Better Business Communication Results

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'Efficiency' - one of the three Es of business communication

There are many different ways of delivering your business communication:

• direct mail;

• in-person sales calls;

• telephone;

• the annual report;

• above and below the 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 the 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 the 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 the design integrity of your documents remain intact, irrespective of the 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 the cost of producing one item is paid for (such as creating the original document), the cost of making a thousand or a million copies is negligible.

Imagine the saving if you could do away with 80% of the 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 the need for hard copies of your Annual Report as there will always be either a regulatory requirement or shareholders and investment analysts who like the 'feel' of a bound document in their hand, or they lack the facilities to download and print the Report off. But such a saving would definitely allow you to invest the saving in more growth-focused marketing and sales activities.

The internet, be it the World Wide Web where your website sits, or the greater part of the internet that allows for email transmissions, is a tremendously powerful and cost-effective distribution channel.

Once you have invested in the tools - such as a website or pdf-creation software - you have a licence to market your messages down the most efficient distribution media the world has ever known. For free.

It costs nothing to send email, once you have paid for access to the Internet. It costs nothing to have valuable information up on your website, once you have paid for the design and building of your site and its hosting. You can change your content on that website as many times as you like - you 'own' the space and you can do with it pretty much what you will.

Which allows you to push out your unpolluted marketing message, or your fact sheets, or your installation guides, to as wide an audience as you can attract.

And let's not forget that eTechnology can help us build a targeted, qualified audience of prospects and more rapidly turn them into clients, because they have in part already taken the first steps to building a relationship with you themselves, by visiting your website and finding out more about you and your service/product offerings.

The implication for your business communication costs

Using eTechnology you can quickly and efficiently update your prices, introduce new products and services, provide better service to your existing customers, generate new leads, position your brand and inform your stakeholders - all at costs significantly less than traditional media allows.

Note: this article on efficiency in business communication was extracted from my eReport, "The Three Es for Business Profit". Download your free copy of this report now (pdf).

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