Velocity blog

“Native Advertising” is a big thing at the moment – it’s when paid-for content is put into the main flow of a publication.

If I was parachuted into an engineering or scientific company tomorrow and asked to take over their marketing, this is just the sort of guide I’d want to work through.

What we should never do is to use generic language which somehow skates over the differences between customers, and in doing so creates boring content for both of them.

It’s worth investigating the idea of the “Zero Moment of Truth”, or ZMOT. If “FMOT” is the “first moment of truth”, the point where you buy something, then “ZMOT” is the research you do before that.

I love companies which aren’t afraid to be human. Companies whose philosophy is to try to make people happy, rather than trying to avoid making any unhappy. I’d rather have 50 customers who loved me than 100 who didn’t have any opinion, because I’m sure I could sell them more in the long run. You may work for a more conservative organisation. If you come up with a marketing initiative which could divide opinion, your first thought might be to reject it because it could put a few people off,… Read More »Are we human? Or are we marketer?

A long article in B2B Marketing recently addressed a subject which is being increasingly discussed – marketing to people who influence buying decisions, rather than the ones who sign the order. You probably have your own idea of who your prospects’ influencers might be, but as The power of influencer marketing points out, there are a lot of potential candidates out there, including “journalists, consultants, academics, authors, sourcing advisors, management gurus, procurement advisors, systems integrators, regulators, government executives, standards setters, industry associations, resellers, lobbyists, events, forums and bloggers”. With people… Read More »Which important marketing prospects never buy your stuff?

There’ll always be a place in this blog for articles about wider marketing issues. And here’s a classic issue: how to handle customer complaints. In Learn to love negative feedback on B2B Marketing it reminds us that if things go wrong, the best and cheapest way to resolve complaints is to ask the customer what would make things right, as they’ll usually want less than they’d settle for if things got as far as negotiation. And critically, it’s been argued that customers who have had a problem which was successfully… Read More »Turn customer complaints into loyal business