B2B marketing insights for
those targeting a niche
Insights, learnings and stories from the world of B2B marketing and communications, direct from Velo’s B2B agency team
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Marketing Agency Selection
Governance of AI in practice
Anthropic’s Claude now embeds an invisible watermark directly into the text it generates using patterns of text it chooses, a requirement driven by the EU AI Act’s transparency obligations. Every model launched from that date carries it by default, and older models are being retrofitted. Image and file outputs carry a different mark: signed C2PA provenance metadata […]
B2B Sales Enablement, B2B Strategy
Conversation is the new conversion in B2B marketing
Trust matters in B2B, and it’s getting increasingly harder to earn and sustain. In our previous article on how B2B brands build trust, we split trust signals into two groups: signals about the company, such as credibility, reputation, expertise, stability and customer references, and signals about the people, such as chemistry, shared values, quality, responsiveness […]
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Advocacy
What role do customer stories play in AI GEO?
Increasingly, prospects aren’t starting their journey on Google or your homepage. They’re opening tools like Gemini, ChatGPT or Perplexity and asking a simple question: “Who should I be talking to?” Gartner puts GenAI use at 45% of recent B2B purchases; G2 found AI chatbots are now the single biggest influence on software shortlists. The challenge for marketers now isn’t just about […]
B2B Audiences, B2B Research, B2B Strategy
Can Reddit provide useful insights for B2B marketers?
Reddit conversations cover an enormous range of ground, from hobbies and politics to niche communities that have nothing to do with work. But only a narrow slice of that activity is useful for B2B planning. Reddit’s B2B activity is heavily concentrated. Analysis of 522 million Reddit mentions found that 67% of B2B recommendation activity happens […]
Does LinkedIn’s “Seems like AI slop” button actually do anything?
LinkedIn has quietly added a button that lets users flag posts that “seem like AI slop.” The obvious question is whether clicking it actually does anything. I needed to take a closer look at what LinkedIn’s new flag really does, and what it means for AI-assisted content. Turns out that the answer isn’t to put ChatGPT or Claude back in its box. There’s a new option buried in […]
B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Strategy
How do senior B2B marketers tell if their B2B positioning is working?
If you’re the marketing leader accountable for how your business shows up, here’s a test that will tell you more about the campaigns you’re about to sign off than any positioning workshop will. Ask five people in your business “what is it we sell?” and see how many different variations come back. We use this test with marketing teams regularly, and the results […]
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Strategy
When “good enough” stops being good enough
Somewhere in the country this morning, a marketing executive about eighteen months into their first proper job is being asked to plan a campaign, write it, design it, schedule it, report on it and brief three AI tools before tomorrow. They’re doing a decent job of it, all things considered. Nobody has ever shown them what a great job would look like. That, rather than […]
Why every B2B business should be thinking bigger about video
For years, we’ve talked about video as another marketing tactic: something to support a campaign, promote an event or sit alongside a product launch. I think that’s selling it short. One statistic recently caught my attention: pages featuring video are 53 times more likely to rank on the first page of Google than text-only pages. […]
B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Marketing in Technology, B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Research, B2B Strategy
How do you track market share without a big market study?
Formal market studies cost more than most challenger brands can justify, and revenue comparisons rarely help either. This piece sets out three practical proxies, brand search volume, competitor invoice patterns and tender win rates, that give a genuine read on competitive standing a board will recognise.
B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Strategy
New to the role as a senior marketer? A 9-step blueprint for successfully taking over a team.
Taking over a marketing team is as much about people as it is about a plan. This piece lays out a 9-step blueprint for the first 90 days: understanding what success looks like, learning how the business and its customers really see marketing, and building the credibility that makes bigger changes possible later.
B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Strategy
Received investment? How to make sure your marketing operation is ready to scale your activities and your company.
When private equity invests, marketing comes under immediate pressure to prove it can deliver growth fast. This piece sets out a seven-part readiness framework across market-facing and internal factors, potential, proposition, pipeline, perception, process, people and priorities, plus a 90-day roadmap for finding out what needs fixing first.
ABM, B2B Audiences, B2B GTM, B2B Marketing in manufacturing, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Strategy
How to build trust in your brand when targeting the defence sector
Most B2B marketing runs on proof: named customers, published outcomes, a case study for every objection. Defence marketing rarely gets that version of the game. Contracts stay classified. Customers stay unnamed. Case studies still exist, but they carry more weight when built to fit those limits rather than despite them, and the real competition usually starts before […]
B2B Content, B2B Marketing in Insurance, B2B Marketing in manufacturing, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Sales Enablement
How B2B marketers can prepare winning sales decks
Most sales decks fail because they’re built like brochures: complete, generic and impossible to adapt mid-conversation. This piece sets out a framework built on SPIN selling and five fast-moving elements, context, clarity, contrast, character and call to action, for decks sales teams can actually flex in the room.
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Marketing Leadership
What skills do you need to future-proof your B2B marketing career?
AI has sped up marketing production, but it hasn’t replaced the judgement that makes campaigns work. This piece sets out nine skills that separate marketers who’ll thrive from marketers who just use more tools: curiosity, critical thinking, commercial acumen and the ability to know what’s actually worth doing.
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Marketing Agency Selection, B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Strategy
How are we using AI across our marketing? A look behind the curtain
Velo doesn’t bolt on AI tools one at a time. It runs them as a connected ecosystem: brand-trained models, automated agents and generative tools working across research, planning and delivery. This piece goes behind the curtain to show how human judgement stays central to every layer.
ABM, B2B Marketing in manufacturing, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Sales Enablement, B2B Strategy
How does running ABM campaigns in the defence sector differ from other B2B markets?
Defence buying doesn’t behave like other B2B categories: decision-makers are hard to identify, cycles run in years and switching a qualified component can cost more than it’s worth. This piece sets out what ABM actually looks like in defence, from manual stakeholder research to the trade-show playbook that gets you noticed.
B2B GTM, B2B Marketing in manufacturing, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Strategy
If AI data centres are where the money is, how do you position your products and services as relevant?
The real AI opportunity isn’t the software, it’s the infrastructure behind it: the power, cooling, land, construction and compliance work that data centres depend on. This piece sets out how suppliers in adjacent markets can sell outcomes and technical proof to get noticed by infrastructure buyers.
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B Campaigns
ChatGPT Ads are here! What B2B marketers need to know
ChatGPT Ads have moved from a closed pilot to a self-service platform, just as B2B buyers start using LLMs to research vendors before making contact. This piece covers how the platform works, what it costs to test and why niche B2B marketers should treat it as discovery, not scale, for now.
B2B Advocacy, B2B Audiences, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Strategy
How do you influence buying decisions before they’re even being made?
There’s an uncomfortable truth sitting at the heart of most B2B marketing right now. Recommendation is the most influential driver of revenue, but it can only be indirectly influenced – and it’s even harder to measure. The channels you can measure are rarely where the real decision gets made. The channels where it does – the peer conversation, the internal Slack thread, the industry […]
AI & MarTech for B2B, B2B ESG, B2B Marketing Leadership
How do you balance a growing use of AI with the inevitable sustainability impact?
B2B marketers have become the fastest adopters of AI, but the environmental cost of casual use rarely gets examined. This piece argues that the question worth asking isn’t whether AI can do a task, but whether using it is proportionate and efficient, and sets out the workflow habits that make that judgement practical.
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