Creating Effective Marketing Collateral: Tips and Tricks

Whether you are launching a new business or want to grow an existing one, creating effective marketing collateral is an important action for a business. Its purpose is to effectively promote a brand, build brand loyalty, and familiarize the intended audience about the products and services offered. It’s a big job that can’t be done on a whim. However, consistently implementing a few key tips and tricks will make the job manageable and help achieve maximum results.

Create a Style Guide

Regardless of the size of a business, a style guide is a key first step to creating effective marketing collateral. A style guide is a document that outlines how a business presents itself to the world. It encapsulates the heart and soul of a brand – its mission, vision, and values – and how they will be portrayed in the marketplace. 

A detailed style guide shapes brand identity and ensures accuracy and consistency across marketing collateral. It further establishes and maintains a business as credible, reliable and trustworthy. While prescriptive, a style guide should strike a balance of standardizations and mandates without squashing sparks of creativity from marketers.  

For a style guide to effectively serve its purpose, it should be shared with employees, agencies and business partners who create marketing collateral for your business. A style guide should also be reviewed and updated as necessary, with changes communicated clearly and timely to those using it.

Less is More

It’s tempting to get caught up in fine details when creating marketing collateral, but usually less is more. The impact of effective marketing collateral is maximized most often with a minimalistic design. Limit the number of images, fonts and colors used on marketing collateral (as your style guide should detail). A focused design will help the most important information stand out to inspire and motivate the audience to answer the call-to-action (CTA) the marketing collateral is guiding them to take. Following the less is more tip for marketing collateral means your CTA will jump out to the audience, and they can take swift action.

Use Graphics Wisely

How to use graphics is something that should be defined in a style guide. It’s up to a business to determine how it wants to use graphics, and it will vary depending on the marketing piece, but it’s always important to design with the audience in mind.

Graphics should be as high quality as the budget allows and align with the reputation and professionalism you want to portray to the audience. If the graphics aren’t yours, secure the rights to use them to avoid copyright infringement.

Avoid Jargon and Big Words

While effective marketing collateral is intended to “show off” your business, it should do so in a customer-centric manner that includes words the audience can quickly and easily understand. If technical terms are necessary to deliver the message, make sure the meaning of such terms is explained in the marketing by including a few clarifying words or graphics.

Provide Multiple Contact Options

Whether it’s a business card, a special event invite, a social media post or some other marketing tactic, effective marketing collateral contains more than one way for a customer to get in contact. This means, most often, it will be appropriate to include all the ways to get in touch with you and/or your business:

• Phone Number
• Email Address
• Physical Address
• Website
• Social Media Channels

Making contact with you or your business must be easy for the customer. Since “easy” is different for everyone, the more contact options you can provide, the more successful your marketing efforts will be.  

There is a lot to consider when creating effective marketing collateral. If you don’t have a marketing background or simply don’t have the time to handle marketing for your business, Fuhrman Creative, an agency for marketing in Gettysburg, PA, can help. Contact Fuhrman Creative to learn more.