By Josh Cline

When you think about the strategy behind your current or future online presence, you likely think about beating your competitors (perhaps in search-engine rankings or in direct sales on your website) or becoming a recognized thought-leader in your specific industry.

Today, however, such a strategy is becoming increasingly difficult – if not impossible – in a world of millions of websites in which a select few have usually dominated their online markets for years (and will most likely continue to do so). If your company sells books, you will likely never beat Amazon. If your firm wants to create the next Facebook (and you are not Google) and replace the popular social-media network, it will take years even to come close to Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth. The “first-mover advantage” exists for a reason.  Read more...

The following is the third in a series about high-tech market strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

A big, strategic failure that many organizations get into is picking the wrong market. Either, they don’t pick one at all and just see what sticks or else picks a market that is so wide (“everybody with a cell phone,” “mothers over 30,” “all people of a specific religious or ethnic group of a certain age,” “all Java programmers”) that it’s impossible to develop a market penetration strategy.

If your market is everybody, than your market is nobody.  Read more...

By Emily Kanter

In today’s holistic, integrated marketing-climate, a press release can now serve many more purposes than just getting a busy New York Times reporter to return your calls, tweets, and/or e-mails. Online press-releases can improve SEO by building backlinks, and sending them through social-media outlets can spread a company’s branding as well. And these are just two of the additional uses.

Still, there are different tactics to remember in order to maximize the effectiveness of an online press-release. In a recent Hubspot webinar entitled “The Science of PR,” the company’s social-media scientist, Dan Zarrella, and PR Newswire’s VP of Social Media, Sarah Skerik, presented valuable data then will tell you when and how to publish online press releases for various purposes.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

Is every single one of your Facebook and Twitter posts delivering something that your target market will find valuable, or are you posting items in social media just to put something there? The answer will likely determine the future of your social-media marketing efforts.

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog-post, Brian Solis relates how he had once attended a presentation by a Facebook sales-representative and was shocked at his useless recommendation:  Read more...

The following is the second in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.

It’s Strategy Stupid.

This should be obvious, but it’s not.

We’re enamored with the next shiny thing to realize that the basic fundamentals are even more important than ever.

Marketing is about markets. Strategy.

Do you remember the four Ps? The core principals of marketing:

• Product
• Price
• Promotion
• Place

These principles guide all marketing activities, including crossing the chasm from early adopter to mainstream.  Read more...

The following is the first of several posts about high tech business and marketing strategy, based on the bible of high tech marketing, Crossing the Chasm.

As The Cline Group CEO, Josh Cline likes to say, we frequently put the cart before the horse, developing a plan before engaging in a strategy.

We can’t implement a promotional plan before we understand the decision making cycle and just how technology is adopted. Selling to different audiences require different business strategies.

In order to plan throughout the entire technology adoption lifecycle. In order to develop a plan, first we should understand how technology is adopted.  Read more...