What is a Marketing Collateral?
A marketing collateral is a tangible effort to communicate with your target audience. It is bringing your brand vision to life. Marketing collaterals can be produced in various forms or materials and disseminated through different channels. The basic goal of crafting these promotional materials is to create a powerful image for your brand and to build trust among your potential customers.
Marketing collaterals must effectively convey a message with coherence and aesthetic appeal. Here is a guideline to help you create appealing promotions of your service and products in planning your next marketing strategy.
Some of the common marketing collaterals for your brand
There are several types of marketing materials that suit best to your brand identity. From print to digital, make sure that when you do a promotional effort for your products and services, it aligns with your values and objectives. Below are some examples of common marketing collateral today.
- Brochures
- Posters
- Short-form Videos
- Testimonials
- Case Studies
- Flyers
- Infographics
- Presentations
- Emails
To understand more about the types of marketing collaterals, check out LinkedIn‘s elaborations.
A guide to create appealing marketing collaterals
Creating marketing collateral takes several efforts in applying creative thinking and careful decision-making to ensure that all your materials serve its purpose. You wouldn’t want to waste effort and energy by producing low quality materials that fail to capture attention and interest. Marketing collateral must effectively convey a message with coherence and aesthetic appeal. Here is a guideline you should be taking notes of to guarantee you appealing promotions of your service and products in planning your next marketing strategy:
- Always include a compelling Call to Action (CTA)
Audience will have a clear idea of what to do next after reading the content of your marketing collateral. Your goal is to quickly entice the audience to take a specific action, whether wanting them to avail your proposed service or register to product promotions that will spur purchases. Potential customers look for a prominent part of your promotional materials for a quick action to direct them.
Below are the examples of a compelling CTAs you may include on your flyers, brochures, email campaigns, or social media pubmats:
- “Contact us through our provided email to book an appointment for a free consultation!”
- “Register by clicking the link below to join our campaign!”
- “Scan the QR code below to sign up and get discounts on your next purchases!”
Take note that it is best to start your CTA with verbs!
- Be consistent with your brand style
All your marketing materials must have a design that incorporates the style and image of your brand. This is to ensure that your brand gets easily recognized across any marketing materials and channels. Never miss to place your logo, taglines, and contact details. Always follow the right color and font styles in creating a marketing collaterals that will reflect the image of your brand. A consistent and cohesive style avoids confusion to the audience and gives your brand a powerful identity.
- Create unique and appealing visuals
You wouldn’t want your promotional materials to be dull and uninteresting. The purpose of creating marketing collaterals is to effectively communicate what your business does and how it will benefit your potential customers. You should ensure that at one glance, the audience will get intrigued by what your service or product may offer. Visuals are crucial, so always include eye-catching and high-quality graphics and images that evokes interest. It is important to be creative and unique, but never make your design too complex and overly crowded to avoid confusion to the audience.
An effective marketing collateral must maintain balance. You don’t want to give your audience too little to leave them guessing, and you shouldn’t be making them overwhelmed with too many things going on with your marketing materials. Give them the right amount of information and visuals to consume, and at the same time allow a space for them to be curious of what to know more about your brand.
The best tip here is that, you must outsource your creative design team.
- Proofread the content
Of course you want to sound professional to your audience to leave a positive impression. Having clean and comprehensive content is one way to sound professional. This will make potential customers believe that they are dealing with legitimate and decent services. Always check that all your marketing collaterals are free from typos, incorrect spellings, and grammatical errors. Remember that no mistake is too little!
- Go straight to the point
Deliver a clear message to your audience for them to instantly grasp what you are trying to communicate with them. Keep your composition short and concise. No beating around the bush, convince and persuade right away.
- Highlight Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Convince your audience what sets you apart from other brands and why should they patronize your products or services instead of your competitors’. Surely your niche is a competitive one, you wouldn’t want to miss possible sales by failing to emphasize your strength in your marketing collaterals. Show off what you got and display all your brand’s advantages! Here are some of the impactful USP from successful brands:
- Domino’s Pizza: “We GUARANTEE – Fresh hot pizza, delivered in 30 minutes or less or it’s FREE!”
- M&M’s: “Melt in your mouth, not in your hand”
- Starbucks: “Expect more than a coffee.”
- Add interactive elements
Interactive content makes your marketing collaterals interesting and helps gain increased audience engagements especially in digital channels. You may include quizzes, polls, or games to have a deeper understanding of the preferences of your target audience. Some customer preferences align with immersive promotions where they can actively engage rather than passively consume content. This will effectively capture their attention and may lead to higher retention of brand messaging and foster repeat purchases.
- Incorporate testimonials and customer reviews
One way to make your promotion convincing is to present opinions based on lived experiences on your products or services of your past customers. This is to help your brand build its credibility. Your audience may trust customers’ words more than yours, so make sure you incorporate positive reviews to entice them. Below is an examples of testimonials from DefinerTech.
- Emphasize benefits of your services
Customers will seek reasons why they should avail your products, hence the importance to put emphasis on how your services will be advantageous to them. Again, it is important to effectively communicate with customers and quickly elaborate how your products or services fulfill their needs. Customers’ purchasing decisions highly depend on quality, price, and convenience so make sure you highlight these.
- Highlight special offers and discounts
Tailor your messaging by prominently indicating special deals or rewards such as offering coupons, loyalty programs, or discounts to encourage the target audience to reinforce their loyalty with your brand. By feeding them with exclusive offers, they are most likely to feel the sense of urgency to purchase products or services before missing out big discounts. Below are some of the promotional ideas to attract customers and to motivate repeat purchases:
- Buy 1 Take 1
- Free shipping
- Free consultation
- Free trials
- Coupons or Vouchers
- Apply personalized content
Customers will feel special about themselves if they are presented with contents that align with their interest and preferences. Your goal is to ensure your customers have a memorable experience and build a strong attachment to your brand, so it is better to consistently make them feel valued and appreciated by personalizing your marketing content with emotional appeal. For instance, you may indicate their name when sending them email marketing or greet them in their important celebrations and milestones so they feel connected with your messaging.
- Create your marketing collateral with Definer
DefinerTech provides you several options to enhance your brand image through marketing collateral that effectively communicates with your target audience. DefinerTech makes styling in your promotional materials easy and efficient. Creative and innovative graphic designers in DefinerTech await to make magic happen towards achieving your desired goals.
Conclusion
A well-crafted marketing collateral is integral for your brand’s success. You just need to know what effort is right and efficient with your resources and current goals, then you can easily have an idea what tool to use to produce appealing promotions that can influence customer perceptions on your brand. This will eventually result in your business becoming impactful and significantly differentiated from competitors in the market.
Check DefinerTech’s Design Portfolio and start your creative journey today!
