The Use of Multimedia in Modern Marketing Campaigns

Advances in multimedia software make it easy for even non-technical people to create breathtaking audio and video presentations in-house without contracting with expensive outside talent. When combined with the dropping prices for CD and DVD duplicating equipment and services at CD Solutions, these developments have opened new avenues of marketing allowing companies to reach consumers in new ways.

Dynamic and Interactive Marketing

A challenge faced by marketers is to create ad campaigns appealing to different segments of the consumer population, segments that may want different things from the product. When shopping for cars, one buyer might want something sporty and fast while another is interested in reliability and gas mileage. A marketing effort that tries to appeal to both may fail miserably as each buyer is bombarded with what he feels is useless information.

An interactive multimedia presentation on a disc and copied with one of our CD and DVD duplicators is more appealing to consumers than a canned ad they see on TV. More information on the product can be included than in a typical ad and users can decide what information is important. Each consumer can watch different parts of the presentation and get the information important to them.

Broader Reach Than Other Presentations

CD Solutions' DVD duplicating technologies allow dozens, hundreds or even thousands of copies of a presentation to be created and distributed as desired. They can be handed out at trade shows, mass mailed to potential clients, or stocked at retail outlets. Consumers can take the DVDs and watch them at their leisure without having to tie up your sales force in presentations.

More focused presentations can be given by using the DVDs in interactive kiosks set up anywhere there is high customer traffic such as malls or local events. Your sales team can use the presentations to give directed sales talks to groups of potential buyers, using the multimedia technologies to add a wow factor to their presentations.

Inexpensive Technology

Our customers are often surprised at just how inexpensive DVD duplicating is. They expect this kind of cutting edge technology to cost a lot of money, but modern CD and DVD duplicators can put out high-quality discs quickly and at low cost.

What this means is that a single DVD can be produced for about the same you'd pay for a sales brochure, yet the interactive multimedia experience will have greater impact than a typical sales presentation. The ability to deliver information that is both broad and deep without overwhelming the client means the DVD duplication marketing medium can lead to more conversions than other technologies could.

Although we've focused on using multimedia DVDs for marketing products, interactive presentations can be used to deliver messages in other areas of business such as stockholder reports or company procedure manuals. The rich and compact information stream delivers information more easily and efficiently than other media.

Ways Companies Use Multimedia Presentations

Organizations have come up with clever and interesting ways to use disc-based applications to present their messages. Here are a few of the more interesting clients who have used the DVD duplication service at CD Solutions:

Real Estate Agents: One of the first industries to embrace the power of multimedia was the real estate market. Agents realized they could do more than just show pictures of a home. They created virtual tours and copied them with CD and DVD duplicators. Users can "walk" from room to room and get a feel for the size and ambience of a home before visiting it.

Interior Decorators: It's difficult to relate furniture, carpet swatches and other decorating elements to create a unified look to a room. Decorators use software that creates virtual rooms and make many copies with DVD duplicating technologies. Customers can experiment with different styles to find the one right for them and decorators can show clients how a room will look before the first stroke of a paint brush.

Shopping Software: Any company selling a customizable product such as a car or a computer system can use CD and DVD duplicators to make copies of a shopping application on disc. Users can play around with different customization options to create the product they want. Oftentimes, shoppers who aren't in a buying mood create a custom product for the fun of it. When it's done they realize that buying it is just a click away and how easy is that?

Artistic Portfolios: A host of creative people can create compact portfolios to show off their work. Bands can use CD duplicating to release their own albums or to create demos for distribution to potential performance venues. Painters don't have to carry a cumbersome portfolio if they have their work on a DVD. Keynote speakers or entertainers can distribute videos of their work.

Company Reports: Financial analyses aren't the most interesting reading, but they can be jazzed up with a full multimedia presentation and copied with CD and DVD duplicators. It might be an internal report for executives or a stockholder report which will be sent to thousands of people. Video and interactive displays bring across the message of the company's past performance and future potential.

Interactive Manuals: DVD duplicating simplifies employee training by creating courses on disc. New workers can train at their own pace without tying up another person to act as instructor. Interactive demos allow people to operate virtual equipment to ensure they have the procedures down before they have to try their skills live.

Non-Profit Appeals: Charities have learned the value of reaching into people's hearts. They use pictures of the people they help to add a human element. CD and DVD duplicators allow them to create presentations and take this a step further by including video interviews with these people or interactive tours of new facilities built with past donations. They can also include detailed financial reports so donors can know exactly where their money is going to go.

Creating Your Multimedia Presentation

Once you've decided that multimedia is right for your business, you need to create the presentation, burn it to a master DVD or CD, and then duplicate it for your target audience.

Making the Presentation

The creation of your master disc can be very simple or very complicated depending on your project. A presentation could be as uncomplicated as a PowerPoint file along with the Microsoft PowerPoint viewer, or a collection of images and a slideshow program. These could be copied to a disc and sent for CD duplicating.

Software allows more complicated presentations to be made with simple drag and drop interfaces. For the technically minded, powerful applications are available using the same editing techniques as special effects and video production professionals.

Another option is to contract with an outside agency to do the work. These multimedia companies work with you to create a professional looking final product on a master DVD. This disc can be sent to CD Solutions for DVD duplicating or copied in your own CD and DVD duplicator.

Duplicating It Yourself

Once you have the master copy of the presentation, the next question is whether to make your own copies or hire CD Solutions to copy it.

The burners built into off-the-shelf computers aren't a good way to make more than a handful of copies. We stock a wide range of CD and DVD duplicators to fit any budget. We have small units good for producing a few discs at a time and large, automated duplicators that can run unsupervised to produce hundreds of discs.

Using one of our CD and DVD duplicators is a good option if you run discs in batches of less than about 50 at a time or if you need immediate turnaround. It's also a good choice if your presentation will change often. For example, a real estate agent might have virtual house tours that change weekly and are copied on demand as customers need them. A CD and DVD duplicator would be the best option.

Using CD Solutions DVD Duplication Service

For large jobs, we can provide DVD duplicating for less than doing it yourself -- even if you already own the equipment. We use the highest capacity CD and DVD duplicators to produce hundreds or thousands of discs. Not only can we give you a great price because of the economics of scale, but you also save on the manpower involved having someone operate the duplicators.

If you have DVD duplicating batches in the thousands or higher, our replication services can definitely beat the price of doing it yourself. On this scale, we use a different technology where the discs are pressed rather than burned, the same technique used to produce DVDs of Hollywood movies or CDs of major recording artists.

Including a DVD or CD as part of your overall marketing strategy can be an important decision. A solid sales presentation may just be what it takes to get the next customer, charity donation or investor.