TechSpread: Staying Ahead of the Curve

As with every successful small business, Resonetrics is evolving with its marketplace. We have always specialized in helping small to midsize businesses leverage the power of new technology in their marketing. Now, with the spread of technology throughout the business world, we find ourselves moving toward a more solid niche, with a slightly different focus.

Forging A New Path
One of the influences on this focus is the fact that we’ve been working with larger organizations. We believe this is due to the fact that larger, enterprise-level clients are catching up to the need for a deep, rich and highly interactive online presence in today’s fast-paced world. 

There have only been just so many of us out here, staying ahead of the curve in testing, evaluating and implementing new technologies for these companies’ marketing staffs. We believe our results have gotten the attention of these larger clients, and they have been reaching out to us here at Resonetrics. They seek help in moving forward into the new age of “Web-as-central-hub,” rather than as an afterthought or adjunct to traditional marketing with print and broadcast promotion. 

With this evolving marketplace, we now find ourselves again out in front, sharpening our service focus as the needs of our clients change. They have discovered that not only does the Web serve best as the hub for the many spokes on their marketing wheel, but also that—with the proper back end—their websites can and must integrate well with other enterprise functions such as administration, recordkeeping and internal communications. 

They’ve also come to embrace the idea that good marketing aims at two audiences: external consumers and internal stakeholders, including employees and management. The work we do has morphed to accommodate this reality, which has frankly always been the case. We're just glad this level of client is finally realizing it. It helps us help them far more effectively.

Technological Darwinism
To ignore the power of this integration—because it can be difficult to implement—has been the standard for many, if not most, businesses until now. But at this point in the growing sophistication of the consumer marketplace, it is simply not an option for those who want to remain in business. As in the natural world, those who can't or won't evolve do so at their own peril. 

But the reality of how quickly and completely technological evolution plays out can strain even the most well-organized and resourced businesses and groups. Their main challenge these days isn’t getting their websites launched and functional, though that remains a significant effort. 

The real obstacle is finding a way to task existing employees with maintaining the freshness of their site’s content once it’s launched. Without constantly refreshed content, websites plummet rapidly in search engine ratings, and give visitors little reason to return. This dwindling engagement shows up directly on the bottom line. The emergence of tools to accurately and reliably track such changes is one of the factors driving the evolution we've described so far.

Implementation Is Key
Up till now, typically the corporate website has been an afterthought in the priorities and schedules of already harried marketing departments. Staff who have been trained mainly in the daily activities traditionally associated with their service or product specialties found themselves pressed into service as digital content managers and/or social media managers. But as more and more businesses, institutions and organizations realize the power and immediacy of websites as a 24/7 information bank and sales representative, they recognize that they must allocate dedicated resources to keep their sites viable. 

They have begun tasking people to manage this constant flow of content. This means employers have their hands full, trying to deal with some inevitable resistance by those being pushed out of their comfort zones, into tasks that likely didn't even exist when their original job descriptions were written. Other departments, perhaps longer in the game and more experienced, are creating new job titles and descriptions in recognition that the Internet has proven not to be a fad but likely the most powerful marketing and operations tools ever invented.

Either way, there is a ramp-up to developing acceptance by all staff involved, and that’s a cultural issue. Here at Resonetrics, we certainly find ourselves dealing with it on a close basis. While we don’t get directly involved with the development of staff and new attitudes toward technology in the workplace, it does affect our work. We help these clients with both new technology acceptance, and with identifying and implementing solutions to the very real and immediate technological challenges of this situation.

Next Time: The Internet Evolves