Jokes about lists all hitting at year's end are nearly as common these days as the lists themselves. This year, we at McBru are applying a slightly different twist to the list idea by proposing five New Year's resolutions for deep tech marketers. No, these aren't of the "exercise more" or "eat better" variety. We're suggesting five best practices deep tech marketers should concentrate on to ensure our work is thoughtful, contemporary and strategic to enable our employers and clients to generate significant return on investment.

New Year's Resolutions for Deep Tech Marketers

1. I will conduct a thorough, process-oriented positioning and messaging program before beginning any new communications campaign, be it a small product launch or a company launch.

Some deep tech marketers are very disciplined in beginning any launch planning process with some form of a positioning and messaging exercise. However, upon further investigation, you can sometimes discover that while the positioning demonstrates broad relevance, it is lacking in significant differentiation. Or vice-versa. And, often when relevance and differentiation have been closely examined, only one audience, such as customers, is considered. Powerful positioning and messaging considers all of the above.

Issue 1.4 of our e-newsletter can be accessed here, if you'd like to read more on the subject of positioning and messaging.

2. I will reexamine each of my target audiences to get up-to-date on what influences them and how they prefer to access information.

Many deep tech marketers chose their field years ago and have, therefore, benefited from generally communicating with only a handful of different types of technical folks, be it electronic engineers or IT staff. Yet few can deny how the emergence of both the Web and globalization has shaken up the status quo in the way deep tech marketers do their jobs.

Take advertising for instance. A semiconductor industry marketer, who 10 years ago was primarily managing campaigns across a few print formats in North America, perhaps Japan and maybe parts of Europe, now is also navigating myriad online ad formats, plus pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, mobile advertising and more. And he or she is managing these campaigns from North America to Europe to Asia, with rapidly emerging geographic markets dramatically impacting the mix.

Yet questions remain: Are these deep tech marketers using the appropriate venue and/or technique for the desired brand awareness or lead-generation outcome? And is their creative tailored to each international audience?

While an examination of online advertising formats will surely be a subject for a future e-newsletter, you can learn more about our study of one international audience, China, in issue 1.6 of our newsletter.

3. I will improve the four "M's" of my lead generation programs: metrics, methodology, materials, and minutiae.

Metrics, like lead volume and cost-per-lead, translate into the ROI for a lead gen program. Spending the appropriate amount of time and attention in the metrics definition phase will pay off, as will carefully determining the best methodology, including desired prospect data and segmentation parameters. Content is king. In lead gen programs, the materials or assets are the content, without which, there is no lead. Lastly, few types of marketing initiatives are more fraught with devilish details than lead gen programs; minding the minutiae can be the difference between a program's success and failure.

As was pointed out in issue 1.3 of our e-newsletter for deep tech marketers, a lucrative pipeline to sales hinges on all four of these lead-generation program aspects. To learn more about the four "M's" of lead generation, feel free to visit issue 1.3 here.

4. I will help my company become its own publisher.

Trade media companies are winnowing news staffs and jettisoning entire publications that cover your corner of the deep tech industry. Why not pick up the baton and take advantage of the new economical and easy-to-use electronic publishing tools (e.g., blogs, e-newsletters, RSS) to serve as a news and insight source for your target audiences?

But, just as the best and most trusted trade publications have demonstrated, it's less about the tool and more about the content. Be timely, educational and inclusive to ensure your foray into publishing is a success. (Perhaps you'll be so forward-thinking that you'll start your own publication, like a couple of our readers.)

If you'd like to read about one client's publishing success story using blogging, visit issue 1.1 here.

5. I will reinvigorate PR with relations among my publics instead of just releases for the press.

While the last few years have seen dozens of op-eds, blog posts and speeches from the greater business industry's marketers about the death of the press release, let's face it: It's not going anywhere soon in deep tech PR. For one thing, technical journalists still ask for it as an official and, hopefully, educational summary of company news. Furthermore, if crafted correctly, it can help with search engine optimization (SEO).

That said, when press releases themselves become the core tactic or dominate a planning discussion for an announcement, that's a problem in any industry's marketing. And that's been a fact for decades.

Along with the obituaries of the press release, much has been written about conversational marketing, or the need for companies to transform their marketing from a top-down, sanitized world of collateral and other communiqués that focus on the company and its products to one that's seated in the world of the customer and full of two-way conversations rather than monologues. The thinking behind what some call "conversational marketing" is that, with the advent of the Internet, customers often have more opportunity to share information about a company's products than ever before and are, therefore, more influential than previously imagined. Many of these conversational marketing proponents, such as the writers behind the Cluetrain Manifesto, believe that companies should go so far as communicating informally in a human voice as their customers do with one another.

Rising above the press release and seeking out ways to build relationships with key constituents is a worthy goal, and likely one that will be achieved gradually, not overnight. Why not begin with leveraging customer references to help you create a conversation between prospects and their peers? Our latest newsletter on customer reference programs, Issue 1.5, can be revisited here.

Fortunately, deep tech marketers have all year to give conversational marketing and the other four New Year's resolutions a shot. Let us know if you have any more resolutions to add and we'll gladly post them to the list.

Best of luck in 2008,

Jeff Hardison