Some marketers lose all perspective and even obsess over a single new medium. Before you know it, there’s someone furiously scribbling on a white board and warning senior executives that the company will absolutely fail in the absence of a “podcast strategy.”

This is nonsense. What’s most important is to manage marketing media or channels in a disciplined manner. Just as portfolio theory teaches us that our best financial outcomes are typically attained through diversification, we need to think in terms of a diversified marketing investment portfolio.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s most recent study on business technology marketing, the B2B media mix now includes new media such as blogs, podcasts and paid search, as well as more conventional forms such as white papers, e-newsletters, webinars, demos, advertising, direct mail and trade shows.  Stefan Tornquist, the firm’s research director, contends that the companies most likely to defy the present trend toward lengthening sales cycles are “those that use multiple tactics” in an integrated fashion.

That’s where the portfolio concept becomes relevant. Marketing media – new or otherwise – are the “securities” that we manage and measure. We need both “conservative” (proven) and “aggressive” (speculative) media investments in our portfolio. And as the performance of the portfolio plays out, we rebalance it – moving money into media that are consistent with past performance and our future objectives. We should be careful in our measurement, however. It’s important, for example, to consider not only metrics like total leads generated, but cost per lead as well.    

The most interesting thing about today’s growing mix of media options is the ability it gives us to project and demonstrate thought leadership in the marketplace. Thought leadership – the stories we craft and tell about our industry’s direction, critical success factors and customer value – is an increasingly vital factor in B2B technology marketing. Indeed, our customers no longer are simply buying our products; they are now valuing our insights, advice and perspectives on the future.

Tech powerhouses such as Cisco and IBM have done an exceptional job of leveraging thought leadership to engage executive decision-makers – moving beyond the lower level decision-makers that control smaller budgets and have less corporate influence. Smaller companies, such as Tech Image client GlobalSpec, have demonstrated the power of creating customer evangelists and then enabling them to tell their own stories to new prospects.

Unlike marketing that revolves around image or product, thought leadership provides a means of cutting through the noise and elevating our companies to a position of enduring market leadership. It also represents an opportunity to engage and enable prospective customers at each stage of the decision cycle: awareness, consideration, and purchase.

To successfully position ourselves and accelerate sales, we need to smartly map our thought-leading content to the marketing vehicles that allow us to actively leverage it. This begins with analysis.

We are challenged to profile our target audience, determine the stage of the decision cycle in which we are trying to engage them, and then link these factors to the marketing media that represent the best payoffs. In fact, we optimize our performance by integrating our marketing across media and throughout the various stages of the decision cycle.

As mentioned, success in these efforts depends on rigor and discipline – much more so than intuition and gut feel. The media landscape is now far too complex to simply wing it – and it is changing too rapidly to rely solely on the wisdom of past experience.

We shouldn’t allow new media hype to seduce us into making careless marketing investments. But new media represent new ways to interact and share compelling stories with our prospective customers – to project thought leadership and drive growth. We shouldn’t ignore that opportunity either.