The Importance of Strong, Well-Designed Marketing Collateral

What is ‘marketing collateral’?

As defined by fullstop360.com, marketing collateral is a collection of media compiled by a business for its sales and marketing activities. It encompasses all media material, print and digital, used by a business to communicate its message to its target audience.  This can include blogs, eBooks, brochures, print and digital advertisements, and so on.

Marketing collateral is an important tool for every business, even though different businesses will have a different collection of collateral to use that best fits their needs.

Using Marketing Collateral to Showcase Your Business

Marketing collateral should be made strategically to help showcase a business. It will be important to know your business’s strategic plan, values, and end goal to make sure you get the most out of your collateral. The collection of collateral should work well together, no matter if it is print or digital. It also should be easily identifiable to your audience, with a consistent, branded look.

Well-designed and strategically planned marketing collateral will help a business by telling their story, connecting with their target audience, and showing your company’s value. In turn this can help make sales (completing the sales process) or give potential customers something to remember.

Consumers will often go through phases when viewing marketing materials, starting with the consideration phase. When a consumer is in this phase, the collateral will educate the consumer so they can make an informed decision/purchase when they reach the decision phase.

Consistency is Key

To help build loyalty around your brand so consumers will remember you, a consistent brand is of utmost importance. Consistency of your marketing materials can impact your overall company growth, helping to increase revenue by 23%.

Even as you create collateral across multiple platforms, you’ll want to make sure messaging is consistent across all platforms, from print to digital, to avoid customer confusion. Following formal branding will help guide this and you’ll also want to make sure all your call to actions (CTAs) point in the same direction.

Creating Your Marketing Collateral

Your branding and target audience will help guide your overall aesthetic for your marketing collateral, you’ll want to make sure your collateral is overall simple, yet high quality, and will capture attention. Two pieces to focus on across all channels are your call to action (CTA) and answering the WHY.

What is the WHY?

The why will answer all the customers’ questions as to why they should purchase or work with you. Think about your target market and what the problems they are facing might be when they research your company. Will you save them money? Will your product solve their problem? Why should they choose you over the competitor down the street?

A well-established brand will already be on track to answer your audience’s WHY. Your branding should reflect the research to know what colors work well with messaging, what tone of voice to use, and more. Answering the WHY will help a customer to feel confident with purchasing or working with your company.

One of the most important pieces for marketing collateral is getting your consumer to act.  

You need a clear and easy to navigate CTA, which is a prompt which tells the user to take some specified action such as click a button or visit a website.  A CTA can vary based on the medium, such as a button on a digital advertisement versus a short URL listed on a print advertisement — but remember, these should all point to the same place for the marketing campaign!

Popular Collateral

Remember, you’ll want to choose collateral that works for your audience. If your target audience doesn’t use computers regularly, a blog may not be the way to go. Here are some examples of popular channels for marketing collateral.

• Blogs: Blog posts are great ways to provide your prospects with a lot of value. Don’t concentrate on selling in a blog post. Instead, focus on solving problems and helping your prospects.
• Infographics: Infographics help to visually simplify the information you want to share with clear icons, charts, graphs, and illustrations. Minimal text is used to get the message across in a memorable and engaging way.
• Landing pages:  Landing Pages may be specific to your marketing campaign and focused on delivering the message you’ve shared across all the other channels. Landing pages are simple versions of your website with less links and distractions to help complete the sales process.
• Free eBooks or guides: Everyone loves to get something free! These books or guides should provide educational, actionable, and useful information. Best practice is to have consumers provide name and email to receive the free download, so you’ll be collecting leads!
• Video: Unless you are doing longer/informational/tutorial videos your videos should be quick. Attention spans are short, but a simple explainer video can help inform and even show how your product or service works.
• eNewsletters: Sent via email on a regular basis, eNewsletters are a great way to stay top-of-mind with your subscribed recipients. You won’t want people unsubscribing left and right, so be sure to include valuable information and news.
• Direct Mail: Not as popular as it once was, but it still isn’t dead! Creating direct mail may be hard, as it needs to truly capture someone’s attention before they toss it in the trash. Direct mail is a great opportunity to reinforce other marketing collateral your audience may be seeing. Best practice is to track it!  Create a unique code for a sale to see how many people responded to the mailer.