There are many different ways of delivering your business communication: direct mail; in-person sales calls; telephone; annual report; above and below line advertising; packaging; posters, and company stationery to name just a few.Each involves a financial cost for both production and distribution. Are there ways of reducing these costs?
Certainly! eTechnology allows production of words, sound and visual elements to be seamlessly integrated in a dizzying number of ways to achieve different ends. Each element can then be 're-purposed' or re-used in a different way to try new marketing and content delivery approaches.
These are just some of potential new technology outputs that your marketing messages and end-user documents can be distributed through:
* cd-roms
* pdf documents (an electronic format for storing and sending documents which ensures that design integrity of your documents remain intact, irrespective of end-user's computer and printer configuration)
* website
* mobile phone technology such as sms and wap
* PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) devices such as a PalmPilot
* web-tv
The cool thing about many of these distribution mediums is that once cost of producing one item is paid for (such as creating original document), cost of making a thousand or a million copies is negligible.
Imagine saving if you could do away with 80% of printing and posting costs of your expensive Annual Report, allowing instead any interested party to download it from your website, or be sent it via email.
You will not completely get rid of need for hard copies of your Annual Report as there will always be either a regulatory requirement or shareholders and investment analysts who like 'feel' of a bound document in their hand, or they lack facilities to download and print Report off. But such a saving would definitely allow you to invest saving in more growth-focused marketing and sales activities.