75 years ago your marketing was entirely based on print and word of mouth. There was no internet, no TV commercials, no billboard advertising. If you wanted people to know about you, you had to run newspaper or magazine ads, go door to door meeting people and hope that others would spread the good word about your business. This meant that your customer service had to be top notch. Every detail of your business needed to be perfect so that you didn’t miss the sale for a slip of the tongue or a mistake in marketing. You had to understand your ideal client so you didn’t waste time or energy marketing to the wrong people. You attended events in the hopes to meet the right people – and when you did, you didn’t ask for their email or cell number, you planned a face to face meeting at an office to discuss how you could work together. There were no shortcuts, no simple ways to reach somebody, nothing that made business easy at all. And yet, thousands of businesses grew, improved and became huge successes. Why? Because they worked their butt’s off, understood what it took to  succeed and never let laziness or short cuts inhibit their success.

Fast forward to today – the land of laziness in business. You can send an email from the road, tweet in bed and cold call from anywhere in the world. It doesn’t take much to create a website, and there are tons of places you can market yourself for next to nothing. And all this has led to disaster for many companies. It is  more important now than ever before to make sure that every detail of your business is perfectly in order, because your customers can reach you faster and in more ways! Companies who don’t remember the past  – or don’t appreciate how to really connect with customers – are letting social media tools run their marketing and are hitting a brick wall. Social media is not the answer to marketing, and it is definitely not a solution to save your business. In fact, unless you already have a steady marketing strategy based on the old ways of actually having quality products and customer service, social media will bury you alive.

Is your business being lazy or are you using these tools to capitalize on the changing market?