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As Salesforce celebrates their 15 years in business, it just so happens that my own company just hit its 15-year-old mark in 2013 as well! To say that the online filing industry has changed a lot is an understatement. Many of the ways we celebrated our 15 years in business couldn’t have happened in 1999. Our two 15-year contests, video and photo based, wouldn’t have been able to reach the masses since YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist yet. Hashtags were also MIA and most websites were chunky and cluttered with text (if you were able to get on them through dial-up and not get kicked off the moment someone tried to call your landline).
Over the past 15 years, technology has greatly affected how we do things here in the office, but mostly, it has changed the world of marketing, making the exposure better and more accessible than ever. Here are three ways the marketing landscape has completely turned upside down thanks to technology.
Your social imprint is a big deal. Today, if you don’t have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest account, your business is seen as irrelevant. Beyond just signing up, however, you also have to stay updated on a daily basis to show that your business is invested in keeping your customers informed and engaged with what you’re up to. If you take a week or even a couple days off from updating, your brand looks sloppy and inconsistent. So if your brand’s social media manager is out for the week, make sure someone else on the team has got it covered. 15 years ago, businesses didn’t even have a need for social media managers, and now if they take more than 24 hours off we need to fill their absence with plenty of tweets and status updates to keep up our brand’s reputation.
In 1999, you’d have to print out and mail press releases to the physical newspapers. Now when a press release is drafted, they’re almost always submitted online and picked up by a series of online-based media outlets for further promotion and potential inquires from various members of the media. Unless a newspaper is actively looking for a story through local press releases, most press releases can survive and thrive completely online today without so much as touching a printed page.
Last – but most certainly not least – the ultimate marketing game changer has been blogging. It's one thing to create a company blog and update it from time to time, but you should also be expanding across the board and blogging with additional sites as a contributing writer.
One area that really helps benefit small businesses is to cross blog with their partners. Basically, this is a reciprocal content partnership where you write on their blog and they write on yours. Cross blogging not only provides great content from an outside expert source, but it also provides you the ability to share your own written work, and link back to your website, with a brand new audience that completely doubles your exposure.
Technological advancements have only continued to strengthen and widen the PR and marketing world as time has gone by, so embrace the movement and keep testing out what platforms work best for you and your business. There are, of course, a few things outside of our direct control that could still use improvements, but overall, everything is moving in the direction of utilizing more automation. We’ll check back in with Salesforce in another 15 years to see what changes have come about since.
Join the anniversary conversation on Twitter with #Salesforce15. Then, learn how to grow your small business to last 15 years and beyond with the free Salesforce e-book below.
