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 from:
http://www.hopkins-business-communication-training.com