5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Collateral Marketing Strategy
In the past, businesses could generally get away with the ‘if you build it, they will come’ approach when advertising their products and services. In other words, build a product, put it on a website, toss up an ad about it, and wait for people to come. Unfortunately, this model no longer works effectively, especially considering the shift in consumer marketing towards a more personalized experience. Customers want to be engaged at every level of their journey; they want to be heard, and they especially don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to.
It’s not that consumers hate promotional material – they just see a lot of it. In an article from LinkedIn, the number of ads consumers are exposed to per day has reportedly risen to upwards of 5,000. That’s a huge amount of information for customers to sort through in order to find information related to your products and services. Luckily, we know that direct advertising through print and digital media isn’t the only way to reach an audience and there are a multitude of platforms, including social media, to help communicate effective brand messages that can get consumers on board with what you’re selling.
Essentially anything you distribute on or offline is considered marketing collateral. This can include everything from catalogues and brochures about your products, to blog posts, eBooks, personalized emails and newsletters. You can even consider white papers and reports to be marketing collateral when the copy includes a relevant call to action for the consumer.
The type of collateral to introduce or revamp depends largely on different aspects of your customer’s journey. Someone who’s in a decision stage probably isn’t as interested in your eBooks or blog posts; they’re looking for personalized content like newsletters or engagement emails and promotional offers that keep them loyal to your business. Someone in a consideration stage is likely looking for successes from your case studies and the human element of brand stories to help them feel like they can trust you. Someone who is meeting your brand for the first time (at a trade show, perhaps) will find flyers and brochures that are designed to introduce the who, what, where, how and why of your brand most useful.
Carefully consider your unique audience groups, do some fresh market research, and think about what information would be most valuable to each segment in their stage of the journey. That’s also where you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t as the year progresses.
So how can you really leverage your marketing collateral to work better for you in 2020? Here are some key tips to keep in mind.
How to Leverage Your Collateral Marketing Strategy
Create collateral specifically for those different customer segments mentioned above and don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas. If you haven’t developed a brochure or magazine before, who would you gear it towards and how would it be helpful for them? Make it meaningful to that group and decide how you will promote it before you create it.
Revive old content. What’s worked with your past marketing collateral? How can you reinvent it? Add an eye-catching visual or updated stat to make it standout and a piece of vital information that will potentially draw consumers further into your sales cycle.
Design your collateral with a uniform look. Have you ever received multiple promotional materials from the same company, and everything looks different? Keep the same template, font, colour schemes, logos and other visuals on every piece you produce to avoid confusing your consumers. This goes for brand messaging as well.
Consider implementing interactive, visual content which is predicted to be a hot commodity this year. This includes more infographics, videos, podcasts, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
Make everything easy to share, especially videos! According to SocialMediaToday, 54% of consumers are demanding more video content and 92% of mobile users share videos with others. Maximize your audience’s ability to share content with buttons and directions to make it simple for them to WANT to spread the word.