Marketing Collateral includes everything from PPTs, business proposals, corporate presentations, flyers, billboards, brochures, and more. It covers anything that can be communicative about your brand or a pitch you wish to present to your customers.
In the olden days people depended on hardcopies and printed materials such as pamphlets and flyers, however, gone are the traditional ways of branding and marketing. New technology has given rise to a digital presence of visuals and content to draw in customers. This new technology not just works wonders to influence customers but also to impact decision-making with internal communications between teams, stakeholder decisions, and company mergers to name a few.
Making impactful presentations using visual and content slides and advertisements works well if it is the right pitch of ingredients that allows it to resonate with the viewer. The secret is that marketing collateral should have methodology behind it.
What is the purpose of Developing Marketing Collateral?
Your marketing collateral serves different purposes for your various audience segments, but it collectively helps to support your marketing and sales efforts. You might focus on building awareness if your audience is figuring out the challenges they are facing. If they know about your brand but are unsure about whether they should start using your product or service, you might create something that’s focused on converting them into qualified leads.
Most marketing collateral contains at least one call to action. It may be something as simple as asking the audience to check out the company’s website or a more specific request to check out a blog post. Regardless, your collateral should work together to draw prospective customers through the buyer’s journey and eventually help them make a decision.
What kind of collateral should you use?
Different collateral types serve different purposes and largely depend on how far along your prospects are in the marketing funnel. Some prospective customers might be ready to commit to your product while others are just exploring options. It’s vital for you to address each group with different collateral that is appropriate to where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Tracking marketing collateral
A big challenge for many companies is tracking, measuring, and optimizing their marketing collateral. This is especially true when marketers use PDFs or other “static” formats. While you can see how many people download a PDF, you can’t measure how much of it is read, nor which specific pages were read. Furthermore, there is no way to track PDF distribution. Once your collateral is out there, it can be forwarded freely to others even after its information is out of date and you have no way to track its circulation. That’s why many progressive companies have switched to online marketing collateral that can be tracked. To know more about how marketing collateral and do your company good email us at info@strattonblue.com for a free discussion.
