Introduction to marketing collateral
Marketing collateral is all printed or digital material that a company uses to promote or communicate its services, products, or brand image. This makes it important for them to understand the tips, tricks, and best practices for creating marketing collateral from scratch.
Robust marketing collateral comes in different formats. These formats include graphics, e-books, videos, newsletters, point-of-sale posters, and brochures, among others. When choosing the best marketing collateral for your company, you should evaluate your goals first.
What do you want the marketing collateral to achieve? Which format is best suited to help you meet your marketing goals? How much will it cost, and what is the Return on Investment (ROI)? These are some of the questions you need to answer to ensure you have chosen the best format.
Before discussing the tips, tricks, and best practices for creating marketing collateral from scratch, let us talk about the different types of marketing collateral.
Types of marketing collateral
Different things dictate the type of marketing collateral your company chooses to use. These include your audience, goals, and budget. You can use different types both in digital and traditional marketing channels.
Here are some of the most popular types of marketing collateral;
- Brochures
These are phablets with your company’s information. They also contain information about your services or products. Ensure that your brochures are catchy, short, and contain visuals. Always avoid long and crowded brochures. To make the process easier, consider using a professionally designed brochure template that can effectively showcase your offerings and captivate your target audience.
- Brand magazines
You can use magazines for content marketing or share your service or product information. You can include product catalogs or create content that attracts your target audience.
- Blog posts
These are the most common types of marketing collateral. Companies use blog posts to not only attract new clients but also retain existing ones. You can share posts on your website or as a guest writer on a third-party website.
- Infographics
If you want a type of marketing collateral that allows you to share content in an easy-to-understand format, choose infographics. They represent your information using visuals.
- eBooks
If you want a long-form way of demonstrating your expertise or educating your customers, ebooks are your best bet. You can even expand your revenue streams using premium ebooks.
Other common types of marketing collateral include displays, direct mail, podcast, logos, reviews, and reports. Social media, sell sheets, case studies, testimonials, webinars, videos, white papers, and websites are also common.
Tips and tricks for creating your marketing collateral from scratch
1. Balance your graphics
The graphical elements of your marketing collateral are very important. They guide your target audience and help keep engagement and attention. According to research, visual content gets over 90% of views compared to other types of content.
However, this does not mean that your marketing collateral should be made up of images only. You need to ensure that your graphics are balanced throughout your content. In addition, make sure that every visual has a purpose in your marketing collateral.
Your images should also relate closely to your brand image and business. They should also be high-quality images, showing what your business stands for. You can use different online tools to create images that stand out from those of your competitors.
BeFunky’s intuitive photo editing tool is one of the best tools for this. Using BeFunky, you can enhance your images, edit them, and add different effects to ensure that they meet your requirements.
2. Get the right style guide
Your marketing collateral is going to represent your business. No matter the different types of marketing collateral you are going to create, ensure that you have consistency. Consider using a free logo maker to brand different aspects of your visual design to reflect the branding of your company.
In addition, all copies need to reflect the voice of your company. Marketing collateral consistency is going to be key to the success of your marketing collateral efforts. This is because your target audience can identify your pieces and associate with them.
However, remaining consistent through the different types of marketing collateral you will use is not a walk in the park. It cannot be achieved without the right style guide. A style guide ensures that you remain on track.
A style guide outlines a couple of things, key among them;
- Taglines
- Fonts
- Graphics
- Color schemes
- Logos
These are the things you need to use when creating marketing collateral. It also ensures that all the essential elements are added to your marketing collateral pieces.
3. Integrate your marketing strategy
If you want to meet the goals of your marketing collateral, your target audience needs to understand what your company offers. Marketing collateral allows you to tell potential and existing customers about your company and its services or products.
Even though the type of marketing collateral you choose to use is essential, messaging is more important. Your target audience will find it easy to relate to your content if it talks about their pain points and challenges.
But how can you comprehend these pain points and challenges? The first and most important thing is to understand your buyers’ journeys and exactly where they are. These stages are crucial in helping you create the perfect marketing message.
Doing this ensures that you are telling your target audience exactly what they want to hear. It also ensures that you are providing solutions to their challenges. This is the only way your marketing collateral is going to be successful.
4. Pay attention to digital assets
Advancements in technology have changed how businesses operate. They have also changed how customers interact with businesses. This has made digital assets and digital marketing strategies very important when creating marketing collateral from scratch.
Assets such as social media platforms and websites are crucial when directing customers to the right places where they can interact with your company. You can add as many resources as you want to these assets to ensure that your customers get everything they need.
There are different types of digital assets you can look at. These assets, together with the purpose and depth of your marketing collateral pieces, can help you understand what you need. It can also help determine whether you need ungated or gated marketing collateral.
5. Create high-quality content
Your marketing collateral content needs to be of the best quality. Modern customers want high-quality content that is easy to understand and relevant to what they want. For instance, if you are creating a blog post, ensure you have added clear and high-quality visuals.
In addition, back up your copy with research from trusted sources. You can add links to these sources to help your target audience understand your materials better. Ensure that you review your content to ensure that it remains relevant.
This does not apply just to blog posts. You should do the same with all other types of marketing collateral. Doing this ensures that your marketing collateral remains relevant for a long time. In addition, it helps you build a solid relationship with your target audience.
Best practices when creating your marketing collateral from scratch
1. Define the objectives, audience, and purpose of your marketing collateral
This is one of the most important best practices when creating your marketing collateral from scratch. It requires you to ensure that you have defined the objectives, audience, and purpose of your marketing collateral.
Unfortunately, most companies do not know how to do this. The best way of defining all these things is by asking yourself a couple of questions.
These include;
- Why are you creating marketing collateral? Do you want to improve an existing product or launch a new one? Is it lead nurturing that you are looking for? Or maybe you want to provide a product’s specifications or run a promotion? Answering these questions will help you understand the purpose of your marketing collateral. Stick by that particular purpose, and your marketing collateral will be successful.
- What should be the course of action after someone has received and gone through your marketing collateral materials? What do you want to achieve with your marketing collateral? What kinds of call-to-action buttons do you need? This is important in helping you define your desired outcome and direct your audience to the outcome.
- Who are you creating the marketing collateral materials for? How will your target audience use the marketing collateral material? How will they even get it? Will you be handing out the materials or maybe mailing them? This is crucial in helping you define your audience.
2. Do not focus your copy on your company but on your customers
This is one of the most common mistakes people commit when creating their marketing collateral from scratch. They do not know that they are creating the materials for their customers, not their companies.
But how do you do that? The easiest way is by assuming that you are the customer. This way, you will easily evaluate ways through which you can appreciate content and materials from a company.
For instance, you might find yourself in a situation where you want to show your customers how a certain product solves their problems. When doing that, ensure that you have provided case studies, success stories from existing customers, and actual outcomes. This way, potential customers will easily understand the benefits of using your product.
3. Formulate your messaging correctly
The first step to formulating your messaging correctly is ensuring you know who you are making the marketing collateral material for. Will you use a particular piece in different market segments?
When evaluating these situations, you also need to remember that there might be multiple decision-makers before a sale is made. Ensure that you understand the needs of your target audience.
In addition, find out about the things they already know about your products or services, as well as your company. You can do this through different forms of research. With that information, you will find it easy to formulate your messages correctly.
4. Your designs should be comprehensive and appealing
As discussed above, there are different types of marketing collateral. The type or format you choose to use is dictated by your goals, budget, and audience. Your messaging might also affect the format you choose to use.
That notwithstanding, one of the most important best practices is to make sure that the format you choose maximizes comprehension and readability. You should keep it streamlined, straightforward, and simple.
In addition, your copy should be broken down into different sections for easier digestion. You can use bullet points, numbering, and subheadings for customers who might be busy and cannot read through dense content.
Supporting images such as infographics are also important. Apart from making your copies appealing, they make it easy for your target audience to understand your marketing collateral materials. Do not forget about statistics, figures, and facts from trusted sources.
5. Access to marketing collateral materials
When creating your marketing collateral from scratch, one of the things you need to think about is access to the materials.
There are two ways of looking at this;
- How your team will access the marketing collateral materials. You should make sure that every team member can access all the materials they might need as soon as they need them.
- Privacy and security of your marketing collateral materials. Even though granting full access to your team is important, you also need to think about privacy and security. If these materials land in the wrong hands, your company might be negatively affected.
So what do you need to do? The best way of handling access is to ensure that you have set solid rules and permissions for every team member. Their permissions should only allow them to access exactly what is needed.
Creating marketing collateral from scratch
Now that you know the tips, tricks, and best practices you should follow when creating your marketing collateral from scratch, how do you start? Creating solid marketing collateral requires skilled personnel, planning, and objectives.
This is the only way for you to ensure that you will create professional and effective materials.
After that, remember the following;
- Your audience comes first.
- Be consistent with your brand.
- Ensure that your decisions are informed by data.
In conclusion, creating your marketing collateral from scratch is not a walk in the park. You might spend a lot of money and resources working on marketing collateral that does not work for your company. However, if you follow the guidelines discussed in this article, you can be assured of creating successful marketing collateral materials for your company.
