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Velocity: The B2B Marketing Blog - A Joyride Through The Mean Streets of B2B

Topic results for "Web Marketing"

B2B web marketing: the platform battle

As B2B web marketing comes of age, a battle is brewing between some pretty big players (and a few upstarts) over who will become the primary dashboard for marketers.  The…

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Doug Kessler | February 8th, 2010 | 8 comments

Never mind the Barack, it’s mobiThinking

Birth of a thought leadership website

dotMobi is a mobile Internet services company and the registry for the .mobi domain name. It’s backed by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Internet…

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Lucy Longhurst | February 2nd, 2010 | no comments

EPiServer uses market momentum to go public

We just learned that our client EPiserver is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.

The company offers the best Microsoft .Net CMS on the planet (running nearly 10,000…

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Stan Woods | January 27th, 2010 | no comments

The rise and rise of B2B content marketing

Content Marketing is rivaling social media marketing in the hype stakes — and for good reason. It may not be particularly new, but in the age of the informed buyer…

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Doug Kessler | January 26th, 2010 | no comments

IBS injects Velocity into turnaround

When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale…

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Lucy Longhurst | January 22nd, 2010 | no comments

2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions

ClickPredictions 2010
View more documents from Ambal Balakrishnan.

There she is. The 2010 Content Marketing Trends and Predictions eBook from ClickPredictions — a crowdsourced effort by “39 of the world’s…

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Doug Kessler | January 22nd, 2010 | no comments

Should free B2B content hide behind a form?

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…

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Doug Kessler | January 18th, 2010 | no comments

Our New Year’s B2B Marketing Resolutions

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…

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Lucy Longhurst | January 8th, 2010 | 3 comments

Velocity Does Video: Nine kinds of B2B web video

As this quick showreel demonstrates, we’ve been doing more and more video for our B2B marketing clients. Why? because it’s a great way to get even the most complex ideas…

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Doug Kessler | December 18th, 2009 | 5 comments

Low-tech videos for a high tech product

We love these Google Features videos on YouTube. Most tech demonstration videos are all high-tech flash with little icon men and screen shots and slick animations.  These are the opposite:…

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Doug Kessler | December 18th, 2009 | no comments

Diary of a Tweet: Clarity vs Twitterjunk

The birth of every every new communications medium is followed by a period during which the underlying technology actually cramps the communication it’s supposed to be enabling.  When it comes…

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Doug Kessler | November 13th, 2009 | 3 comments

B2B marketing predictions for 2010

We were recently asked where we thought B2B marketing would go in 2010.  Made us think. So here are some predictions for the next year:

THE KIND-OF-OBVIOUS PREDICTIONS:

Content Marketing will…

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Doug Kessler | November 6th, 2009 | 6 comments

Lethal Generosity: a key principle of social media marketing?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 90% of tweets are generated by just 10% of Twitter users. Apparently this is a higher concentration than for Wikipedia and much, much higher…

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Stan Woods | November 5th, 2009 | 3 comments

You can’t have a conversation when you use a megaphone

Selling to B2B customers has been changed forever by the Internet. A truism maybe, but it’s surprising how many B2B marketing organisations are still structured  as they were in the…

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Stan Woods | October 29th, 2009 | 5 comments

Quick Case: when content goes social

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…

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Doug Kessler | September 30th, 2009 | no comments

Microsoft marketing hits new low

Oh. My. God.

We’ve given Microsoft’s marketing a hard time in this blog before and we’ve also had some nice words to say about them.  But this one takes the cake:…

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Doug Kessler | September 28th, 2009 | one comment

Join us for a Demand Generation Webinar

An illustrious panel

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…

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Doug Kessler | September 24th, 2009 | no comments

B2B blogging for beginners

Let’s face it: these days, if you don’t have a blog on your website you’re admitting that you have nothing to say about your market, your customers, their problems and…

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Doug Kessler | September 14th, 2009 | no comments

Ghost in the machine: who should write your blog?

There’s a debate in the blogosphere about whether it’s right for a blog to be ghost-written, particularly one advertised as being written by a particular author. Rather than get exercised…

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Stan Woods | August 27th, 2009 | one comment

Why ShipServ won a 2009 CRM Market Award

Once again, ShipServ has ’scooped’ a marketing award (why are awards always scooped?) — this time the 2009 CRM Market Awards run by CRM Magazine.  ShipServ, piloted by CMO John…

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Doug Kessler | August 25th, 2009 | no comments

The Web Form Wall

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.

We tend…

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Doug Kessler | August 6th, 2009 | 4 comments

The white paper is dead…or is it?

At a webinar I presented the other day  I  said that while white papers were still the staple of content marketing, they’re getting really stale as a communications vehicle for B2B.…

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Stan Woods | June 16th, 2009 | 2 comments

The Content Marketing Workbook

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…

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Doug Kessler | June 11th, 2009 | 3 comments

How strong is your B2B positioning?

 

Positioning is one of the essentials of B2B marketing but it’s very rare to see it done well. It’s a simple idea: as a marketer, you should explicitly manage the…

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Doug Kessler | April 16th, 2009 | 3 comments

The Disruptive Idea: that’s what it’s all about

There is so much written about the black art of marketing and even more written about digital marketing (or internet marketing).  Zillions of blog posts. Millions of white papers, books,…

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Doug Kessler | March 24th, 2009 | 4 comments

Drop-down positioning at the Royal Opera House

We’re always telling clients that everything you do contributes to your positioning.

A great example from a drop-down menu in a Royal Opera House web form:

That’s just a small sample.  Check…

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Doug Kessler | December 15th, 2008 | 3 comments

Five Basic Social Theories of Online PR

Roger , our web wonderwall, posted a terrific article on the essentials of Online PR.  The central metaphor: the web is a party — work the room instead of stumbling…

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Doug Kessler | December 11th, 2008 | no comments

Velocity Xmas B2B Technology Marketing Newsletter: the Gift That Keeps on Giving

That’s right, deck the halls - it’s that giving time of year….

In our bumper edition Xmas newsletter, you’ll find:

A super-shiny new White Paper, ‘The Hierarchy of Benefits‘, which identifies one of…

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Roger Warner | December 10th, 2008 | no comments

Opt-Out: Digital Marketing’s punch in the stomach

Marketing used to be all about the upside.  You fired off a message; some people responded; others didn’t.   Net gain.

In the digital world, there’s a downside that’s as painful as…

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Doug Kessler | December 8th, 2008 | one comment

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…

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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…

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Doug Kessler | December 3rd, 2008 | no comments

Credit Crunch B2B Marketing: Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Online PR

The CEO is stalking the corridors, blood dripping from his Budget Axe — and he’s on his way to the marketing department.  Your department.

How will you defend your marketing plan? “That…

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Doug Kessler | November 28th, 2008 | no comments

Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development

B2B tech companies are often run by engineers. Engineers are great at talking about technology, but not so great at translating the technology into business benefits that people actually believe.

Being…

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Doug Kessler | November 25th, 2008 | no comments

Spamalot to the Holy Grail: a personal email journey

Are you a spammer?  I’m sure you’re not.  But I’ll cheerfully wager that some of you have, at one point, been confused for one.

According to the BBC, undercover US researchers,…

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Neil Stoneman | November 21st, 2008 | no comments

Your new content may not be as relevant as your old

All the best B2B tech marketers are mini-publishing houses — they never stop cranking out thought-provoking content on the issues their target market cares most about.  White papers, blog posts,…

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Doug Kessler | November 18th, 2008 | no comments

A really good newsletter

We know we ‘big up’ Pär Almqvist, the Marketing Dude at VNL, quite a bit. But we thought you’d like to see what we consider a really, really good eNewsletter…

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Doug Kessler | November 13th, 2008 | no comments

Microsoft’s baffling “I’m a PC” campaign

Apple got a lot of attention with its “PC vs Mac” commericals.  They were simple, funny, well-scripted and seemed to capture the essence of what Mac people love about their…

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Doug Kessler | November 10th, 2008 | 11 comments

Branding as body language

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…

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Doug Kessler | November 4th, 2008 | no comments

I beg you: don’t bore the bejesus out of me

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…

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Doug Kessler | October 31st, 2008 | no comments

Good Reasons to do Social Networking in a B2B Environment

Social networks are extremely interesting things.  They give an online home to folks with common interests and hobbies - like staying in touch with one another or following Metallica.

They’ve actually…

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Roger Warner | October 8th, 2008 | 6 comments

B2B Web Marketing Tools Around Town

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…

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Roger Warner | September 24th, 2008 | one comment

Buff Your Pitch Up. Google Suggest & B2B Content Marketing

It’s funny, but oftentimes we marketers are our own worst enemy when it comes to marketing ‘ideas’.  In my time I’ve had the pleasure of conceiving some truly dreadful press…

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Roger Warner | September 9th, 2008 | no comments

Quick Start Pimp Your Content Guide to SEO

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…

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Roger Warner | July 25th, 2008 | no comments

A Different Kind of Growth Equity Investor Needs a Different Kind of Web Presence

Don’t know about you, but it’s Friday evening and we’re offski. Peroni awaits. We’re celebrating the launch of a brand new web site for Kennet.

This is our latest and greatest…

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Roger Warner | July 18th, 2008 | no comments

Marketers everywhere - get a little mobiThinking

…check out mobiThinking.com, which was launched today to help the world’s marketing community to better understand the opportunities and challenges presented by mobile marketing. (Note: it’s web marketing Jim, but…

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Roger Warner | June 16th, 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 -…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Roger Warner | April 4th, 2008 | one comment

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…

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Roger Warner | March 18th, 2008 | 2 comments

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…

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Roger Warner | February 23rd, 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…

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Roger Warner | February 1st, 2008 | 2 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,…

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Roger Warner | January 15th, 2008 | 5 comments

B2B web marketing trends for 2008

Here’s our first broad brush, crystal ball prediction of the year: 2008 is the year of web engagement for B2B technology firms.

You built v2 or v3 of your site last year.…

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Roger Warner | January 4th, 2008 | 3 comments

Why Blog in B2B? The Final Word…

Whilst blogs are no longer the sexiest subject on the block, the ‘why blog?’ question still rages in B2B - and nowhere more so than here at Velocity.

Like many of…

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Roger Warner | December 23rd, 2007 | 2 comments

How NOT to sell yourself online

I was just uploading some images to our Flickr stream when I caught sight of the one of the most useless, intrusive banners of all time.

See the ad to the…

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Roger Warner | December 13th, 2007 | no comments

Why Web Usability Matters

You know the scene. You or your boss thought it’d be great idea to build a new web site and it’s the first planning meeting. Across the table someone shouts:…

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Roger Warner | December 11th, 2007 | no 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…

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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…

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Roger Warner | December 6th, 2007 | 3 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…

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Roger Warner | November 24th, 2007 | 9 comments

Velocity time warp: going way, way back to the early SEO days

Do you remember the time when you didn’t exist? Nope, me neither. But today is a big day for us because we kind of experienced re-birth…

…web re-birth that is.

As you…

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Roger Warner | November 23rd, 2007 | no comments

A Second Life for Marketers?

We’ve been keeping an eye on virtual worlds like Second Life for a while, waiting for the killer app for business.

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Doug Kessler | November 5th, 2007 | no comments

Does search matter in B2B?

Search matters.

The Role of Search in Business to Business Buying Decisions by Enquiro and Marketing Sherpa reported the following:

    93% of participants said they would research online when making a B2B…

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Doug Kessler | July 17th, 2007 | no comments

x5 reasons to blog

That’s right, FIVE reasons your company should blog. Count ‘em:

    Improved SEO - a steady flow of dynamic content published on a weekly basis to your web site. Search engine spiders…

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Roger Warner | July 13th, 2007 | no comments

YouTube for B2B Technology Marketing

Just posted a short film we did for BT Counterpane in the US on to YouTube. It’s an interview with Bruce Schneier, security guru.

YouTube is fast, cheap (as in free)…

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Doug Kessler | June 20th, 2007 | no comments

Reasons a business should blog a lot…

I’ve just read an interesting piece in this month’s Wired magazine on the subject of blogging.

I’ve written elsewhere about the various benefits of blogs as early product conversations, focus groups…

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Roger Warner | April 17th, 2007 | no comments

Insult to injury

Pet Peeve:

I HATE when a website asks me to register for something, takes all my details, validates my email, makes me jump through hoops, THEN tells me the service is…

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Doug Kessler | April 12th, 2007 | no comments

What makes a good web site?

Originality, originality, originality!!!

See “No One Belongs Here More than You”, a promotional site for Miranda July’s book.

Now, I know its SEO will suck because it’s all images and no text,…

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Roger Warner | April 11th, 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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Roger Warner | July 10th, 2008 | 5 comments