Velocity Partners

The Big, Beautiful, B2B Blueprint — a step-by-step guide to create a hardworking go-to-market plan that marries brand with performance — is here. Today. Right now. And we’re really excited. This is a fill-in-the-blanks workbook to make a unified marketing master plan that’s going to help you absolutely destroy your most ambitious KPIs. Full transparency: it’s long, it’s thorough, and it’s practical. You gotta bring your A-game (and probably a bucket of coffee) to get the most out of this. It’s for marketers who know *in their hearts* that lead-gen without brand building is a lopsided equation, but don’t have all the pieces to integrate both into one strategy. Yes, it’s over 70 pages. You won’t come away with a quick fix for making a tiny incremental increase on the lead-gen project sitting in front of you. If anything, you’ll come away with a shitload of homework. But it’s homework that’ll reinstate a clear connection between creativity and pipeline, and more broadly, your marketing and your revenue. For too long B2B has been languishing under a dated playbook that has marketers scrambling to capture ever-more-elusive MQLs your sales team doesn’t give a damn about. The whole thing gets harder and more frustrating every year. (Frankly, it’s been hard to watch good marketers get measured on shitty objectives. And sometimes to *be* those marketers). This blueprint is your map to a whole different destination. It’s gonna help you: - Connect brand building and sales activation into one coherent strategy - Get off the sugar-rush lead treadmill and start getting famous with your best prospects - Create a glorious RevOps partnership between Sales and Marketing - Create a measurable link between creativity and revenue The result? You’re going to gain clarity about how every tactic fits into a master strategy. It’ll make every decision easier — and give you a sense of control over your marketing results. Oh, and it’s free. (For-real free, not trade-your-data free). Get The Big, Beautiful B2B Blueprint. LFG! https://lnkd.in/eWcJfFvu

What happens when an agency markets itself? That’s what this series is about. ‘Marketing with the door open’ is a three-parter about all the gory details of Velocity’s marketing efforts throughout 2024 so far. This is the first post. It’s about how we shaped some big market shifts (dipping performance, tightening budgets, falling engagement and lagging pipelines) into a load-bearing story. It’s about how we finished 2023 feeling like something big was about to change, and came back in January 2024 determined to get ahead of it with a big campaign about the new B2B GTM playbook. It’s about how we tightened up our target audience and got serious about marketing to a target account list in the same way we recommend for clients. It’s about defining big, hairy goals and devising a campaign plan to meet them. It’s about eating our own dogfood, drinking our own champagne, dipping in our own secret sauce and all the other disgusting marketing analogies you can think of. The link to part one is in the comments.

Any worthwhile B2B marketing strategy in 2024 needs tightly integrated SEM and SEO — but the level of change Google is imposing on search right now is making collaboration hard as hell. First, Google is combining AI with search results to provide a clickless experience designed to keep users on-platform for as long as possible (all while increasing cost-per-click by an average of 19%). Second, the search engine continues to push the automation of bid strategies as a way to spare SEMs the nitty-gritty of bid optimization. But its algorithms don’t have the level of nuance needed to understand the B2B keyword space. (An automated bid strategy might think “remote security” and “secure remote workers” are related terms, despite one describing a CCTV system controller and the other an endpoint security platform.) Cumulatively, these changes are overwhelming SEMs with new complexity and making it harder for SEO specialists to drive organic visibility. The risk is that each side turns inwards to focus on their own challenges, instead of connecting the dots and creating a shared strategy. SEM and SEO need to work hand in glove. Offsite SEO, such as collaborations or influencer marketing, can help rub shoulders with the right terms before your buyers are really in-market, which builds the brand equity you need to make your well-targeted SEM bids more effective when prospects are actually looking to buy. Or conversely, smart SEM can bring buyers to your door, but then it’s down to onsite SEO (landing page optimization and the likes) to ensure you serve the same queries your SEM ads targeted with the right level of intent, and push people onto the next step in the conversion journey. Our latest blog explores how to bring SEO and SEM together at a moment when search is frothing with complexity and volatility that threatens to drive the teams apart. Find the link in the comments.

Always good to see Velocity in the B2B Marketing UK Agency Benchmarking Report! This year we placed #34 overall, #21 for Content Marketing and Thought Leadership Specialists and #17 for World’s Largest B2B Marketing Agencies. The categories in benchmark reports like this are always an interesting reflection of how the market thinks about marketing. Last year’s report split out agencies into 4 groups. This year there are 9. Is that because stakeholders are hunting for specialist solutions to more specific problems? (Do you go to an ABM shop for your ABM programs, a brand shop for your identity, and so on?). There’s a lot of talk about convergence between qualities like brand and demand gen at the moment (not least from us). It’ll be interesting to see whether those specialisms deepen or diversify in the next 12 months — and how future benchmark reports might describe brand and performance as a shared discipline. https://lnkd.in/eNs8kDBU

B2B needs to get a lot less comfortable.  That coworker who annoys the hell out of you? Because everything they do is the opposite of what you’d do? You need to spend more time with them. This goes double if you’re a designer/copywriter/mystic being told Performance’s strategy is for you to create a highly utilitarian series with the inspiring title ‘How to Do This Practical, Really Boring Thing in 5 Easy Steps.’ (Please pay close attention to our notes on keywords, CTAs and character counts!). Or worse, you’re a dollars-and-cents performance marketer side-eyeing a creative telling you about a groovy content idea that came to them in a dream after mainlining client research about DNS tunneling when all you wanted was a landing page optimization for a campaign you’re running right now. So why are you supposed to like each other again? Because nothing, NOTHING nourishes truly dramatic innovation — not incremental futzing — like combining previously discrete ideas. And you’re not going to get new ideas by talking to people who think like you. Also — and we’ve been annoyingly shouting about this for a while — brand and performance are the most natural, complementary pairing in the world. They just don’t know it. And almost no one’s doing it. Mostly, you get agencies that are rockstars in all things performance. They deeply understand conversion rate optimization and targeting and ad buying. Ooooorrrrr you get shithot creative agencies with wafer-thin knowledge of how to move a prospect down a buying funnel. But when you pair whip-smart performance folks with dazzling creatives, you get spectacular results. Killer creative that hits exactly the right audience with the right message at the right time. And then makes ‘em lean forward because it’s deeply useful shit created with loads of mojo. (Just like when your creatives seek out a huge variety of experiences, say Mulholland Drive followed by some Greta and Margot, they’re gonna bring all that bonkers energy into brilliant ideas ChatGPT could never dream up). It’s what Matthew Syed calls ‘recombinant innovation’ is his podcast, Sideways. And we think it’s time to do more of it. There’s a lot more fun stuff to read about this topic — find the link in the comments. And follow us for more recombinant innovation hallucinations. https://lnkd.in/ePXWebrd

If you’re any kind of marketer in B2B, you’ll have felt things shifting underfoot recently. The industry is staring down an effectiveness crisis. Traditional sales activation tactics are delivering fewer (and worse) leads. Buyers are disengaging. Pipeline is plummeting. You’ve got two choices: Try to brute force results (more paid media, more sugar rush leads and endless (and fruitless) sales qualification)  Make big moves to drive up effectiveness (get serious about bringing brand, creativity and performance into one connected plan) Get the lowdown ⬇️. Then check out the Big, Beautiful B2B Blueprint workbook in the comments!

We were surprised to wake up and hear our new sort-of B2B manifesto was the topic of one of our account director’s favorite podcasts, B2B Growth. Our plea for brands to wake up and see that brand and performance work better together — instead of pitting them against each other — elicited a few ‘preach, preach!’ exclamations from hosts Benji Block and James Carbary from Sweetfish, a B2B podcast and creative agency. In the podcast, Benji and James say something interesting: “We know that intuitively, brand matters, it compounds over time.” A lot of B2B marketers *feel* that. They know in their souls that brand matters, that neglecting it year in and out will hurt their other efforts. But when lead gen is faster to pay off (at least in metrics) and easier to prove, it’s hard to make the case for investing in brand.  The hosts make a good point to illustrate why lead gen suffers without brand: “When you release a new feature or you launch a new product, you can blitz the market with messaging around that product. But if you don't have a strong brand coupled with that outreach or the ads that you're bringing to market, there's just not gonna be a lot of buy-in to that.” We couldn’t agree more. If your audience doesn’t already like you and trust you — or at least know something about you — the best product messaging in the world won’t stick. Benji and James have a lot more to say, including how they’re thinking about moving their own brand story forward without losing out on current market demand. Find the link to B2B Growth: The New B2B Manifesto podcast in the comments. 

B2B needs to get a lot less comfortable.  That coworker who annoys the hell out of you? Because everything they do is the opposite of what you’d do? You need to spend more time with them. This goes double if you’re a designer/copywriter/mystic being told Performance’s strategy is for you to create a highly utilitarian series with the inspiring title ‘How to Do This Practical, Really Boring Thing in 5 Easy Steps.’ (Please pay close attention to our notes on keywords, CTAs and character counts!). Or worse, you’re a dollars-and-cents performance marketer side-eyeing a creative telling you about a groovy content idea that came to them in a dream after mainlining client research about DNS tunneling when all you wanted was a landing page optimization for a campaign you’re running right now. So why are you supposed to like each other again? Because nothing, NOTHING nourishes truly dramatic innovation — not incremental futzing — like combining previously discrete ideas. And you’re not going to get new ideas by talking to people who think like you. Also — and we’ve been annoyingly shouting about this for a while — brand and performance are the most natural, complementary pairing in the world. They just don’t know it. And almost no one’s doing it. Mostly, you get agencies that are rockstars in all things performance. They deeply understand conversion rate optimization and targeting and ad buying. Ooooorrrrr you get shithot creative agencies with wafer-thin knowledge of how to move a prospect down a buying funnel. But when you pair whip-smart performance folks with dazzling creatives, you get spectacular results. Killer creative that hits exactly the right audience with the right message at the right time. And then makes ‘em lean forward because it’s deeply useful shit created with loads of mojo. (Just like when your creatives seek out a huge variety of experiences, say Mulholland Drive followed by some Greta and Margot, they’re gonna bring all that bonkers energy into brilliant ideas ChatGPT could never dream up). It’s what Matthew Syed calls ‘recombinant innovation’ is his podcast, Sideways. And we think it’s time to do more of it. There’s a lot more fun stuff to read about this topic — find the link in the comments. And follow us for more recombinant innovation hallucinations.