So what is high tech marketing?  

Marketing is about markets, about understanding your potential customers and their motivations, meeting their needs and establishing a relationship for the longer term. Marketing is about creating, launching and communicating sustainable solutions and products to the market place profitably – to ensure long term viability. For high tech companies this is more difficult to achieve: technology is intangible, complex, and constantly adapting and improving.

Applied technology is the answer – ask why would customers purchase your product or solution? What are the key benefits?  Is there a need? Does it fill a gap? Is it a better, quicker, different way to achieve a goal? Are there any barriers, motivations, and competitors actions you need to be aware of?

Where does it fit and is it indispensable?

Every organisation needs marketing. At the board level - and throughout the organisation… Marketing is a mindset that creates and sustains business energy. Without marketing you will fail.

So why do marketing budgets get cut in recession? For all the wrong reasons – marketing is wrongly seen as a cost and not directly linked to the growth of the company. This can be partly explained by the fact that marketing is not an exact science and is difficult to measure. Technology has helped fill some of this gap (CRM, e-marketing, website hits…), but this only measures the responses to marketing communication campaigns, not marketing as a whole.

Strategic marketing… or integrated marketing communications?

So what is the difference? Are they both needed in your organisation?

Marketing strategy is about answering very specific questions and opting for a long-term approach: Where is the company now? Where does it want to go? Is there a market, niches? What characteristics do they have? How are they likely to react? Which routes are available to achieve the company’s objectives? Which one – or combination – to choose? How can we evaluate our performance and learn from it?

To simplify, marketing strategy – or what we can call business development – is about market validity and the fit between your company and its stakeholders. It is ensuring that the entire company moves towards the same goal. This is communicated throughout the organisation and in the market place through integrated marketing communications plans, designed and implemented for each target audience: employees, customers, investors, distributors, press and analysts.

We also need to embrace the concept of integrated campaigns – the strength in designing plans with a selection of marketing tools and media relevant to the audience.

Can you decide which marketing you need? Is it better to have a good strategy and a bad plan or the reverse? The answer is to choose both – a good strategy and a good plan are needed to succeed.

Is marketing expensive?

Thinking time is free! This comes as a shock to many but much of the strategic thinking can – and should – start within the company. The cost attached to marketing depends upon the size of the organisation, its objectives for growth (ambitious, organic….), company culture (tech, sales, or marketing led), company creativity and above all the team in place (internal, consultants and agencies).

We also need to look at the concept of “expense” versus investment. Are R&D, HR or other budgets always perceived as expensive? Probably not –people’s perception are changing and realising that marketing stands for value added business expertise!

High tech marketing – what does the future hold?

In the recent years we have been provided with real life examples of how NOT to do it. The dot.com era: many failed and few succeeded.

Technology and innovation is not sufficient to succeed – the creation and delivery of the brand, and the consistency of quality of services are the critical success factors, not the fact your main distribution channel is the Internet! So “idea generation” is important but ascertaining market potential, value propositions and best routes to market are what make or break a business. Creativity does not have to be only linked to the product and the technology. Marketing embraces change and creativity through prototyping, evaluating options, adapting to customers’ needs and competitors moves… consistently.  

Technology forces us to radically change the way we communicate with our customers and other stakeholders -- with e-marketing we are offered low cost, high speed customer communications like no other but has anyone asked their customers what they wanted? How it is affecting them to receive over 100 e-mails a day (very few relevant and targeted)? Permission marketing sets out to change this providing it embraces the idea of dialogue and choice. Does the question “would you like to subscribe to our e-mail newsletter” really help customer satisfaction?  Will 3 G and wireless devices change the way we do business? Where will be the added value? Who will own the relationship – and the data – of your customers? Undoubtedly there are challenging times ahead opening a wide range of opportunities for companies close to their market and applying new communication tools wisely – remembering that content and message is more important that the medium.

A Round-up…

Here are a few tips and references, which you may find useful.

-          Focus on profitable partnership for your business – not to be confused with logo swapping

-          The Cluetrain manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com –Tell a story, be creative, be curious.

-          “You must be the change you want to see in the world” Mahatma Gandhi 

Do you have comments or suggestions or other ideas in this field? Give us your feedback.