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IT: For Marketing Your Business, by Richard Sonnier This week I will discuss IT for marketing your business. HistoryInformation Technology has always played a part in marketing companies. In fact, the mass marketing age in which we live is a creature of IT. For example, mass market mail, junk mail, requires databases of addresses and other demographic information to target the customer. It is really amazing how far this technology progressed. Several months ago I received a magazine not only addressed to me with a personalized message, but the front cover was a satellite photograph of my house here in Houston, amazing and a little spooky.Hot Marketing ITBeyond slicker junk mail, the latest thing in sales and marketing is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The CRM vendors like Microsoft want to automate and manage the business process of sales and marketing. CRM is supposed to revolutionize this process the way that accounting software forever changed business accounting. In fact, your accounting software vendor has a CRM add-on package to sell right now. The concept is that everything: email, phone, documents, products, or services that interacts with your customer is tracked and coordinated by the CRM. Ultimately, the CRM products aim to be integrated into the entire company not just the sales and marketing department, so they feel big and complicated. A CRM automates your standard sales and marketing process, but they cannot bring order to chaos. An important question is does the company have a standard process or just really good, creative sales people who get it done. I would not just jump into one of these solutions, but they are hot items and worth investigating.The Internet is a marketing miracle. Mass market email is the new revolution, even if it is very annoying cause of SPAM. The Internet makes the distribution of your marketing messages nearly free. Email cost nothing to send unlike postage on mail. Further, you can deliver a multimedia experience over the Internet not just a flat printed flyer. Used effectively, it is very powerful. However, don't go overboard with glitz and glamour. It is annoying to customers. The current Internet fashion is simple, clean, bright and very friendly web sites. Beyond email and websites, there are interesting new tools like www.linkedin.com LinkedIn is about the all important business of networking people, not computers. The approach is very interesting and they protect your privacy so you have to grant permission to others in the LinkIn network to access your information. I joined several months ago and LinkIn claims that my network now contains 71,700 professionals that is a lot of happy hours if you doing it the old fashion way. Try it out and let me know if it works for you. Next week, I will discuss wireless networking (of computers, not people). |
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