By Hillel Glazer, Entinex, Inc.

Technology doesn’t only play a role in your company’s productivity or in the services your company sells. How you use technology plays a role in your company’s image as well. The role it plays and the impact on your business depends on what your company does.

Marketing specialists will tell you that marketing material must be sensitive to the target market. How you represent your company in the marketplace takes into account how and when your market seeks what your company sells, and what they expect to see. Your image is also built on whether or not your market perceives that you understand them. To put it bluntly, you’ve got to demonstrate that you belong in that market space.

All this is also true for companies that do business with or in a technology industry. But since technology is so often a poorly understood field, it’s no surprise that many companies also misunderstand the expectations and sensitivities of the technology marketplace. The relationship between technology and your company’s image is just as important as your company’s logo. In fact, in some respects, if you are marketing to or in the technology market, how your company uses technology can be more important to your image than the name or logo.

For example, a technology company seeking an accounting firm probably doesn’t care as much about the firm’s logo as it does about whether the company can communicate with their accountant via email. A firm that doesn’t use email is nonetheless sending a message to the tech company that they may not fully appreciate their needs.

There are several aspects of technology’s role in your marketing strategy that are easy to address, not very expensive, and hugely reflective of your image in the technology marketplace. Although many of these examples relate to the Internet side of technology, there are other technologies that play a part in building your company’s image as well.

If your company advises other companies on marketing and selling on the Internet, what does it say about your company if you don’t have your own domain name? What does it say about your experience with the Internet if your email address is "wehelpyoursales29854@PROVIDERNAME.com"? Not having your own domain and/or using your Internet provider’s email address conveys that you don’t know much about marketing on the Internet.

Why do some companies not have or use their own domain name and email address? It could be because they don’t realize that it’s not very expensive to do, and not very hard to do. Registering your own domain name takes minutes and can cost under $10 for the initial year of registration. Buying email space also takes minutes on line and can cost under $10/month if you also want web site hosting. You can start sending email with your own domain name in less than an hour and start receiving email to your own address in no more than three days.

A simple website doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars either. Plenty of developers will create a simple but professional web presence for between $300 and $500 and get it done in less than a week. Some local developers cater to the small and individual business owners without big budgets and can set everything up for you, even email.

Some companies are not aware of the importance that technology plays in their image. Take, for example, the case of a consulting firm specializing in helping software developers be more productive. Its site requires users to register to gain access via a password to the resources area of their site. So far so good. The site allowed users to specify their own user name as well as a password. Even better. However, instead of automatically registering users using simple programming and a database repository, the process went from fancy to foolish in one step by saying that confirmation of registration would take "one to two days." Something that ought to have been handled by the very technology this company claimed to be experts in was not even in use on their own web site. Worse, is that they inserted a manual process into the user experience that any experienced user knows is totally unnecessary.

Companies in the tech marketplace don’t have to be fancy or be pushing the state of the art with how they market themselves. However, they do need to be consistent with their industry. To ensure consistency between word and deed, businesses in the tech marketplace ought to focus on being thorough in the technologies they use in their marketing strategy and avoid doing things only some of the way.

How you’re using technology says a lot about your company. You don’t want to say one thing with your mouth and another thing with your business card. For very affordable costs, a mere number of days, or a simple self-audit of the way technology is being used, your business image reflected in technology could be validating that you’re a serious player in the tech marketplace.

Hillel Glazer: Entinex, Inc., Baltimore - Washington | 877-ENTINEX | http://www.entinex.com