Mass marketing has become so prevalent that it has rapidly lost its effectiveness. Gone are the days where a national marketing campaign provides sufficient influence on your consumers to convince them to purchase your product. As the web expands personal communication has become more important. The web has empowered individuals by increasing their reach. Your customers can read through the material nonsense that large marketers force down their throats via tv ads and newspaper ads in which the consumer has a huge smile on their face. The most influential marketing strategy has become guerrilla marketing. But still, guerrilla marketing has even garnered negative rapport as marketers have begun to invade individual’s personal relationships. So how do you connect to your customers?

You need to build genuine personal relationships with your customers. While this may not be the case for commodities, this is the primary case for the vast majority of services being offered. As you build these relationships with individuals they will in turn tell their friends and suddenly your marketing efforts will have paid off. You can reach out to more individuals via blogs and alternative forms of social media.

It’s nothing new, in one sense. The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global. The one-to-many scope that technology brought to mass production and then mass marketing, which producers have enjoyed for two hundred years, is now available to customers. And they’re eager to make up for lost time. -Cluetrain Manifesto
You may even be able to generate some traffic to your blog and various web sites via mass marketing, but the impact from these large marketing campaigns will be nowhere near the response you receive from developing geuine relationships. Trust me, I have seen a number of national television advertising campaigns by Fortune 500 companies only generate 50 leads to a site. Some will say that it’s because their ads were bad. This may be true, but I’ve witnessed the result of successful word of mouth campaigns that would dwarf any national mainstream media campaign. The new marketplace is primarily responsive to relationship marketing. So get out there and start building new relationships!