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Marketing is about creating value for both the customer and the business and it is principally about establishing a relationship between the customer and the business. The good news is that technology has made marketing both cheaper and more effective. A business can easily harness technology to open up personalised communication with its customers for significantly less than old fashioned media advertising.

First of all your businesses website is its new face, the website has almost replaced the shopfront as being the most important external presentation for many businesses. Indeed if you sell your product on-line your website may be the only part of your business that a customer actually sees. The good news is that the cost of producing and maintaining a professional website have fallen drastically. There are companies who will design (or re-design) your businesses website for a couple of hundred dollars, or more often than not young employees have the requisite skills.

From the website we lead into email which is again become the prevalent form of communication between businesses and customers in the new technological age. Customers prefer email to telephone simply because it is so much more convenient for them. So you need to make sure that your contact details are widely available (this goes back to website design) and that your email is cleared regularly. Don't forget that customer service skills should still be applied to talking to a customer through email, just because the medium has changed doesn't mean the relationship has. Email lists are also a great way to send personalized relevant marketing communications to your customer base, a cheap and effective alternative to traditional advertising.

Blogs are also a great way to foster communication between your business and its customers, not only can you announce new products and services or special deals, blogs provide a great way to easily gain customer feedback. Customers who interact with your business and your product through blogs and forums are more likely to generate customer loyalty and alert you to potential problems. It is worth talking about social networks here as well. These can work incredibly well for certain businesses and build a community around the product, it is also a brilliant way of stimulating word-of-mouth promotion (which is normally considered the holy grail of marketing because it is so effective in promoting a business) through the "invite a friend" or "invite a fan" function. The only way to ascertain whether social networking can boost your business is to try it out and best of all its free so you have nothing to lose.

Mobile Phones are the ultimate cross-over between old fashioned marketing and customer relations and new technologies. Mobile Phones allow personal customer service to be given regardless of whether you are at the office or not and as such are an essential tool for any business and an essential part of its marketing structure. They also through mobile internet increase effectiveness of on-line customer communication through a mobile ability to respond to emails and other communications. Customer mobile numbers can also be used as a means of distributing targeted marketing communications, for example invitations to special valued customer functions.

Marketing in the age of technology has become much cheaper and far more focused on building close personal relationships with your customers through a variety of means of interaction.

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