Tag: Communications

What Every Company Needs To Know About Business VoIP And Unified Communications

A business voip solution is an alternative to a traditional switched-voice service. Instead of using dedicated trunks between PBXs, you can share the bandwidth with your data services, making better use of the available capacity. Also, in today’s business world the availability of a plethora of Unified Communications features within the VoIP ecosystem is a huge boon to business communications at all levels.

No matter which direction your business goes with a business VoIP solution… the key is understanding how you communicate and what you want to achieve.

The search for a business VoIP solution, or more appropriately Voice Over Internet Protocol, can confuse any business. There are many flavors of VoIP… and many pros and cons… that you need to be aware of when considering which service to choose. The goal of this article is to help you navigate through the technospeak so that you can make an informed decision that will save you time and money.

BUSINESS VOIP

The first thing you need to know about business VoIP Service is that it can replace your local phone company. Whether you have just one POTS (plain old telephone service) line… or a voice T1 (24 bundled dedicated lines)… a business VoIP solution is meant to replace your phone company. Instead of using your local phone company’s voice connection, VoIP will digitize your voice signal and send it over an internet connection.

In order for your voice to transmit digitally through the internet, you need to be sure you have enough bandwidth to facilitate the communication link. To optimize the quality of your business connection we recommend a minimum of a T1 Line (preferably ethernet fiber depending on the size of your enterprise) – a dedicated link directly to the internet that is guaranteed to be up over 99.999% of the time. Since you will be entrusting all of your business voice communication to this technology, your connection to the internet becomes the critical link. You don’t want to risk a company-wide phone outage to save a few hundred dollars on your bandwidth connection. So always opt for at least a T1 Line (preferably ethernet fiber) over DSL. It just makes business sense.

If you need assistance finding and provisioning bandwidth… we have developed software that will allow you to generate a circuit price in just seconds. You can request a bandwidth quote (as well as quotes for Business VoIP solutions) by simply asking at Business-VoIP-Solution.Com. Of course the quotes are free and no obligation. NOTE:… all circuits acquired through this resource also include FREE independent circuit monitoring.

Once you have your high-speed internet connection taken care of, it’s time to select a Business VoIP Service provider – the company that will actually route your digitized voice signal to a real telephone on the other end. In essence, your VoIP carrier will become your long distance carrier. The service providers we work with offer unlimited telephone calls to the United States and Canada, all for one fixed price. For companies who average more than $40 in local and long distance usage per employee, VoIP is well worth the initial investment. In some cases there are also very cost effective options for international calling also {just ask if you’re interested}.

There are likewise other hidden benefits of Business VoIP service, the main benefit being the reduced bandwidth required to conduct a regular telephone conversation. Since a VoIP transmission only requires 32KB of bandwidth, you can fix up to 24 ‘VoIP lines’ on a Data T1, and still have 768KB left over for dedicated high-speed internet access! This means that you can migrate your entire phone system on to your existing T1 and still have half of the bandwidth allocated for data.

Another benefit of VoIP lies in the prioritization of the digitized voice signals that are generated when you speak. In the event no one is talking, the VoIP line does not transmit any data. This allows your T1 Line to dynamically allocate bandwidth as it is needed, instead of permanently blocking out an entire channel of data.

Business VOIP means intelligent communications. Whether it is toll-bypass call routing, unified communications (integrated phone, email, IM, etc), or a specific application on the phone itself, the power of IPT is in the applications. In fact, the robust capabilities and functionality of the unified communications applications available are a real selling point in adopting Business VoIP.

In a highly mobile sales organization “find me follow me” functionality may be priceless. In an organization where deadlines have to be met, point and click call control settings may be crucial. Other organizations may benefit with high level call log metrics to track billable time. Enabling true mobility across your work force, enhancing video/conferencing activity, and easy use when traveling globally are also very attractive attributes to businesses.

With so many features available on most platforms… rarely do you see every user applying the same controls and features. It’s the freedom to control communication at the single user level that makes VoIP a great business solution. Additionally, the marriage of Business VoIp technology and Unified Communications features opens up a world of unlimited possibilities and applications for today’s business communications.

Why Integrated Marketing Communications is Essential for Small Businesses

How can Integrated Marketing Communications help me, the small business owner?

Integrated Marketing Communication is essential to small business owners because they, even more so than large corporations can not afford to misspend or waste money on a single isolated marketing effort.

For instance, as a small business owner, it may be tempting to focus on one aspect of marketing – a new website, a direct mail campaign, radio ads or as a manufacturer, simply letting your partners market for you. However, what happens if that one piece of marketing doesn’t work?

ANSWER: Your entire marketing effort fails.

Instead, wouldn’t it be great to have an integrated marketing plan that takes the best parts of online marketing such as websites, email newsletters, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising and use that to make your traditional, offline efforts such as direct mail, advertising and public relations even more effective.

For instance, this may be as simple as making sure that your website has the same key words as your radio advertising and that your banners at the little league games also have the same message. To internalize a message, a person must be exposed to it several times. If you hit them three times with three different messages it is nearly the same as being exposed only once. Even worse, it could be confusing and disorienting, resulting in a negative experience with your brand.

Integrated Marketing Communications addresses this issue by creating a plan with a consistent message and then delivering it through as many media as possible, online and offline.

What are the components of an integrated marketing plan?

An Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) plan should draw from all communications disciplines available, including online, offline, and interpersonal.

Online marketing channels include any e-marketing campaigns or programs, from search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, affiliate, email, banner to latest web related channels for webinar, blog, RSS, podcast, and Internet TV. Offline marketing channels are traditional print (newspaper, magazine), mail order, public relation, billboard, radio, and television. Interpersonal marketing includes participating in community groups, networking organizations, your handshake, how you dress, and even how you answer the phone or return calls.

While not every communication discipline needs to be included for each campaign, it is important for any integrated marketing practitioner to be well versed in the various components so that he or she can select the ones most appropriate for a specific client’s budget and demands.

Is it better to go with an agency, or shop for individual services myself?

While both have benefits, an agency can be a benefit if you don’t already have a network of trusted service providers including printers, promotional products companies, tradeshow planners etc. who are familiar with your business. Often times, an agency can get things done for a client faster, more efficiantly and with better quality for the same or lower price. Plus, as a business owner you have to factor in the time you may spend shopping for the best price and reading reviews to make sure that the best price doesn’t give you the worst services.

However, the cost of each component shouldn’t be your primary concern when evaluating an integrated marketing plan. Instead, look at the expense and benefits of the entire plan working together. For instance, a website might cost $2,000 to build and then you might spend $10,000 in pay-per-click advertising over the next year, but if the content on the website doesn’t match the message on your direct mail, or your customer service people aren’t able to answer questions about the website then you wasted a lot of money.

Instead, don’t look at the website as a single entity. Make sure that it is perfectly integrated into your marketing strategy:

* Promote it at all opportunities. This includes not just pay-per-click ads, but also on business cards, in radio ads, even place a sticker on your products letting customers know they can download copies of the product manuals there, and print it on your receipts telling customers to download coupons on the website.

* Develop an email newsletter to offer your customers and prospective customers news and information they can use – not just a brochure to sell your products.

* Create a blog and allow people to subscribe to it. This will build trust and familiarity between your customers and your company. Don’t limit blog posts to just the president, sometimes a post from a project manager or even the receptionist can keep the blog interesting and attention grabbing.

* Create a contest – but make sure the message is consistent with your integrated marketing strategy. Have people visit your website to enter.

* If you run an advertisement promoting a specific service, make sure that that your customers can find more information about it quickly and easily. Perhaps even put a graphic at the top of your page saying “Attention 99.5 listeners, Click Here to Learn More about Gutter Cleaning”

Those are just some examples for how you can integrate your marketing plan and maximize the initial investment you made by building a website.

Isn’t an an integrated marketing communication just like any other marketing plan?

A marketing plan can be just a marketing plan for a website, or a marketing plan for an advertising campaign, but an Integrated Marketing Communications plan involves all aspects of marketing, across the entire company. This means that you are integrated all aspects of the company into a single cohesive plan.

After all you could have a great website marketing plan, an awesome advertising campaign and an award winning PR agency, but if a customer reads a press release or hears your ad and decides to visit your website where he can’t find more info about your PR or advertising message what’s the point of spending the money in the first place?

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