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Marketers everywhere - get a little mobiThinking

Roger Warner — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:08:24 +0000

…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 not as you know it.)

We’re so proud about this one that we’ve issued a hard-hitting press release that explains what it’s all about in full.

The short story: it’s the first part of a new Velocity campaign for dotMobi, which is designed to help make “.mobi” the domain of choice for all mobile web sites.

It’s a great brief, working with a really great organisation. We’re pumped! Watch this space…

Project credits: design and content - Velocity; development and implementation - dotMobi.

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Mobile Marketing Madness: What We Learned this Week

Roger Warner — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:30:48 +0000

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 - full of over-hype and under-delivery a few years ago; now ripe and ready for prime time.

Looking at the guts of the technical environment, it’s clear that much has happened since the heady days of BT advertising ’surf the mobile web’ with a dodgy GSM connection and a two-tone, LED-like WAP browser. Now we have 3G, in-home Femtocells for maximum coverage, and a mini super-duper iPhone in our hands. As a result, the mobile web is now ready to be used as a killer marketing platform.

But where to start?

This is one of the most interesting questions in ‘new media’ marketing right now. Nobody’s really developed the killer app or the definitive campaign yet. And it looks like in many ways we’re also recreating many marketing mistakes of the past.

Just like the desktop web took a bunch of successfully established marketing activities and deliverables and ‘transcoded’ them online into brochureware web sites, Flash microsites and the like, the mobile web seems to chock full of broken e-commerce sites for ringtones, poorly formatted mapping services and mind-numbingly frustrating directory listings.

The view from here is that we really need to stop and start again when it comes to building successful marketing experiences on the mobile web.

Here’s some obvious - but often forgotten - points to take into account:

Phones screens are small (less content is more)
Usage patterns have different restraints: time, location, etc (think running from tube to bus into town for a meeting and trying to check up on some facts)
Speed is important. Not in terms of speed of connection (although this obviously helps), but in getting to the point as quickly as possible. Fewer clicks to action, easier to search and find, that sort of thing.
Development standards and processes are different. See ready.Mobi for an example of how different by running your url through their free page and site checker. It’ll show you how your site looks on a Nokia (or a Motorola, or a Samsung…)

That’s a lot of difference - but, if you can build this kind of thinking into your creative plans at source they ought to present a bunch of great marketing and communications opportunies.

For example, how about a mobile version of your site that serves mobile-centric content only….? Like creating a stripped down ‘About’ and ‘Products’ section, but a top line presentation of those important white paper pdfs in an iPhone browser-friendly format so that - instead of playing Sudoku - executive types can read them on their long train ride home?

Mobile-thinking seems to be the future of the mobile web. What do you think?

© Roger Warner for Velocity - the marketing acceleration agency for B2B technology companies, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us digg
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Guerrilla video for B2B companies like yours

Doug Kessler — Mon, 26 May 2008 22:59:21 +0000

We used to do short films for clients that took weeks to plan, weeks to shoot and edit and never came in for less than £30k. Now we’re experimenting with ‘guerrilla video’ — planning and shooting in a few days, editing in a few more and getting it straight on to the web.

Instead of a 5-6 person, two camera crew, we’re sending out a camcorder and a lavalier (lapel) microphone for interviews — it’s amazing how much better a video ‘looks’ if its sound is strong and clear (something the mic on the camera can never give you).

The point of guerrilla video is to shoot first and ask questions later. If the footage is disappointing or the experiment is a failure, you’ve lost very little. If you get good footage, you’re ready to edit.

With broadband now ubiquitous, it’s easy to justify video content for B2B websites. If you’ve got a story to tell, a product to demonstrate or an idea to evangelise… talk to us about getting it on screen quickly and cost-effectively.

And talk to Roger about using this video content for boosting SEO by spreading the love beyond your own site.

While we’re at it… a big shout out to the folks at VNL – Pär Almqvist, Anil Raj and Elise Alpen – for the courage and spirit to dive in where traditional marketers fear to tread. Watch this space.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity - the marketing acceleration agency for B2B technology companies, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us digg
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New Velocity B2B Marketing Newsletter Available!

Roger Warner — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:36:47 +0000

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 make your marketing activity really drive new sales.

Other highlights include new papers on how to make your web site ultra-usable and how to make your PPC campaigns sing. Plus a roundup of our latest blogs and information on a hot new web marketing service we’re offering called ‘web motion.’

Go get it now!

The Velocity B2B Social Media & Web Engagement Mind Map

Roger Warner — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:37:58 +0000

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 levels.

Now I’ve blogged and blabbed about this before, so I won’t go into the thinking - but if you’d like to get a sense of why social media and web engagement is so important then check out some recent posts such as ‘Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing,’ ‘Pico Branding‘ and our ‘web marketing trends for 2008‘.

This post, however, is all about the mechanics and how to do it.

In truth, it’s not hard. All you need is the following:

A dedication to publishing a regular stream of gold top content to your site (note: it needs to be good and valuable to the folks you’ll reach out to in #2)
A variety of web outlets in which to cost-effectively publish this stuff (note: per above, the idea here is not to abuse these places but to selectively publish your best stuff on them ….think sensibly about this as many of them are happy to ban content ’spammers’)

For help with #1, call us.

For #2, the mind map below gives you everything you need to do web / social media engagement by yourself. It’s easy. Just pin it on your wall and - once you’ve published a great piece of content to your site - follow the map clockwise and post it to the relevant destinations.

Let us know your thoughts (and results).

Note: your key to success here is to BE SOCIAL. Don’t just use these ‘outlets’ as a window for your own content. When you see other pages that you like, Stumbleupon/Digg/Reddit them - because this is their inherent value ….they exist to raise awareness of good, valuable web content. So, consider it your duty to promote everything that you really like, and not just the stuff you grow at home.

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

Roger Warner — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:30:08 +0000

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 mean on key ‘attention measurements’ such as time on page - these are the things that tell you if people are really interested and engaged.)

What comes out top?

If you have a blog, or if you’re in the habit of publishing white papers or opinion pieces then my money’s on them. Am I right?

Here’s my hypothesis: for B2B web sites, the content that really matters in terms of positioning and prospecting isn’t your ‘markitecture’ pages - your product and services descriptions, corporate histories and such…. it’s your ‘thought leadership’ pages - the places where you express opinions and ideas rather than features and benefits.

More to the point, having done detailed analyses of a mass of B2B technology web sites, I can tell you that this rule holds firm for our entire industry, without exception (and, I’d hazard a guess, it does so in any information-hungry B2B market).

To give you a feel for it, here’s our top content stats for the year to date… (Note: we measure our content performance by establishing an ‘Attention Index’ - average time on page x number of page views…. and we only include those pages that have held people’s attention for more than two minutes.)

(Click to open!)

You’ll see that the most engaging pages are a bunch of white papers and blog posts.

Putting the blog aside for a moment, this is interesting because unlike most of the B2B technology industry, we make a point of giving our most interesting content away for free. Most firms take a strategic decision to lock prime content such as white papers away below a subscription line, and often within secure ‘walled gardens’ that render it almost completely inaccessible to all but the most motivated of site visitors.

The consequences are obvious. If you lock your most valuable, compelling content away beneath a subscription line, then you’re missing a proven opportunity to help your prospects select you.

The rationale for ‘content locking’ is straight forward. You hold out the promise of access to an interesting piece of content in exchange for a visitor’s personal information - usually a name and an email address. This is the concept on which ‘web-to-lead’ forms are built to support the growth of CRM ‘lead’ databases.

I think this approach is fundamentally flawed, and also detrimental to driving quality sales leads.

Why? Because if you lock your content below a subscription line, it’s not just sales prospects that you’re hiding from: you’re also hiding from Google.

Put simply, if your content is sat behind a firewall, then Google’s spiders can’t reach it. This means a big loss of SEO traction, since your ‘thought leader’ content is likely to be your most valuable in SEO terms - it’s going to be stuffed with all the key phrases and concepts that you want search engines to associate your site with. Also, if it’s sat beneath the subscription line then you’re discouraging other sites from linking to it - which is illogical from an SEO point of view (good SEO practice means helping sites to link to you).

Furthermore, what of the people that you lose along the way? To me, a commitment to form-filling is no great measurement of the quality of a sales lead. A far better tactic is to set your thought leadership content free and give people more ‘opportunities to engage‘ with who you are and what you stand for. In this way (and this is the flip side of ‘web-to-lead’ thinking) you give yourself more opportunities to convince the skeptics - the people who until this point believe in your competitors not you, or those who have chanced upon your site during some desk research. Let’s face it, most of us are commitment-phobes when it comes to the web anyway. Why not just accept this fact and move on?

Instead, we ought to be finding better, more intelligent and subtle ways of establishing leads. There are better deals to offer our prospects than ‘give me your names and I’ll give you some content’…. deals that don’t carry an SEO penalty. We can divide our content in different ways, and base a ‘lead generating’ offer on a really big ticket content item, after we’ve provided people with the opportunity to see all our other great stuff. For example, an offer for a piece of industry research can be embedded in a free white paper. Isn’t this a better place to pop the question? Wouldn’t the quality of resulting leads be better?

Whatever - my point is that a bog standard web-to-lead form slapped on as a firewall to the content that people (and Google) really care about is clumsy and negligent.

Here’s some questions to ask yourself:

What’s your most valuable and engaging content?
Do you make you accessible enough?
What’s the upside of providing more opportunities to engage with it?
What’s the downside of removing a subscription line?
How scientific is your answer to the previous question? (Gut feeling, conventional wisdom, or based on small side-show experiment and validated by stats?)

I’d encourage you to play around with these thoughts and, if you’re not a fully paid up member of the free content brigade, to tweak the presentation of some of your content and see what it gives you…

© Roger Warner for Velocity - the marketing acceleration agency for B2B technology companies, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us digg
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Love Writing? Love Tech? Love Marketing?

Roger Warner — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:36:04 +0000

Velocity is in hiring mode again….

Love getting to grips with new clients, new markets & new ideas?

Love writing about technology and business?

We’re a fast-growing, insanely ambitious B2B agency specialising in technology markets. We need a copywriter who can turn dry technology into compelling stories.

Whether it’s a white paper, an e-book, a data sheet, brochure, website or video script, you’ll sink your teeth in, learn the business inside-out, and build a powerful case.

Frankly, we’re not sure if you’re a junior or a middleweight or somewhere in-between. As long as you’ve got talent, ambition and a hunger to learn new things.

You’ll also have plenty of direct client contact so you need to be good at listening, getting the brief and taking direction.

Interested? We’d like to hear from you…

Send us some samples of your work, a CV and your salary expectations via this here simple web form…

(No recruitment agencies please.)

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Your First (Free) Baby Steps in B2B Web Marketing

Roger Warner — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:15:48 +0000

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 a sales sweat house – and this takes real effort and a bunch of web marketing smarts.

Your first order of business is to attract engaged and interested traffic to your site… with the ultimate goal of turning these people into qualified leads.

In order to do this effectively (and to filter out the tyre-kickers) you need to pull out your Web Marketing 101 Kit Bag. We’re talking SEO, social media, online PR and blogging.

Sound OK?

Don’t worry. It’s simple (and largely free to do). The key rule is ‘give to get’: you’ve just created a category-killing web site with a beautifully designed and executed value proposition…. now all you need to do is work hard to engage with the right kind of people and bring them to your door.

The idea is to increase your web ‘reach’ and improve your performance in search engines (ie, your SEO) so that you can engage with and drive high-value, motivated traffic to your web site.

Here are the techniques you need…

Step 1: Content Generation

Step 2: Backlinking

Step 3: ‘Rest of the Web’ engagement (via Social Media, Online PR and blogging)

And here’s how you can do it….

1) Content Generation

Put simply, you need to generate some content bait. Quality content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your site. You need to be publishing good content- and keyword-rich articles, papers, podcasts, and video regularly to your site. This will encourage those search spiders to return more often and, over time, it will give you a compelling body of work that you can publish off-site with the aim of steering people away from other web destinations and onto your site.

2) Backlinking

The links that are made back to your site are the number one influencing factor in Google’s PageRank algorithm. And the higher quality they are, they more influential they will be in boosting your ranking (for a full explanation of what ‘quality’ means in this respect, see our paper on SEO). To this end, you need to encourage as many of them as possible. How? By submitting your site to relevant, quality listings directories (such as the technology section in Yahoo’s business pages), creating reciprocal links with important partner sites and getting hip to…

3) ‘Rest of the Web’ enagagement via Social Media, Online PR and blogging

Here’s where you put that battery of superior content to use. You should be out there creating a variety of social media application profiles - YouTube, Squidoo, Flickr, Slideshare, etc - so that each time you create a new piece of content you can publish it on them, along with a healthy dose of linkage back to your site. Elsewhere we’ve described this effort as ‘Pico Branding’ - using top-flight content to engage with audiences elsewhere on the web with the intention of inviting everyone back to your place. It’s a fantastic way of driving interested traffic.

In addition, you should be taking a leaf out of the new book of PR and publishing all of your newsworthy content via online news distribution hubs. This is another means of backlinking - the hubs will take your content and distribute it far and wide across the web to ‘newsy’ destinations like Google and Yahoo News and others. Note - the aim here is not to convince a human being to write up your news story, but to have a web site somewhere deep in the interweb publish it, along with a link or two back to your key web pages.

Last but not least, you should start blogging your market-related ideas every time you hit on something of interest. Why? Well, we’ve already written on what we feel the value of blogging to be in B2B, but in short, blogging can be:

Another reason for Google to pay you frequent visits
A direct continuation of your sales discussions
The place where your prospects head to to get a handle on the real people behind the product/service
A great way of engaging with the fabric of the web and generating high quality backlinks

A word about measurement

Aside from all this content generation and ‘engagement’ activity, we’d also recommend that you measure what you do on a regular (monthly?) basis. Otherwise it’ll be hard to track the effectiveness of what you’re doing, and hard to convince other important people (like bosses!) that you ought to be dedicating more resources to the work.

Using a stats package like Google Analytics (which is free!), here’s a few simple yardsticks you can use to validate your work…

Average page views per month
Average time on site
Average bounce rates
Average number and cost of acquisitions per month (sign ups to newsletters, white papers, etc)

If you follow the above advice, I can guarantee you’ll soon have people beating a path to your door.

Alternatively, contact us and we can help you on your way!

© Roger Warner for Velocity - the marketing acceleration agency for B2B technology companies, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us digg
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Velocity at Pecha-Kucha night

Doug Kessler — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 15:27:00 +0000

Intrepid Velocipedes Doug Kessler and Stuart Rothwell attended the first ever D&AD Pecha-Kucha night last night. Nine creative supremos (mostly digital marketers), each delivering their first Pecha-Kucha presentation to a packed house of 400-ish trendy digirati.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of a Pecha-Kucha night yet:

It’s a fast, fun, freaky new medium from Tokyo
Speakers get just 20 powerpoint slides, each on screen for 20-seconds
So the whole thing lasts six minutes and 40 seconds
It’s pronounced kind of like p’CHOK-cha and it means ‘chit-chat’ in Japanese

We went because we were curious about PKs (we call them 20/20s in-house) and have done one of our own to introduce Velocity to new prospects. We’re also experimenting with doing some of these for clients, so they can boil their stories down to under 7 minutes (we do a lot of boiling down at Velocity — hence the industrial extractor fan).

The potted review? An entertaining and thought-provoking evening, though the thoughts provoked were mainly about the appropriateness, artificiality and advantages of Pecha-Kucha for the world of B2B. It is certainly an artificial constraint, but a lot of good can come from constraints.

The evening wasn’t as diverse as expected, but given that it was essentially a parade of like-minded, hip, creative narcissists, we probably shouldn’t have expected diversity.

Watch this space… we’ll publish our next Pecha-Kucha soon.

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ShipServ.com Goes Live: a B2B Before and After

Roger Warner — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:01:27 +0000

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 is the shipping industry’s #1 e-marketplace, and, as of today it’s also winner of the Red Herring 100 Award for European innovation.

It’s a very cool company.

Eight years ago the shipping industry was awash with e-marketplaces making bold promises of new beans for the ‘new economy.’ Today, only ShipServ flourishes (the others are toast). They got in touch with us towards the end of last year to see how we could help revamp their brand and their online presence.

Here’s what we did.

We took them from this:

…to this:

Along the way we’ve worked hand in glove with ShipServ’s VP of Marketing John Watton, and CEO Paul Østergaard to redefine their core positioning and messages, turbo-charge their corporate pitches and plan their next brave moves into the world of web 4.7.

So, we’re thrilled that the new site is now up and sailing.

Thanks to John and Paul for giving us the space and direction to do work that we’re really proud of.

Big thanks also to the extremely talented Ben at Jackfruit for his superior web development skills (Ben’s the guy who did the physical build); and thanks to Rob and the team at RMA for their work on another top drawer piece of design (they’re the guys who created the site templates).

…And watch this space - because there’s more to come.