Both “Chief Marketer” and eMarketer ran stories on the former’s survey of digital marketers, calling the results evidence of a “growing number of tools” in digital campaigns.

Looking at the results and how they constructed the survey, I’m not so sure that’s a valid conclusion. There are, however, a number of things you can say, based on the data.

+ The vast majority of digital marketers rely on emails to reach prospects – no surprises there. For over a decade, “digital campaign” has been practically synonymous with email. Inboxes fill up. Marketers sweat their conversion figures. Little changes.

+ Marketers have invented a new, very low bar for digital campaigns called “social network presence”. The survey defined this as “putting facebook like and tweet icons on a website”. Imagine. A campaign that wouldn’t make you break a sweat.

+ Chief Marketer doesn’t rate content marketing very much. Own media doesn’t make much of an appearance here, except for video content, white papers and webinars.

+ Tools go together, but not in any way that’s being measured. A carpenter wouldn’t build a table with only a hammer; a marketer wouldn’t build a digital campaign with only a QR code. How do emails, videos, social presence and SEO work together? No answer.

+ More for more’s sake, or more for results’ sake? If, as the study’s authors suggest, more tools are being used, why? I’m less interested in the raw figures here (what proportion of marketers plan to set up online sweepstakes this year) than the rationales – why do they stop and start using new tools?

+ Thousands of marketers will undoubtedly use this chart to justify investing in new tools, wrongly. “Boss, look how many people are using personalized URLs. We have to do that.”

What does this tell us about the value of quantitative survey results about digital marketing and campaigns?

Quantitative data alone is useless
Without qualitative and follow-up data to answer the enormous questions quantitative data asks, the quantitative data loses all of its rigor and value.

Aggregate and compare
Proportions tell us little. “Three of four marketers use emails for digital campaigns!” Um. So? Aggregate budget sums compared year on year would have more value – “Top users of email in digital campaigns increased their budget in the area by 40%, while bottom users decreased it 50%”. There’s a story there.

Marketing-centric surveys suck
Asking marketers what they do is actually of little value to other marketers. Give me instead a survey of buyers, asking them which kinds of campaigns they notice or click on. Or at least ask marketers which tools seem to generate ROI.

Focus on the best, not on the mass
Marketing’s full of waste. The digital revolution has, sadly, failed on its promise of making the field a purely rational affair, where every dollar spent is linked to revenue. That’s still a pipe dream for most. Here and there, we see exceptions – truly insightful, experienced and clear-headed marketing. The experiences of this 5% is ten times more valuable than the responses of the 95%.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: digital campaign, digital marketing, marketing data, marketing survey

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When I look around, I see two fundamental changes happening in IT-land:
1)    Consumerization’s overthrowing the best-laid plans of CIOs, and
2)    Enterprise software’s become the belle du jour of VCs and tech bloggers.

I’d cite those points, but I’m sure I don’t need to. What do these changes mean, though? I mean, more than the obvious: Consumer technology’s crashing the workplace party and enterprise startups are seeing sick valuations.

For anyone marketing technology to enterprises, I’d argue it means you need to flip your ideas about the market; in fact, I’ve been arguing it – alot. Stop marketing to buyer committees in 18-month purchase paths. Start marketing to dudes who need to do something, like, now and want a simple piece of software to do that.

Stop marketing to CIOs, as if they had the keys to the empire. Start marketing to a different kind of buyer, the kind of guy or gal who’s upending that empire without a moment’s hesitation. Start marketing to these godless barbarians.

Profile of a godless barbarian
Ever since I wrote about this buyer group, I’ve had people say “oh, yeah, the prosumer”, “you mean the social B2B buyer?” or “welcome to the consumerprise.” Yes, yes and yes, but there’s more to it than that.

Late last year, Chris Dixon delighted in SAP’s purchase of SuccessFactors, citing cloud’s superior architecture because it “starts to remove IT from the purchasing process, meaning the user and the buyer are, increasingly, the same person.”

Intriguingly, the comments to that short post shared a delightful little anecdote: “Groups in enterprise went ‘rogue’ and started using it [Salesforce] with small teams. Then Salesforce was able to approach a company after x number of groups were using it to convert them to a more economical bulk price package.”

In this model, the cost of sale dwindles to zero, and the cost of marketing shoots up. Venkatesh Rao outlined the changing B2B sales pattern eloquently, describing a transition from the plodding B2B hunter sales persona to “death from inside”, when salespeople simply upsell a product that’s already saturated the organization.

But we need to start seeing enterprise software buyers with a finer sense of nuance. Roughly, these godless barbarians may come from different tribes:

The Vandal Fanboys: Anyone with peers who are using the cooler cloud apps, and wants to be in on the game (but probably fears discovery by an admin – “What? Skype? Me? No, my girlfriend must have installed that.”)

The Visigoth Datasloths: Those professionals who are not properly house-trained, and simply do it (use an app) wherever they find it and whenever they feel like it. Also known as marketers.

The Hun Young-uns: Those little devils born after 1980. They’re known to plug in to social business software as readily as they breathe. And they don’t read instruction manuals.

The Viking Sky-kings: These particular godless barbarians are on the move so much that they don’t even know or remember which particular application IT wants them to use for what anymore (or know what a desk looks like, for that matter).

Those are only the broad and obvious godless barbarian clichés. We know that there are hundreds more bands of rogue IT buyers.

How do you market to godless barbarians
The winners among those marketing to godless barbarians seem to prize a tool culture, rather than a platform play. They’re beloved by users, not gatekeepers. Any technology marketer would be wise to assess their base – user, or gatekeeper?

If you offer a single-user license, you have a ticket to market to godless barbarians; and when the likes of Karmasphere can offer business intelligence tools payable by the hour, anyone should be able to do a single-user license.

The next step is product development that’s more tribal than organizational. You’re developing a cultural product, not an overthought technical masterpiece. 37 signals is a great example. Dropbox is an exception – a technical masterpiece that spawned its own culture, and has become sticky as sh*t because of it.

The cloud has enabled product development that goes as fast as we want it to. Expect to see more and more enterprise tools popping up and nailing more and more discreet activities. And developers with clever marketing sensibilities who pitch products that hit the buttons of their specific kind of godless barbarian, whichever tribe that may be.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: BYOD, consumerization, enterprise marketing, enterprise technology, software marketing, Technology Marketing

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Here’s the chart, showing the search interest since 2004:

It’s exciting to see — and if we add ‘social media marketing’ to the chart, you really start seeing the vital signs of an industry in transition.

Of course, traditional advertising still dwarfs these search volumes, but it’s trending down, down, down:

Just out of interest, let’s see how the search interest trends for Content Marketing and Inbound Marketing compare:

A curious scrap of B2B marketing research: it looks like ‘inbound marketing’ came from nowhere to rival ‘content marketing’ but now both terms are trending up at about the same rate. That’s interesting — usually markets like to settle on one name for something so big. But it feels like both terms are equally viable so far…

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Advertising, B2B content marketing, B2B Marketing Research, B2B social media, Content Marketing, social media marketing

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As B2B marketers get serious about content marketing, they’re starting to bring together the people, processes and technologies needed to run a continuous content-generating machine.

An editorial calendar is central to this new discipline and the core of a marketing plan. To call it best practice is like calling breathing a best practice technique for living things. It’s kind of more fundamental than that.

What an editorial calendar is for
Seems obvious enough but here’s how we tend to use them:

• To give a quick overview of an entire program in one glance.
  This helps make sure the program is balanced and has a cadence.

• To guide the marketing production process
  And keep everyone running in the same direction.

• To help optimise your content marketing budget
  Instead of shooting from the hip and running out of money before you nail your top priorities.

• To exploit time-specific opportunities.
  Like marketing around events.

We don’t often do a marketing plan without a calendar — it’s where the theory turns into action.

Editorial calendar varieties
At Velocity we use different kinds of editorial calendar for different purposes:

Sometimes they have target audiences down the left hand side, dates across the top and specific content pieces in each cell.

Sometimes themes or topics down the left and buyer personas across the top (which, I guess, isn’t officially a calendar but it serves a similar purpose).

Or dates across the top, and media down the left had side (video, blog post, eBook…) – to make sure the marketing plan has a good content mix.

We’d love to know how you use them, so do share your thoughts. Meanwhile here’s a round-up of our favourite resources for planning your editorial calendar initiatives:

Eight editorial calendar resources

Five keys to effective editorial calendar s – You’d expect the Content Marketing Institute to have lots to say about editorial calendars and you won’t be disappointed. This post by Rachel Foster is a good intro: five simple tips.

How to Create Editorial Calendars – Tim Slavin did this excellent, comprehensive post and deck on the entire editorial calendar process. Really good.

Editorial Calendars for Content Marketing – Michele Linn did this post on the Content Marketing Institute blog a while back but it’s still spot-on. Michele knows her stuff.

Video: Editorial Calendars in Google Calendar – Rod Kirby posted this on Vimeo a couple years ago. Still a really good tutorial for using Google Calendar for creating your editorial calendar.

A search perspective on editorial calendars – Rob Ousbey of the search agency Distilled on how to create an editorial calendar around events.

A WordPress editorial calendar plug in – Zack Grossbart and Justin Evans wrote this post on copyblogger about the wordpress plugin that makes it easy to produce editorial calendars. We like the look of this one but haven’t used it yet.

An editorial calendar template – from Damang Media Group. You can just save it and drop into your marketing plan. Nice.

A whole content marketing platform – Kapost looks really cool to me. It’s way more than a calendar tool but it puts the editorial calendar at the centre of a complete online publishing and collaboration platform.

The heart of the marketing plan
I always love the moment when we plug a real content calendar into a new marketing plan for a client (or for Velocity). That’s when I know the strategy is turning into a proper program.

If I’ve missed any great resources or tools, do drop them in a comment below.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content, Content Marketing, editorial calendar, Lead Generation, SEO, Social Media

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Did you learn much about content marketing strategy from this?
Do you think it might even help us rank on the term Content Marketing Strategy?

If you think of anything related to Content Marketing Strategy that we left out, please make your own goddamn infographic, smart arse.  [Insert smiley, winky emoticon here]

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Content Marketing Strategy

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Simon Acland, an old friend of Velocity (who used to run VC-company Quester and over the years introduced us to many of his portfolio companies) has a new life as an author of both fact and fiction.

The book Velocity’s B2B-obsessed and entrepeneurial audience should read is called Angles, Dragons and Vultures: How to Tame Your Investors and Not Lose your Company. It’s a rollicking. practical expose of the VC world for tech entrepreneurs and worth £14.44 of anyone’s money.

He’s also written two (even more rollicking) novels about twelfth-century knight-adventurer Hugh de Verdon. The first is The Waste Land, described by bookseller extraordinary Tim Waterstone as ‘highly original and a most enjoyable read’. (You can meet Simon, dressed in appropriate knight-adventurer garb talking about the book himself on the Amazon link above. 11th Century content marketing in action, forsooth.)

Both books are currently shortlisted for The People’s Prize in non-fiction and fiction respectively. You can vote for them here (after buying and rereading them first, naturally – or you can just trust Velocity as usual, vote for them immediately, and read them later. The vote concludes in four days time, so make haste.)

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B content marketing, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency

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Social media has washed over the B2B world in a way reminiscent of Ghandi’s quote: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Social media has more or less won in B2B, but people are still scratching their heads: “Now what?”

In this interview, John Watton shares his rich experience implementing social media tactics in marketing efforts – what seems to work, what doesn’t seem to work.

And note that this is no pie-eyed social media cheerleading; the darling of new B2B channels gets rough treatment in some contexts.

If you want to see a quick one-minute introduction to this B2B marketing masters series, see this mini-segment from Stan.

And we’ve included links to all of the other segments in the series below the video. Enjoy!

B2B Masters interview part one: Talking about the role of the senior marketer today

B2B Masters interview part two: The relationship between B2B sales and marketing

B2B Masters interview part three: How marketing technology levels the playing field

B2B Masters interview part four: How do you make content stand out in a busy market

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B marketing, Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

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It took us a while to come around to calling target audiences ‘buyer personas’ but we’ve grudgingly stepped on to the jargon train.

After all, a buyer persona is much more than a simple target audience description — done right, each one should be a rich profile that captures the most important dimensions of a given target audience sector. The result is a powerful guide for writers, designers and content strategists.

As a writer, I rely on a clear buyer persona to give me a specific image of the person I’m writing for. And building a buyer persona development stage into any major content marketing project flushes out any differences within the team about exactly who the target audience is — the kind of differences that can kill a project if exposed too late.

Check out these buyer persona resources

With that in mind, here’s a round-up of our favourite persona-related resources from around the web. I hope it helps you clarify your approach to buyer personas and gives you new ways to capture your target audience dynamics:

The Buyer Persona Institute blog is Adele Revella’s excellent site all about personas. Her Five Rings of Insight — Priority Initiatives, Success Factors, Perceived Barriers, Buying Process, Decision Criteria – really help you nail the dimensions that will guide your content marketing. Jeff Ogden did an excellent interview with Adele on Mad Marketing TV.

Buyer Personas – Where and How to Start – an excellent post from Jeremy Victor of B2B Bloggers. I like this quote: “A buyer persona enables you create marketing content that is for someone and not everyone.” I also like his Buyer Persona Questionnaire on Slideshare .

An interview with Tony Zambito – by Stephanie Tilton of Savvy B2B Marketing. Tony is one of the pioneers of the buyer persona so he’s got a good view. He feels that, “buyer personas have been oversimplified and have lost touch with their original intention….the static snapshot of a single buyer is a key problem with buyer personas today.”

SpotOn Vision’s Persona Marketing slide deck – this is an excellent introduction to buyer personas, with examples and rationale.

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve? – A short, insightful post from Ardath Albee of the Marketing Interactions blog. Including a sweet picture of her dog, Bella.

Four Tips for Improving Web Personalisation – Maria Wasing of EPiServer posts on the always excellent Econsultancy blog about buyer personas specifically for targeting web content.

A nice, simple buyer persona sheet – In this post, Martine Hunter of MLT Creative shares this nice, crisp way of capturing a buyer persona:

Know any other content, posts or insights into B2B buyer personas or target audience descriptions for content marketing? Drop them in the comment box.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B technology marketing, buyer persona, Buyer Personas, online marketing

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Its ‘zoomable user interface’ (ZUI?) with swoopy transitions and infinite drill-downs make it a sexy alternative to boring old slides.

Why should you put Prezi in your B2B content marketing toolbox? Here’s why:

• It’s great for telling linear stories – allowing you to take the viewer by the hand and lead them through your tale.

• It’s still got novelty appeal – not many people use it so it’s a fresh way to engage an audience.

• It’s pretty rich – you can include video files, images and links.

• You can embed it – so anyone can drop it in their blog.

• You can edit and play offline – so you can present from it even if you’re not near WiFi. (A paid-for option).

Downsides?

• It takes a little while to learn – The editing interface is cool but unlike any other software tool you use now, so it takes some getting used to. The editing tool thingy looks like this:

• You don’t get much of a bonus audience from the Prezi site itself – as you do with Slideshare or YouTube.

• It doesn’t give you SEO-juice – the text inside isn’t searchable (I don’t know why they don’t do the transcript trick that Slideshare does). Oh, and it’s not easy to post a Prezi page on Pinterest — the image isn’t accessible to Pinterest (a small thing but a shame as they’re both visual media and ought to be made for each other).

• If you over-use the swooping you can make people feel ill. Which is embarrassing. The first one I ever did will actually cause sea-sickness. You’ve been warned.

• You still have to help people use it. See the sentence starting with “I suggest viewing it…” below.

Our latest B2B content marketing Prezi
Here’s a Prezi we just produced for Salesforce.com taking people through a typical social-powered customer service case, from tweet to resolution.

I suggest viewing it in full screen mode (press play to load it, then click fullscreen under ‘more’ in the player — bottom right). Then just keep hitting the play button to advance:

And here’s one we made a while ago, called the Content Marketing Tutorial. For this one, we kept the story in one plane and confined movements to 45 or 90 degrees. Keeps things simple:

What do you think?
Do you think Prezi has value for B2B content marketing?
Have you made any yourself? (If so, please share them in the comments section).

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B content marketing, B2B marketing agency, Content, Content Marketing, Prezi, Thought Leadership

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When John Watton of Expedia Affiliate Network and Stan get on the topic of content (and what makes the difference between forgettable content and memorable content), opinions really start to fly. And why? Because it’s clearly something they care about, and something that matters.

Amongst the little gems from the chat:

The world is littered with B2B data sheets and white papers that are just so dull…Marketers need to remember that humans are going to read this stuff, not just robots.

A crime among B2B marketers is simply thinking that anyone really gives a damn about what you’re talking about.

We think too much about how to stand out against our 3-4 competitors, when we should really be thinking about how we get through amongst hundreds of competing signals.

If you want to know what some of the leading B2B and content marketers in the field think about content today, this is a clip to watch. And if you’re missing the context for this interview and want a quick intro, see Stan’s quickie intro.

Also, after the video, see links to all of the previous clips released from this B2B Masters interview.

B2B Masters interview part one: Talking about the role of the senior marketer today

B2B Masters interview part two: The relationship between B2B sales and marketing

B2B Masters interview part three: How marketing technology levels the playing field

B2B Masters interview part four: B2B social media for better or worse

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Content Marketing

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