by Trey Ryder

In addition to having an information packet you can mail or e-mail to prospects, often, the most effective way to communicate with potential clients is in your own voice. This is especially true if your prospects are busy and may not have time to attend your seminar. (For convenience, I'll refer to CDs, but I also intend that term to include DVDs, when it applies.)

How You and Your Prospect Benefit

1. Good use of time. Your prospects can make profitable use of their time by listening to your CD in the car while driving to and from work. And they can take your CD with them on a business trip.

2. Feels like a meeting. Listening to your voice feels to your prospect like they're attending your seminar or meeting with you in person.

3. Easier to listen than read. Prospects who prefer listening to reading will be much happier with a recording. And the happier prospects are when they receive your message, the more open they are to your comments and suggestions.

4. Convenience. Your prospects can listen anytime they wish, rather than having to attend a seminar at a specific time and place.

5. Control. In an audio or video format, you control the sequence in which you present your information. But in a printed format, your prospects can skip around your materials and may not digest your message in the most compelling order.

6. Low cost. You can reproduce CDs at a surprisingly low cost, often $1.50 or less per CD. If you want a DVD, costs go up so you'll need to get bids. When you include video, people can no longer listen in their cars. But they can play your CD or DVD in their laptop while on a business trip.

7. Low inventory. To get a decent price on printing, you usually have to order a large number of books. But with CDs, you can order as few as 10 or 20 sets at very low cost per unit. This means you have almost no money tied up in inventory.

What You Should Say

Content for your CD is no different from any other competent marketing message. If you already present a compelling seminar, you could simply record the seminar and distribute the CD to prospects. Or you could write a script, dictate it onto tape or into your computer, and then transfer it to a CD.

To create a compelling message, you need to (1) identify your prospect's problem, (2) prove it exists, (3) identify one or more solutions, (4) prove the solution works, and (5) build yourself into the solution so your prospect hires you and not a competitor.

Also, make sure the CD shows your phone number, e-mail address and web address so your prospect can contact you with questions or to request an appointment.

How to Create

If you wish, you can record your message in a sound studio. Or you can get recording software and a microphone and record it your office. From that original audio file, your sound engineer can format it for CDs. Also, if you have outside noises on your original, often, a good sound person can remove those.

You can choose from a variety of CD holders and mailers, depending on how you want your CDs to look. You've probably bought CDs in different types of containers.

Sell or Give Away

You could use your recorded message as a freebie that you give prospects. For example, for many years I offered a fr#ee tape of my Education-Based Marketing seminar. I recorded a 72-minute seminar onto a single audio tape, which was cheap to mail in a padded envelope.

Or, you could use your CDs as a profit center and sell them, at least to recoup your costs. It all depends on the level of interest in your subject and how many tapes you expect to produce and distribute.

Who Does the Work

After you make the original audio file, (if you record it yourself), you simply find a sound engineer to edit and duplicate message onto CD. You might check with your bar association to see whom they hire to record CLE programs.

Summary

CDs and DVDs can easily carry your marketing message into places you might never get invited. If your prospects are busy, hard to reach, or travel a lot, offering a CD might be the most efficient way to deliver your marketing message.

And if you want to speak with an excellent sound man, the sound engineer I use is D.R. Wilke, whose contact information appears above.

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© Trey Ryder

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