The Role of Interactive in Your Marketing Mix

Computer-based interactive media engages your prospects, empowers them, spurs them from curiosity to commitment to close. Far more than traditional one-way media, interactive media motivates your prospects to action. After all, we remember and are influenced more by "doing" than by simply seeing or hearing.

In this respect, interactive is more than a marketing medium. It's a hard-working sales medium that eases your sales teams' burden of qualification, education, demonstration, cost justification, and after-sale support. It delivers more knowledgable, ready-to-buy prospects; gives your team more time to trouble-shoot and close.

Interactive media can reach and influence your prospects at home or office, in the reception room or lobby, at point-of-purchase or on the tradeshow floor.

It can be as aggressive as multimedia on a notebook computer, as cost-effective as a software-based response premium, as responsive as an in-depth, transactional web-site.

Interactive is remarkably versatile. Consider:

• Advertising and Direct Mail - Software-based response premiums feature low unit cost but deliver high perceived value. They can boost response rates, reduce cost per qualified lead, help you evaluate the effectiveness of advertising outlets. You can put an in-depth, animated sales story on a multimedia CD ROM for less than $1.00, tip it into a magazine or mail it out. You can drop a 3.5-inch floppy disk in the mail for even less. Either solution costs less but carries your prospect further through the sales cycle than video or expensive four-color print.
  
  
• Sales Promotion - A promotional video game distributed on 3.5-inch floppy or CD ROM can generate excitement, stimulate word-of-mouth buzz, help you penetrate the youth or technical markets, communicate your story in a fresh, persuasive way.
  
  
• Sales Training - A disk/web program can keep the field in top form without the down-time and costs of travel. Sales configuration software helps your sales professionals propose exactly what the prospect needs; assures best sales practices across your organization.
  
  
• Trade Shows - Interactive in the booth can help tell your story and capture leads while your sales professionals are busy making deals. CD ROMs or 3.5-inch disks are low-cost, high-impact giveaways.
  
  
• Sales - Interactive can reduce the cost per qualified lead, the costs of response collateral and qualification, the average number of sales calls per close. A website, CD ROM, or 3.5-inch floppy disk can help presell and qualify your prospects before your sales professional invests in a call. A multimedia presentation on a notebook computer can show and tell what a sales professional can't. A CD ROM or 3.5-inch floppy disk is powerful leave-behind collateral. A web-site delivers cost-effective sales and service support.