Marketing collateral and the sales process need to go hand in hand. It’s one of the most important tools a business can have in its tool belt, when selling its products and services. As such, support the sales team by fully equipping them with an array of high impact marketing collateral to wow your prospective customers.

By having this critical information at their fingertips, your sales team will have valuable tools to utilize, at precisely the right time and with the right message, throughout the lengthy and arduous sales process—whether it’s at the initial meeting, during a touchpoint or to close the sale.

However, marketing knowing what the sales team needs is a challenge. According to a recent marketing and sales alignment benchmark report, only 35 percent of salespeople reported they think marketing knows what they need. In fact, one third of marketing and sales teams don’t talk regularly or have a standing meeting. As a start, it’s critical that sales feels heard by seeking their input.

Kapost B2B Marketing & Sales Alignment Benchmark Report

The different types of marketing collateral include:

• Brochures
• Sales materials
• Product guides
• Packaging
• Branded advertising specialties
• Company & product fact sheets
• Corporate identity – business cards, letterhead
• Case studies
• White papers
• Direct mail
• Newsletters
• Holiday cards

The role of these pieces of marketing collateral is to present the value of your business, product or service offerings to prospective customers, with engaging visuals and content that mimics the personality of your brand. Marketing collateral also helps build your credibility through materials such as case studies and company newsletters. Whether your goal is to create original material or draw from previously developed content, you can refine and enhance your marketing collateral to better serve their purpose.

Here are ways to wow your potential customers, with high impact marketing collateral:

1. Ensure brand consistency – Every piece of marketing collateral should reflect your brand and be consistent across all marketing campaigns. To yield the most consistent results, incorporate your overarching marketing strategies into marketing collateral.

In addition, all marketing collateral needs to:

• Visually mirror your business’s corporate identity
• Incorporate key messages
• Have a consistent tone

All of this will result in an excellent customer experience (CX), throughout the customer lifecycle.

Always refer back to your brand guidelines to help you achieve consistency. Use the same colors, design, words and typeface on every touch point. No one can tell your story better than you, so make sure you don’t keep changing it.

2. Develop engaging content – When you’re effective in developing engaging marketing collateral content, you’ll be successful in moving your target audience to the next stage in the buy cycle. Like an engaging blog post that’s part of a content marketing campaign, you’ll also get results—whether it’s an increase in traffic, conversions, sales of a product or likes on social media.

Start by creating goals and asking yourself the following questions:

• Is the content meant to inform or entertain?
• How will it fit into your overall marketing strategy?
• How will it connect with sales activity?
• What do you want your target audience to do?

In order to grab your target reader’s attention and engage, the content needs to:

• Answer a problem using content that’s consistent with how your business will solve these problems
• Be actionable and inspiring
• Be written in a clear and conversational style

Think about the various types of marketing collateral and which ones will compel a deeper commitment from your customers and prospects.

3. Create eye-catching visuals – To create the “wow factor,” your marketing collateral not only needs to include engaging and actionable content. It also needs to capture your target audience’s attention with eye-catching visuals that reflect your brand.

Visuals reinforce content and branding, in addition to making a connection between your brand and target audience. Think beyond your logo and consider how different types of marketing collateral can work together to effectively communicate your key messages and form that connection through eye-catching visuals. Certain images, photos and design elements can be especially impactful and evoke strong emotional responses.

Similar to the content creation process, it’s vital to conduct the appropriate research to know who your customers are and the problem they need to solve. This will enable you to create eye-catching visuals that resonate with them and appeal to those wants and needs. It also will increase the chances of your customers and prospects choosing your product or service over your competitors.

4. Include strong calls to action – Make sure you have strong calls to action (CTA) on all of your marketing collateral that direct readers to landing pages. Your marketing collateral must have a statement of features and benefits, along with clear and simple instructions on what to do next—whether it’s how to place an order or to like a post on social media.

Marketing collateral can drive digital marketing efforts, by including CTA such as website addresses, social media URL, QR codes and hashtags. Using this approach, you easily can track the results of your marketing collateral campaigns. You also will be extending your audience reach and exposure to your digital marketing channels.

Marketing Collateral Case Study

CMA created marketing collateral for Weight & Life MD, a physician-directed weight management program that features personalized treatment methods. The goal was to create a brand identity and portfolio of marketing collateral tools, to support the launch this new physician group practice.

As a solution, CMA developed a logo and stationery suite by leveraging the historical physician insignia. The objective was to project both a humanistic and calming corporate personality using a light, clean typeface, in addition to earth tone colors of muted orange and olive.

CMA constructed a brand-design compatible sell sheet and all-purpose pocket folder, to highlight the practice’s services and treatment philosophy. The firm also designed a new website, with eye-catching visuals and engaging content.

Launching the practice’s new brand identity and website resulted in Weight & Life MD growing new patients and its business. Increased brand awareness and loyalty became a top driver for referral traffic and created a larger regional footprint for the practice, in the health and wellness industry. The Jersey Shore Public Relations & Advertising Association recognized the marketing campaign with its highest-level award.

CMA created award-winning marketing collateral for Weight & Life MD

Do you want to learn more about how to create high impact marketing collateral to wow prospective customers? Contact us today, to get the conversation started.