They were supposed to be the great equalizer, the marketing tools that finally gave start-ups the same exposure as the industry leaders. When marketing yourself online, you need to remember your target market. If your target market is soccer moms, then you should be posting on Pinterest. Make sure you’re targeting the right people in the right markets and that you're doing enough to get your company noticed. GUEST POST. Social media networks were supposed to be the promised land for small businesses. 1) Stop trying to build Rome. Build relationships. MORE >>

Companies not anticipating and recognizing the technological changes happening in the market and the attitudinal changes of the next wave of customers will put themselves at risk; it’s as simple as that. Even our favorite little meat market in the huge metropolis of Pierz, Minnesota (population: 1,277) has a Facebook page. In an outstanding piece on Harvard Business Review, Users Are the New Growth Engine , Aaron Shapiro warns CEOs who “won’t acknowledge the impact digital technology is having on their business,” may not be around in five years. MORE >>

Some get drip marketing. So if I haven’t totally confounded you, let me tell you how you address the prospective customers you don’t yet know: You market your company so the "customer you don’t know" can find you. For the last few years our company has been using the term Pre-CRM and we’ve seen it take hold in the marketplace lately. As you know, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a strategy for managing relationship, interaction and contact data about potential and landed customers. Let’s run through a familiar scenario. customer emails you. MORE >>

Don’t get me wrong, for companies of all sizes we’re trying to do more with less, so marketing automation has a role to play in our businesses in order for us to keep up. Here at Workface we automate a large part of our inbound content strategy through HubSpot, for example, because it’s simply more efficient at addressing our target market (audience). In the prophetic words of Bob Dylan, “for the times they are a changin’” Right on Bob, right on! The one constant is change. I’m not talking about luddites holding your company back. Web 2.0 MORE >>

Whereas companies use CRM to pull, collect, and curate customer data for record management and subsequent follow-on marketing, VRM is a conceptualization of customers owning their own data and maintaining control over how, when and where they choose to push that data to companies (vendors). Anonymity is a very scary concept for marketers who carry deep-seated motivations to know as much as possible about their customers and prospective customers. In 2006 Mike Vizard coined the term Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as the counterpart to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). MORE >>