As technology changes, current jobs are lost and new ones come into being.

Watching this YouTube movie about creating animation makes this very clear. Changes that took 20 or 30 years to happen, now seem to take only a few or sometimes just a few months to become outdated.

Embracing new technology is difficult when you are comfortable with where you are.  Especially if you are uncomfortable with change.

As small business professionals know, if you don’t stay current, your pipeline of leads will start to dry up.  We all know someone who just can’t get past that “things are not like they used to be.”

I was recently talking with a business owner who has spent the last 10-15 years marketing his business with fliers in newspapers and direct mail letters.  He bemoans the fact that his leads have dried up but yet his advertising budget is swelling.

Although he has a small website (finally set up a year ago), he has no search engine optimization and distrusts the whole computer as a medium to bring him leads.  So his business is really suffering.

On the other hand, I met with another business owner about a month ago who came to me for a website revision and some trade show banners. When shown some of our work, asked if we create “Augmented Realty” videos for brochures.  Meanwhile, he had an administrative assistant creating his brochures in Microsoft Word and posting them on his website… still in Word. Being enamored with what I call the “bright shiny object” doesn’t help, when you’re still executing at a level that doesn’t hold up.  Big gap.

Both business owners have a ways to go because they neglected their marketing for too long.  Perhaps it was that one big customer that keep them too busy in the production side of things.

What ever the reason, keeping an eye on the hundred of marketing tools is something that needs to be done in a business.  It’s important to determine what mediums (websites, magazines, mobile phones?) various groups of people are using - and what works, what doesn’t for each type of customer a business has.

I don’t think that most small business professionals need to chase the most current, cutting edge techniques in marketing, but certainly staying in step by taking small steps, all the time, on a very regular basis, will keep your business moving forward. And then you never hit the big gap, big jump. Just one step at a time.