How To Create Great Marketing Material For Your Small Business
Marketing collateral drives your business. It should familiarize customers with your products, services and the goals that your company has while simultaneously promoting these things.
Effective marketing collateral can mean the difference between a near-sale and a loyal customer for life. Here are 10 tips for creating market collateral or revising the content you already have so that it performs better.
Design Tip 1: Make Marketing Collateral a Main Focus of Your Marketing Strategy
The content you use for marketing collateral needs to be outlined before you begin your next big marketing campaign. It will help you focus your marketing more effectively by preventing you from losing focus on the themes and types of content you want to promote.
For example, a business focusing on printed brochures for a vacation should take note of what their selling points are. This will allow them to reiterate these points with different collateral, such as the content that they use on their website.
Design Tip 2: Create a Style Guide
A style guide is another way of sorting out the various elements that make up your collateral. It allows you to outline your theme elements, which includes your logo and any key graphics, your fronts, key phrases and brand-oriented words.
It also allows you to develop a focus for your content as you create it. This lets you keep your audience in mind, which in turn allows your marketing collateral to be that much more effective with your target demographics.
Design Tip 3: Revise Your Current Materials
Regardless of what you might think, your current marketing materials have certain strong points. The simple elimination of the weak points that work to dissuade readers should be your goal, rather than revising and creating entirely new content from scratch.
Examine your current materials. Do they have a consistent theme? Do they talk to the right audience? Do they use the correct words and graphics? Would a different arrangement of the elements create a stronger dialogue with your potential customers?
Design Tip 4: Step Through the Process of How Your Materials Will be Viewed
Creating effective marketing materials requires that you understand the thought process your potential customers go through when they view your content. Things like how your content flows, what attracts a viewer’s sight and how quickly your content can be read all work towards successfully selling your goods or services to a customer.
If you want to take this one step further, then look for people who fit within your target demographic. Conduct studies to see how your content is viewed by a real person to eliminate the guesswork.
Design Tip 5: Develop Slightly Different Variations of Your Logos
Each type of collateral has a different intended audience, which means that each type of collateral has a slightly different purpose. Your logo should stay relatively consistent across these pieces, but you should develop alternative logos that fit the best on certain pieces of collateral.
For example, you might need a rectangular logo that fits in line with on an envelope or in the header of a letter. If you have a style guide set in place, then making these alternate and more effective versions of your business’s logo will be easier.
Design Tip 6: Use Quality Base Materials
The type of paper you use, how quickly your website loads and even the quality of your recorded video all contribute to how well your audiences respond to your marketing collateral. You want your company to appear professional and reputable, which means that you need to have the highest quality paper and printing that is economically feasible.
If this seems too expensive to maintain in the short term, then consider saving costs by taking advantage of things like the economics of scale by printing your materials in bulk.
Design Tip 7: Use the Correct Amount of Graphics
Graphics can help dictate the flow of your content, and keep the attention of your audience on your materials. There is a certain balance of graphics that needs to be observed in order to effectively do this.
For example, the amount of graphics that a plumber or roof repair business might need differs from the amount that a technical business like IT services might need. The right amount depends on what your audience wants.
Design Tip 8: Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
A professional graphic designer or the eyes of a veteran marketing firm can be helpful in determining how effective the use of graphics and overall layout of your materials are. Don’t be afraid to hire their help, as you can save money and increase your business’s profits in the short run with material that works a the start.
Design Tip 9: Integrate Physical with Digital Collateral
Businesses tend to forget that it can be a good idea to blur the line between physical and digital marketing collateral. Things like web addresses and QR codes printed on physical media can help customers access your business’s digital side, which in turn gives another opportunity for them to purchase from you.
Design Tip 10: Make Sharing Easy
Referrals, social media promotion and anything else that you can think of to trick your audience into promoting your business for you will expand your marketing efforts. You’ll reach a wider audience than you did before, which translates into more opportunities to make sales.
Make it easy and rewarding for your target demographics to share your marketing collateral with other people.
