Integrating Your Marketing Material

Your small business produces great products. They perform well and your specs show it. They also look good and you've got the photographs to prove it. You've got customer testimonials, articles from magazines, detailed descriptions and your products are used all over the place. Where you haven't been very successful is letting the world know you exist.

You've probably got a small web site which wasn't very expensive but which isn't doing much. You might also have a brochure which cost a fortune but doesn't have room for any details. You've got a customer mailing list but don't have much to send them. Printing out a few pages on your computer and mailing those out is easy but not very impressive. For a more in-depth discussion of this subject try the "Growing Your Own Small Business" course at Suite University.

Generating colour material which really looks good and does your products justice is too expensive. And even if you took the plunge and printed a colour booklet, a year later it's out of date. What you need is the ability to produce high-quality colour material in small quantities as needed and at a reasonable price.

This technology is now ready for general use. It is the writable CD. Almost all your customers will have a computer and those computers can read CD-ROM's. For under $500.00, you can get a good CD writer which will write on blank CD's costing less than $2.00. Your CD will hold more material than a thick department store catalog, the quality of the images will be better and the CD's can be generated one at a time and the material up-dated as needed.

But you can go even further in improving the accessibility of your material. If you use HTML, the language of the Internet, to put your material on the CD, you can instuct your customers to simply use their browsers to look at your material. At the same time, some of the files can be put on your web site and you can use a colour printer to generate paper output from the CD. You now have a single, large electronic catalogue which is the source of all your marketing material and which can generate small quantities of CD's, web site material, e-mail material and paper as required. In addition, only the electronic version must be kept up-dated. Overall, your costs should be significantly lower for material quality that is much higher.

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