Digital Velocity: B2B Meets Web Marketing
The Internet is by far the most powerful weapon in today’s B2B marketing arsenal. No medium is more direct, more immediate or more measurable.
But a lot of marketers (and even more agencies) still approach the Internet as if it were a broadcast medium. They send out email ‘shots’ and run banner ads but only skim the surface of the real potential of the medium – the metrics and tracking; the optimisation strategies; the potential to march sales leads from cold contact through to a sale.
The Velocity digital marketing portfolio has grown over the years into a pretty comprehensive range of services that can take you from Web Luddite to all-singin’, all-dancin’, all-optimised Master of the Interweb (or simply fill the holes in your current online strategy).
Here’s a quick summary of what we like to call Digital Velocity:
Web Insight
Before starting any digital marketing program, it helps to know where you are today. An Insight project is where we map out your place in the web universe; show how you’re performing on the search engines; analyse your performance on keywords vs. the competition; evaluate your online presence, social media clout and reputation with the blogs and key media. We’ll also create a new mission, metrics and goals for your web marketing nirvana — we’ll tell you what you should be aiming for and how to get there.
Output: a clear view of where you are today and a program for maximising your impact within your budget.
One recent Web Insight project identified that the client’s home page was optimised around the word ‘November’ (due to a CMS rendering issue). We identified four keywords that would yield quick returns and their search performance climbed dramatically.
Web Start
For clients building a new web presence or completely over-hauling an old one, Velocity Web Start is a fast-track website design and build process that starts with your goals and proceeds systematically (but quickly) through your key web personas, use cases, content plan, wireframes, designs and build – including advice and implementation on the right Content Management System.
Output: an insanely great website that impresses the search spiders as well as it does your real, human audiences.
For ShipServ, we conceived, designed, built and populated a CMS-based corporate website in six weeks, including channels for blogs, podcasts and lead capture.
Content Factory
Content is the core of any web marketing strategy and this is where Velocity really shines. We create content that drives traffic, attracts interest and motivates response. Whether a white paper, eBook, video, webinar or micro-site, Velocity makes content that moves markets.
The things that roll off the Content Factory lines are always different, but they have one thing in common: they’re built around your customers’ concerns first and your own sales agenda second. Mastering the former is the best way to achieve the latter.
Output: ‘tent-pole’ content that stands above the market noise, gets noticed and drives traffic.
One recent white paper for dotMobi earned over 4,000 downloads in ten days. A video for VNL.in generated coverage in the Financial Times. And an iPod mailer packed with podcasts was credited with generating first contacts with three eventual wins for BT Global Services.
Digital Engagement and B2B Lead Generation Tactics
Our rather slick execution of web-based lead generation campaigns starts with a clear, concise set of goals. We then propose a strategy, tactics and creative for achieving these goals and execute the entire program.
Digital Engagement programs include anything from micro-sites and traffic generation to pay-per-click, SEO, eNewsletters and banner ad campaigns — whatever it takes to spur your target community into action.
Our Lead Nurturing and Scoring platform helps us create and manage automated campaigns that treat prospects differently based on their demographics and behaviours – then tracks each prospect as they progress through the sales funnel (sales guys love this stuff).
The power of lead nurturing and scoring
We’re extremely excited about the new generation of lead nurturing and scoring applications. The idea is simple: automate your online campaigns (‘in five days, send email 2 to everyone who opened email 1’); then track every lead in your database according to their demographic (job title, country) and behaviour (‘downloaded white paper A’). As you walk prospects towards your sales force, you score their activities and, when thresholds are breached, alert the right salesperson.Now instead of tell the entire sales team, “Hey! We got ninety responses to our offer – here they are!”; you can say, “Janet, these three people downloaded white paper B this week AND opened our last two emails on XYZ. Might want to give them a ring.”
There’s a lot of talk about connecting marketing and sales. B2B lead generation, nurturing and scoring is the bridge we’ve been waiting for.
Output: on-strategy campaigns that deliver results so indisputable, even the staunchest anti-marketing goon bends a knee in deference.
Our mobiThinking website and traffic-building campaign for dotMobi was the first online resource for mobile marketers, generating significant engagement with a core audience. Another campaign for ip.access drove a new Applications Handbook into existing and new customers, generating significant interest and new business leads.
Social Media and Online PR
Once we’ve identified who we need to engage with, where they are an what language and content we should be using, we then get into some pretty forensic Social Media and Online PR activity to ensure your messages reaches the right parts of the web and the right kind of traffic responds.
Output: real Online PR and Social Media buzz when and where its needed most, plus a huge Google back-linkage ‘halo’ effect.
Blogger Engagement: we help you to monitor activity on target blogs and seed comments on appropriate posts, with (keyword optimised) links to key pages.
Twitter: we get you up and running with a Twitter account and get you engaged with all the right Tweets and conversations.
Social Networking (eg, LinkedIn): we help you to leverage new social networks and connect with interested parties via group postings, discussion forums, Q&A’s and direct messages
Social ‘Sharing’: we help set up accounts on YouTube, Flickr, Scribd, and others to to host your key content assets – images, videos, podcasts – with the express aim of driving ‘off-site’ traffic to your key pages.
Online Content Distribution and Bookmarking: we push your messages harder by issuing social media bulletins, online press releases and more via the most strategic web distribution channels; and we use a variety of tactics to encourage others to bookmark this content and boost your SEO.
Analytics & Reporting
Velocity Analytics brings together a powerful set of tools to create a clear picture of your performance online. These include the new generation of Web Analytics and SEO tools as well as the tracking capabilities of our Lead Nurturing and Scoring platform.
But the tools on their own don’t perform the analysis – they just gather the data. Our digital marketing geek squad takes it from there to turn raw data into actionable insight.
Output: clear, compelling reports on the performance of any campaign or your ongoing web presence, over time.
Our Online PR programs can track not only the improvement in search engine performance but the actual new traffic generated by it. For one client, we showed how a few judicious keyword applications and tags drove over 200 new downloads (for free).
B2B Web Training
A lot of digital marketing is best done in-house… once you know how. Velocity Web Training helps get your team up to speed on the essentials of B2B web content management, SEO, pay-per-click, content optimisation and online PR.
We also provide direct access to our Lead Nurturing and Scoring platform so clients can run their own online campaigns and track their progress themselves.
Output: a team that knows what it’s doing online and can drive new business without driving up fees.
Our half-day introduction to the WordPress CMS gets even total newbies publishing search-optimised blog posts with total confidence. And our Online PR Primer never fails to get clients scurrying back to their desks to drive their page rank into the heavens.
Adding Velocity to your digital marketing and lead generation programs
For all the talk about digital marketing and B2B lead generation, the Internet is still a shamefully under-exploited weapon for most B2B technology marketers.
Digital Velocity transforms your web strategy and online performance from a passive, broadcast model to a dynamic, fully-engaged process that proves its own value as it goes.
We could write about all things digital forever (as our blog and white paper library attests). But we’d rather sit down and discuss your specific goals and challenges.
