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Marketing Collateral is a great way to attract customers and put out a brand’s message. These are materials that you should use to improve your marketing efforts. Things like business cards and brochures can impress your target audience, and therefore, you must include them in your marketing strategy. They can markedly affect your campaign’s effectiveness. Good marketing collateral will help you reach out to different kinds of target audiences and increase your publicity. In addition to your existing audience, you can generate leads and engage new customers who are likely to buy your new product.
Understanding what Marketing Collateral is
Marketing collateral is nothing but the materials a business uses to promote its products, services, or brand image in general. It can be a collection of brochures, business cards, social media graphics, flyers, presentations, etc. Marketing collaterals are inclusive of both print and digital assets and are used to support sales. They are created for generating interest by conveying key messages and achieving desired results from the target audience. Having marketing collateral ready for every stage of your campaign journey helps to drive target consumers into making a purchase.
Types of Marketing Collateral
Today, there are nearly 30 types of marketing collateral that are good for marketing to the target audience and growing a business. A marketing campaign combining different types of marketing collateral is difficult to fail. Digital marketing and traditional marketing both can benefit from using marketing collateral. Decide which collaterals will be the ideal tools for your brand after carefully considering your goal, audience, and budget. Some of the well-known and successful marketing collaterals are mentioned here.
- Brochures – Great for providing in-depth information about any service, product, or event. These are informative documents that you can use to give an overview of the features and benefits of your offerings.
- Business Cards – These compact cards are a valuable networking tool that impresses prospective customers and future partners. Your card should carry a brief introduction to your business and your contact details.
- Flyers – Helpful to capture attention and promote an event, offer, or discount. Flyers are single-page documents.
- Product Catalogs – These are comprehensive guides that can showcase all your services and products.
- Case Studies – Informative and detailed documents for highlighting the results of your successful projects.
- Presentation Decks – Presentations are immensely helpful for webinars, sales pitches, and industry conferences.
- White Papers – Authoritative reports for exploring problem-solving solutions, industry trends, and research.
- Social Media Graphics – Excellent for engaging audiences on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
- Website Landing Pages – These are optimized web pages developed for a specific product or marketing campaign
The Need for Marketing Collateral: When to Use it
Interestingly, a customer goes through a whole process before buying something, which is known as the ‘buyer’s journey’. It consists of exploration, assessment, comparison, decision, and finally the purchase of a product or a service. Different marketing collaterals are best suited for each stage of a buyer’s journey:
Awareness Stage
This is the stage where customers are facing a challenge but lack information on how to combat it. Here, your job is to make them believe that you understand their challenges. To do that, you must create relatable collateral.
The marketing collateral that you create at this stage must be educational for your potential customers. When you successfully describe their challenges, they will also distinctly communicate what they need, and make them look for solutions. Examples of suitable collaterals for the Awareness Stage are press releases, infographics, long-form blogs, eBooks, landing pages, event magazines, etc.
Consideration Stage
At this stage, the customer compares the different solutions that they have found that can resolve their challenges. They look at the advantages and disadvantages of all the options at hand. Therefore, your marketing collateral now should aim to guide the customer towards making an informed buy. The marketing collateral used at the Consideration Stage helps target customers decide by letting them experience a service or product. Examples of suitable collateral for this stage are case studies, testimonials, white pages, brand stories, corporate brochures, product catalogs, etc.
Decision Stage
This is the final stage signaling that a customer has narrowed to a few selected options and the final selection is left. They are yet to decide which one out of the remaining few choices they would go for. Therefore, the purpose of your marketing collateral should reinforce your product value proposition. This is crucial for convincing buyers to buy from you. Examples of marketing collateral to use now are product pages, cart abandonment emails, proposals & presentations, etc.
Conclusion
You not only need to invest money but also enough time and energy into creating power-packed marketing collateral. If you can create and utilize marketing collateral accurately, it is going to be an asset that boosts your entire business. Therefore, create marketing collateral by using consistent branding elements, tailoring collateral for your specific audience, and creating well-designed and visually engaging collateral. Don’t forget to add a CTA and measure its performance.