Technical Page Content Tips

Here at Velocity, we always use a CMS for our client sites. We choose these apps carefully, and always ensure that they let us do some essential SEO-related things from a technical and functional page perspective… Because, for good SEO, there are a bunch of things you really have to do at a technical page level:

* Edit each of your page titles independently. Your page title is the thing that will be printed at the top of a browser window (in the centre of the grey horizontal bar, next to your minimise/maximise buttons). You should try and make this title brief - around 70 characters or so, relevant to the page and peppered with a few important keywords or phrases. This is because, like us humans, crawlers tend to use ‘titles’ as a good indication of what the page is about. (NB: don’t go crazy on the keywords! The page title MUST be readable and easy on the eye to humankind as well!)

* Edit each page’s metadata descriptions. This is the stuff that Google uses to describe you when it displays its results (ie, it gets used as the blurb that sits underneath the page title link in Google’s listing for you). As such, this field should describe the page, include a few keywords, and also *a call to action* like ‘read more’, or ‘find out more’ or ‘get your free offer here…’ etc. (Think about it - this globbet of content is really, really important - this is your ’sales pitch’ on a Google results page…. so a call to action is a good thing to draw people into the click.) This text should be around 160 characters or less. Anything more will get cut off at the knees.

* Edit each page’s metadata keywords/tags. Whilst this used to be important, it’s not any more…. but you ought to do it as a matter of good practice. Here you should list all your relevant key phrases, separated by a comma. This could be a big list, or it could be small…. whatever you think appropriate. You should note however, that this metadata field isn’t really used by search engines as a measure of importance or relevancy any more. It does, however, give them a clue about who you are and what you’re about.

* Use keywords in your navigation schemes wherever possible. Also use them (sensibly) in important on-page functional items like buttons, pull quotes, maps, and other such eye candy.

On-Page Content Tips

So much for the functional and technical stuff. What about the writing? Here’s my ultra-condensed guide to producing good, SEO-friendly page content….

* Make your content chunky - use header tags to split it into bite-sized paragraphs that are easy for crawlers and humans alike to read and understand. (ie, header, para, space; header, para, space, etc.)

* Use keywords in them there headers wherever possible, and wherever it adds value to the process of scanning or skimming the page.

* Create as many internal links in the page as possible, whilst still retaining a (human) reader’s focus. Use keywords in the descriptive link anchor text (if you’re using a half decent CMS, then you ought to get prompted for this). This anchor text is basically a descriptive label. It tells a crawler what your link is about. Hence, if you’re in the business of CRM systems, then your internal link from your home page to your products page ought to include an anchor text that goes something like this: ‘XYZ Corp’s CRM Software helps mere mortals sell ice to eskimos.’ In other words, use a bunch of sensible internal links to help a crawler find its way around your site and learn about what you do in the process.

* Create as many external links as possible. Use the same approach to anchor text as described above. Whilst internal links are important to help a crawler scoot around your site, external links will help them understand what kind of other web sites you associate yourself with. So, if you’re in the business of selling small handheld computing devices, make sure you link out to popular media sites that cover this topic and also other vendor sites that compliment you (and even compete with you). The more popular these sites the better - your goal is the bask in their sunlight.

* If you’re blogging, or using a CMS that uses blog-style principles (and of your front end design houses them) then use categories and tags for your posts/pages wherever possible, and try to infuse some keywords in there whenever you can. As per the points above, these navigational elements help crawlers to understand how to navigate your site and understand who you are in equal measure…. just like they help us humans.

* Put your most important content at the top of the page. By important I mean the stuff that’s full of useful keywords, headings, and links. Save the waffle for later in the page. (Like us, crawlers get bored easily.)

* Think of your page as a hierarchy of content. In fact, think like a robot in a hurry. Big, important words go at the top in big important heading styles. Weave linkage into this important stuff wherever you can, and try to ensure that this linkage reinforces the big keywords in its anchor text. In other words, keywords get kind of scored in order of descending importance, depending on where they feature in your content: from page titles down through primary navigation, headers, body text links, bold text and boring old plain text.

All you really need to remember….

In sum, all of the above illustrates that crawlers basically read the way that we humans do – they scan the page and pick out key elements to get a sense of meaning. As such, good SEO content is good to read…. and to write be able to write it is to have a good level of empathy with readers and crawlers alike.

If you’d like to know more about a bit of the science, check out our best practice SEO white paper ‘How to be a Google Guru in 30 Minutes’….

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 tell a story.

All it takes is an idea — and a client with some vision and courage.

Our client VNL has plenty of both. Marketing guru Pär Almqvist and CEO Anil Raj responded to our ideas for bringing their story to life on the small screen with just three words, ‘Let’s do it’. A few weeks later, Pär and I were in Deorhi, a small rural village in Utar Pradesh, armed with two Sony HD camcorders.

VNL is the inventor of microtelecom, the re-engineering of the mobile infrastructure especially for rural markets. That means base stations that are solar-powered, incredibly low-cost and easily assembled by people with no technical expertise.

VNL sells to mobile operators but we wanted to make the promise of rural connectivity come to life by talking directly to the operators’ potential customers: the villagers themselves.

Deorhi was the perfect village for our needs. Two hundred kilometers from Delhi, Deorhi receives what we call ‘accidental mobile coverage’ because of its location near an important road between to larger towns. The people of Deorhi were never targeted for mobile services, but they got them by accident.

Deorhi is also where VNL’s Chief Technology Officer, Krishna Sirohi, grew up (his father founded the first school in Deorhi and served as it’s principal for 42 years).

The idea for the video was simply to go to Deorhi and interview the villagers about their experiences with mobile phones. We then edited the results into a warm, compelling piece that makes the VNL story come to life.

We expected people to like using mobiles — after all, it’s the first connectivity of any kind for Deorhi. But we were really blown away by the impact that mobile services are having on people’s lives — both for personal and business reasons.

The people of Deorhi were incredibly open and generous. As guests of the Sirohi family, we were also guests of the entire village. That made it easy for Pär and I to conduct over thirty interviews with everyone from 6 year-old kids to an 88-year old man.

After just a few interviews, we knew we’d got what we came for: even without professional cameramen, the footage looks great (bright sun and pretty amazing camcorders helped). We used one camera on a tripod and the other as a hand-held for cut-away shots and footage of the village. The stationery camera used a lapel microphone to make the sound as clear as possible (hugely important).

Pär composed and created the soundtrack himself. He’s not just a ‘marketing dude’, he’s also an incredibly talented musician and kick-ass web developer (he designed and coded the entire VNL site, which we wrote).

The footage was edited by Hugh Gormley, our quasi-in-house editor extraordinaire and posted on VNL’s Resource Library, designed and coded by Pär.

It appears alongside an interview with CEO Anil Raj that we shot over a few hours in Delhi (again, using our two camcorders). It’s a long piece so we cut it into chapters for easy navigation.

Looking back, a few lessons from these first forays into guerrilla video:

• Just do it – The costs of this kind of project are so low, you can shoot first and ask questions later. If you don’t like the footage, abort.

• Keep it simple – Start with a simple idea. No actors. No dramatisation. Just one idea executed well.

• Don’t ignore production values – Yes, it’s the YouTube ethic, but problems with sound, lighting, framing or focus will distract from your message.

• Invest in post-production – The film is made in the editing. Get a great editor and let him do his job. (Thanks, Hugh).

• Skip the committees – Pär and Elise Alpen were the only client contacts for both of these films. We checked in on the key decisions but they let us get on with everything else. It helped that Pär could handle a camera and both kinds of keyboard.

• Go for the end customer – B2B markets can be a bit abstract. Think about skipping over your direct customer and talking to the end consumer for some real energy and context.

Maybe we got lucky with these two films. But the point of guerrilla video is to keep costs low enough to be able to switch to Plan B or kill the project if it isn’t shaping up the way you want.

It isn’t just a video thing: this ’shoot from the hip’ marketing is on the rise as companies harness the power of blogs, forums, wikis, social media, pay-per-click and email.

As our name implies, we LIKE this kind of marketing. It’s fast. It’s fun. And it makes a real impact in the time it takes traditional marketing to arrange a conference call.

We’ve got more videos in the works for VNL and for clients like dotMobi – and we’re hatching a few new case study ideas for ourselves. Don’t touch that dial.

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 market. The only competitor is the inertia of the target audience. At first glance, it sounds like a great position to be in. Never facing a head-to-head competitor. Being free from the never-ending features arms race. But in reality, these can be the toughest marketing challenges of them all…

Think about it: if ‘do nothing’ is even an option for the prospective buyer, you’ve probably got an uphill battle… and a sales cycle that could resemble Napoleon’s march into Russia.

Overcoming inertia means selling someone a problem before you can sell them a solution. Convincing them that the way they’re doing things now is doomed to failure. But no one I know is actually in the market for problems. We’ve all got enough, thanks.

It’s like walking into someone’s office and saying, “See that rock in that corner? Well, there are little monsters under that rock and they’re going to come out and get you one day. The good news is, I’m going to turn over that rock and kill those monsters.”

To which most sane people would reply, ‘Don’t touch that rock!’

The pioneering technology faces exactly this resistance. The prospect has been happily doing nothing for a long time, despite what you claim is a serious enough problem to demand attention now. That can only be because of one of a few reasons:

• They recognise the pain but find it endurable
  Your need to show them that a pain-free life is easy to achieve

• They recognise the pain but see it as someone else’s
  You need to find that other person.

• They don’t feel it as pain at all
  You have to prove that it is pain, and that it’s a symptom of more serious risks.

• They know that all their competitors have the same pain
  Your need to show that this is no longer true: their competitors are now gaining an advantage.

• Their job depends on this pain existing and persisting
  You need to reach their boss.

Clearly, these are all difficult attitudes to overcome. In many ways, it’s easier to duke it out with a direct competitor.

Often, what the competitor-free pioneer is doing is aggregating low-level pains that attack different departments and job titles. If the pain were already in one place, there would probably be some competing solutions (direct competitors or viable substitutes) trying to solve it.

The choice is either to get those different influencers to think like a team so they can also aggregate some budget; or to find the person they all report to and show how all those little headaches are really one big headache and it’s their head.

Another strategy is to break down your solution into smaller apps suitable for the specific pain points, selling each for less but selling to one person at a time. That means faster sales cycles and more entry points to upsell the whole solution.

So inertia just might be the most formidable competitor you’ll ever meet. For market pioneers, traditional competition should be welcomed. It validates the market. It tells buyers that there really is something going on here. And it gives you something to position yourself against.

Thankfully, inertia works both ways. A body at rest may tend to stay at rest but a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Get the market moving and you could be riding a big snowball down an even bigger hill (at which point a host of new competitors will come running out to play).