General Business Files

Every business needs to have an edge, and it’s been proven time and time again that creative, attention-grabbing marketing strategies can push a product into prominence, garner media attention, and reinforce brand awareness and loyalty. In today’s world, multimedia rules. For that reason, CD, DVD, and even HD-DVD should be part of your marketing repertoire.

Getting Your Message Out

Whether you need to send out training materials to employees or product information to prospective customers, CD replication services or DVD replication services can help you place your information in front of your target audience in a format that they will embrace. Similarly, you can easily use CD duplication or DVD duplication services to make thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of discs that can be sold, handed out a trade shows, bound in along with magazine advertisements, or bundled inside mass mailers. And, when your goal is to disseminate the highest quality images that technology has to offer, you can even take advantage of HD-DVD duplication services.

Finding the Right Partner

Whether you’re interested in HD-DVD replication or CD duplication, it’s critical to choose the right company with which to do business. Here are some characteristics to look for in a manufacturer:

Experience:

Your multimedia disc will say volumes about your company, so you need to ensure that the manufacturer you work with has extensive experience in CD and DVD replication, media services, and information technology.

Customer Service:

The company you use should place a premium on customer service, and should have a client roster that contains repeat customers.

Cutting Edge Technology:

Look for comprehensive premastering, mastering, and replication services for all CD and DVD formats, as well as the ability to copy protect your discs. For example, the company should use a laser beam recording machine to transfer your digital information onto a glass master, which is then developed and activated, and then transferred to a bath to grow the stamper that will provide you with DVD replication or CD duplication.

Quality Control:

Ensure that the company you select has exceptional quality control standards. For example, the first discs that are replicated should be tested bit-for-bit against the original, and should also be played in a variety of drives and players to test functionality.

Creativity:

The service you choose should be able to go beyond standard round discs and provide you with creative options that include customized designs and disc shapes. You could, for example, distribute a CD that is the size of a business card, that is in a shape that reflects the nature of your business or the theme of your campaign, or that has other unique characteristics.

Packaging:

At the very least, the company you work with should be able to offer UV cured inks and up to five-color printing on durable labels for your CD or DVD. Beyond that, the best companies also offer incredibly effective packaging services that will make your CD or DVD stand out from the crowd.

From products to promotions, you can use CD and DVD replication that will put you ahead of your competition and enhance your company’s image.

In a company of 25 people; putting on a marketing event and charging an entry fee could give the event administrator a severe headache. The  Marketing Assistant still had to run while she organized the seminars and she realized she could be handling hundreds of enquiries over the period. This was their first venture into this type of event and the company’s accounts department was not really set up for a mass influx of small payments.

The registration and payment procedure that you use should be as professional as you can make it. This fairly small part of the overall event paints a very vivid picture to your delegates of your capability and will be their first evidence of how the whole event experience is likely to be. If you handle this phase flawlessly, you may be excused small hiccups along the way. Make a mess of things here and your delegates will start marking your report card with red ink.

Take some time with your administrative staff to draw up a detailed process that should be followed consistently by anyone who takes a booking. Please don’t just hand them a procedure that you have designed because you will end up shouldering the responsibility for any mistakes that are made down the line. If the process is co-owned by everyone involved, they will feel more motivated to change the process to ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated.

A typical procedure will consider all of the following:

• How will bookings be taken?
• By mail
• By phone
• By Email
• Online

• What type of database will the administrators use?
• Spreadsheet
• Paper based system
• Relational database

• If an outsourced online booking system is used how will you synchronize the data and how frequently will you do this?

• Will payments be accepted using bank transfer, credit card, business and/or personal check?

• How frequently will the event managers and the event caterers require updates on booking statistics and delegate details?

Patricia took one look at the checklist and started researching online booking agents immediately. She reasoned that the workload necessary to do a first class job would probably entail bringing in a temp and training him/her to do the job that the online booking agent could handle easily. The cost of having a temp in their already cramped office and the thought of designing a system, training them to use it and finding work for them to do when the phone wasn’t ringing was already giving her that headache. She also decided that the cached of being able to offer round-the-clock facilities for credit card booking and also a 24 hour telephone answering service would impress their intended delegates.