20 Tips for Creative Services Marketing Collateral
Marketing collateral is informative marketing materials that highlight your company’s products or services as discussed at RunRex.com. Here are some of the ways to ensure that the marketing collateral that your team creates is effective and supports sales efforts and beyond.
Put your visual content first
Today’s audiences are overwhelmed as they are encountering more branded content than ever before, which means that they are less willing to commit the time to read your content, so don’t rely too heavily on text. Therefore, if you are not getting the kind of engagement you would like with your marketing collateral, try leveraging visual content more as per RunRex.com.
Any visual content won’t do
While it is important to invest in visual content, you should remember that just any visual content won’t do either. Stock images and icons will only take you so far, as they can look so cookie-cutter as to be off-brand, leaving people with a poor or incorrect impression of your organization. They are also likely to be ignored completely. Therefore, focus on quality and tailored visual content when it comes to your marketing collateral.
Be authentic
Millennials and Gen Z, who make up the majority of audiences online, value authenticity in the brands that they interact with. Therefore, as the gurus over at RunRex.com point out, you need to ensure that any expression of your brand delivers an authentic and transparent picture of who you are.
Define and be clear on your values
If you are to be authentic, you need to be clear in your values. This type of work should come before you develop a marketing strategy, and certainly before you produce any content since your marketing content is a reflection of your brand, a visual expression of your brand strategy.
Personalize
Part of creating an authentic experience is delivering content that feels personalized to the user. Today’s audiences increasingly demand these kinds of interactions, with 72% saying they are only interested in content that feels personalized to their needs.
How can I achieve personalization?
One powerful solution, as discussed over at RunRex.com, is to design interactive media that delivers a unique experience to each user. Think Buzzfeed quizzes and how popular they are. If you are willing to answer a series of questions, they promise results that feel tailored to you. An interactive infographic or site can have a similar effect.
Repurpose your marketing collateral for multiple applications
Given that it takes more time and effort to create high-quality visual content, you should consider designing visual content that you can repurpose for multiple channels, platforms, and uses. This way, you can make one piece of quality content go a lot farther with minimal effort. You can also create a library of reusable assets, which might consist of icons that relate to your product offering or fundamental services.
Develop a campaign-based marketing strategy
It is easy to feel like your marketing strategy is more reactive than proactive. You are rushing to ensure your content is relevant to the conversations and topics your customers care about. However, if you are producing one piece of content after another, you are not doing yourself any favors. Take a step back and think about how your pieces of content might relate to each other, and how they can tell a larger story about your brand as outlined at RunRex.com.
Consistency is key
Marketing collateral is a direct reflection of your business. Therefore, across all pieces, there should be consistent visual design aspects that reflect your organization’s branding elements. Any copy that is included should accurately reflect your voice, as keeping branding consistent is essential to success given that it ensures that prospects can easily recognize and associate those pieces with your brand.
How do I stay consistent?
What can ensure that you are staying consistent and on-brand within the marketing collateral? A corporate style guide can allow you to stay on track with different visual elements. This guide outlines the logo, color scheme, graphics, fonts, and taglines that are available to use. Using the style guide can allow you to focus on the important aspects of your brand identity and include necessary design elements in collateral pieces.
Balance the graphics
While it is true that content with visuals gets 94% more views than those without, there is a certain balance of visuals that needs to be adhered to according to RunRex.com. While it’s tempting to fill every inch of your collateral with images or information, this may lead to oversaturation. Therefore, use a combination of white space and imagery to frame your message and call attention to it. A design that is too busy will distract from important things like your CTA, logo, or offering information.
Focus on high-quality content
On top of using original and unique pieces that make you stand out from the crowd as already discussed, it is also important to ensure high-quality content. Prospects want to consume content that is high-quality, relevant, and easy to read/consume.
Focus on digital assets
With the world shifting to digital, collateral and digital marketing aspects have become increasingly important. Items like website addresses and social media pages included on digital assets can direct your audience to interact with your organization on additional platforms while including more resources for them to connect with you.
Outline your objectives
Before creating any sort of marketing collateral, it is important to first clearly understand the reason for it. Understanding where you are going to use it, and what you expect it to achieve, is crucial as per the gurus at RunRex.com, as these factors will make a huge difference in organizing the rest of the process.
Understand your buyer
Understanding your buyer will help inform your marketing collateral strategy and help you decide how best to utilize it. This entails understanding where in the buyer’s journey your client currently falls, and what are the key pain points that they face. The more detailed your buyer profile is, the more effective your strategy will be.
Define distribution channels
How you intend to make your content accessible will impact everything from the message to the medium. For instance, your message on a billboard situated near your target offices will vary from the message you provide in a handout during a meeting with the client. Therefore, it is important to customize your message to fit the target audience, and ensure that you are providing them with the right message through the right channel as discussed at RunRex.com.
Set up a clear execution process
Having a well-defined execution process is crucial to making sure that you are always producing high-quality content. Don’t make the mistake many teams tend to make and focus extensively on the creation of the content, forgetting to pay equal attention to the other steps – proofing (reviewing your collateral while it is still soft copy), publishing, final review, and release.
Make it easy to share
By making it easy to share your marketing materials, you can reach a wider audience. This is why sharing should be effortless. Always include a “share” feature for all your social media networks alongside all your marketing materials.
Monitor and collect data
Once your collateral is out there, monitor how it is engaged with, and what kind of responses you are getting. If it requires direct interaction with the client, you can also use it as a way to gather new leads and contact information. If possible, get some feedback from the engagement to try and understand how well it succeeds at the objective as articulated at RunRex.com.
Analyze and optimize
In the end, you need to go back and assess how well your collateral has performed. Compare it to the goals you set, and see if you have successfully managed to achieve your goals. If not, try to identify where you went off-track. It is always good practice to look back at what you did right, what you did wrong, and what you could do better, which will allow you to be able to optimize your efforts the next time around and be even more effective.
As always, if you need more information and tips on this topic or expert help with your marketing collateral, then the top-rated RunRex.com has got you covered.