Velocity’s Plea for Ambition: The New B2B Marketing Manifesto

Velocity, a B2B Marketing company in the UK, has released their newest ebook called, appropriately enough, The New B2B Marketing Manifesto

It’s subtitle is “Five imperatives and six staples you need to win the battle for attention”.

At a quick and lively 48 pages, it’s a fun and quick read, and it nicely captures the realities of modern B2B marketing.

My favourite bit is it being described as “A call to action and plea for ambition.” which is a brilliant line- for what is action without ambition?

And the ambitions in the manifesto are high and specific.

I will do a simple paraphrase here to enthuse you enough to link over and download Velocity’s manifesto.

Success in modern B2B marketing is found by:

people with:

“authenticity” + “expertise, experience and authority” + “ideas”

communicating through:

“content marketing”, “lead nurturing”, “community”, and “search” (being found is a type of communication- you are answering the first question of a new contact)

and measuring by:

“analytics” and “A/B testing”

This is very different from traditional core marketing/communications, and it’s a large gap in most companies marketing efforts.

To me, an interesting followup question to this is what kind of people can engage in this kind of marketing. In my mind, it’s the type of people David Ogilvy identified as the best copywriters in Ogilvy on Advertising- people with an obsession with finding the hidden ideas that can make a difference, and a profound awareness of the difficulty of that task. Three weeks of immersive research to find the one position that might make an impact, split testing to verify, and the use of common forms of communication unless testing proved a new one more effective.

This extends the conversation from what marketers should be doing, to what kind of marketers are wired mentally to thrive doing it.

I’ll followup with some thoughts on that in my next post.