It's 1996, do you know where your clients are? - includes related articles on Web marketing, using CD-ROMs and reader service card management - Technology Information - Cover Story

Home Office Computing, March, 1996 by Sarah Stambler, Abby McLean

Warning: You may have lost prospects you didn't even know you had. They could be anywhere. Maybe they're on business cards that are rotting away in your drawer. Maybe you left them endlessly on hold. Perhaps they're in another state, just waiting for you to find them.

The trouble is, even though it's 1996, your marketing methods probably still have a lot of 1956 sprinkled in. Sure, the tasks themselves remain basically the same--researching your market, gaining exposure, servicing your customers, and so on--but the ways you implement them have been drastically changed by technology, and you need to master the new techniques if you don't want to be left behind.

Here we contrast the old and new ways to accomplish six major marketing goals. We think you'll opt for the new method every time. It'll make the difference between brochures that are tossed or read, press releases that are passed over or picked up, callers who hang up or hold, and clients who are lost ... or found.

Creating Marketing Material

THE OLD WAY: Print your brochures, newsletters, and catalogs on paper. Settle for a one- or two-color print job because you can't afford anything splashier. Hope your stuff will somehow stand out among the piles of mail your prospects receive (and toss) each day.

THE NEW WAY: Publish the same information--and much more--on CD or disk; add color, video, animation, and sound to turn your marketing pieces into interactive, searchable, portable document files. With either of these formats, recipients can do useful things with the data that they simply could not do with a paper version, such as copying the information or graphics and pasting it directly into reports, promotional materials, and spreadsheets; or searching by keyword through your catalog and placing an order.

Still not convinced? Recent market research claims that a person spends a whopping 26 to 30 minutes with an interactive disk. Moreover, while the average retention rate for promotional material is only 30 percent, it jumps to more than 60 percent when customers interact with the same information.

As media and replication costs drop, the lion's share of your CD production budget will go toward preparing the data for publication. But you're likely to have already invested in professional services for graphics, printing, press releases, mailing lists, or programming, which can be the foundation for your new media approach. Take a look at such easy-to-use software packages as Adobe's Exchange, Microsoft's PowerPoint, Aldus's Persuasion, or WordPerfect's Envoy. Each provides "readers" or "runtime versions" you can distribute freely (enabling the recipient to view and use the data on your CD or disk even if they don't have the program it was prepared in). These tools will inexpensively translate your data into portable documents.

As for replication costs, a survey of several providers revealed that the standard industry price to produce a master CD averages about $100. You may have thought about recording your own CDs, now that CD-recordable drives are available starting at about $1,000. But unless you plan to release only small runs of a variety of titles or prototypes, or regular updates of a select group, it's more cost-effective to use conventional media to prepare the data and have CD mastering and replication done professionally. At Diversified Systems Group in Issaquah, Washington (206-392-0900), small runs (fewer than 50) are replicated to a CD and cost around $20 each. Larger runs are pressed and require a glass master; the total cost can run anywhere from around $4 each for 250 CDs to less than a dollar each for 2,500 CDs.

If this still sounds out of your league, consider floppy disks. Small quantities, even as few as 100, can be reproduced, custom labeled, and mailed, using address labels you provide, for about a dollar each plus postage. At approximately 65 cents apiece for smaller runs (versus four or five cents per printed page), you'll start to see real savings when you use disks for distribution if you have more than 15 pages of information to share. Depending on the format and type of data you plan to use, a disk can store roughly 600 pages of text, including some simple graphics.

Using Your Leads

THE OLD WAY: Attend trade shows and conferences to gather new business leads. Return to the office with a mountain of business cards you don't have time to file, let alone key in to your organizer. Stuff them in your drawer for handling "someday."

THE NEW WAY: Use optical character recognition (OCR) software to translate that stack of business cards into a useful database. For example, Corex's CardScan SE, an application that lets you scan business cards, is shipping with many new scanners. It's also available as a standalone product that will work with most TWAIN-compliant scanners. You can use Cardscan's Rolodex-type address file as your personal information manager (PIM), or you might export the data to any PIM that supports dynamic data exchange (DDE). These include many popular programs, such as Symantec's Act!, Delrina's suite of communication products, Starfish's Sidekick, and NetManage's Ecco Pro.