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

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. 

Social media platforms, search engines and advertising platforms have shown us time and again that they can’t be trusted with our audiences. But marketers are addicted to solving the social media puzzle, devoting lifetimes of energy to divining the arcane whims of algorithms (instead of building a brand customers are drawn to). Wrestling back control of audiences from platforms that keep changing the rules to their advantage isn’t a quick fix — but the results are profound and long-lasting. Think of companies like Salesforce or Gong. They’ve become indispensable to their audiences by providing insanely useful content, data people can’t get anywhere else, and comprehensive resources. Their prospects seek them out without being told to by expensive ads, willingly subscribe to their lists, and listen closely when they talk. It’s the ultimate owned distribution. And their astronomical growth isn’t surprising given this extraordinary advantage. You can’t just throw money at ads to get that kind of audience stickiness (or what Gong’s chief evangelist Udi Ledergor calls ‘memory links’). Paid ad spend still has its place: it can absolutely help you build an audience. But it’s by bringing more people to your door rather than generating a bunch of leads. It’s what you do to entice that audience back that really matters. So how do you create an audience on your ‘owned land’ — your digital properties — instead of rented spaces like social and SEM? Our CEO Stan Woods shares thoughts in our new blog. (Oh, and we give you permission to make any kind of snide gesture you want at your paid search providers when they raise their prices or change the rules… again). https://lnkd.in/e2Rx_PCJ

Love to see that even the big brains over at Next 15 are embracing the evolution of B2B Marketing and that it moves from crunching numbers and coming back to a stronger investment in brand. It's starting to feel like brand is back... 😎 #b2bmarketing #b2bbrand

The good news: A shall-not-be-named B2B brand ( 🤐 ) recently achieved a 700% increase in leads progressing to sales and 3.5x better campaign ROI. The scary news: To do this they had to let go of something marketers are addicted to: chasing quick leads that look good on paper but don’t actually create revenue. (There’s a reason Sales hates your MQLs). The good news (part 2): Long-term campaign strategy is the only way to materially increase revenue in B2B. We’ve laid it all out for you here — https://lnkd.in/grXqaQnW