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20+ Types of Marketing Collateral Your Business Needs
Published at
Feb 10, 2022
Edited by: Unenabasi Ekeruke
Reviewed by: Victoria Taylor
As a marketing professional, you must be well-acquainted with the term marketing collateral. It's the type of digital or printed material that businesses use throughout their sales cycle to achieve marketing objectives.
And you must be aware of the fact that the right type of marketing collateral can make or break your marketing campaigns. However, with so many types of marketing collateral to choose from, it might be difficult for you to choose the ones that work for your business.
So, in this guide, we will take you through the 23 types of marketing collateral your business needs.
What is Marketing Collateral?
Marketing collateral is any digital or print material that you use to communicate your brand message to your target audience. It includes everything from digital materials like blogs and landing pages to flyers and brochures.
Marketing collateral helps you attract your target audience and increase brand awareness by forging a connection between you and your customer, simplifying your sales efforts and making them more effective.
How to Create Successful Marketing Collateral
As a marketer, you need to create consistent and visually appealing marketing collateral that gets your brand message across and creates an emotional connection with your target audience.
Though it's not an easy task, you can follow a few guidelines to keep in mind to create successful marketing collateral regardless of the type of collateral you are making. Here are the guidelines that you should follow.
1. Define Your Objectives
Before creating marketing collateral, you should first clearly understand your objectives. Do you want your sales team to give an elevator pitch using brochures or drive more traffic to your website?
Understanding what you expect it to accomplish and where you will use it is the critical first step to help you organize the process. For example, the design and copy of printed marketing collateral like brochures or flyers will differ from blog posts, newsletters and others.
2. Focus On Your Target Audience
Sharing brand messages and encouraging conversations with and among customers across communication channels is the significant benefit of creating and using marketing collateral. Furthermore, it creates a bridge between your brand and your target audience that further helps facilitate a strong connection.
Hence, it would be best to keep your target audience in mind while creating the marketing collateral. Look how the two infographic templates are different since they target different audiences. From the design elements to the copy, everything communicates a different message.
Create informative and beautiful infographics
- Hundreds of premade infographic templates
- Dozens of charts, graphs and data tools
- Premade content blocks to make design easy
3. Include Your Branding
Since the primary goal of your marketing collateral is to communicate with your target audience, you need to include your branding in any collateral you create to get the most out of them. Include your logo, brand colors, taglines and more.
It will help you increase your brand awareness and show off your brand personality to your audience and existing customers. Moreover, you can create a brand kit that will help you be consistent with your design while creating the collateral.
Visme's brand design tool can help you do this with perfection. Watch the video below to learn more about it.
4. Keep Your Marketing Channels In Mind
How do you want to make your marketing collateral accessible to your audience? The answer to this question will change everything from the message to the medium. As you can imagine, a presentation or social media post will vary from the message you communicate in a flyer or brochure. You want to ensure that your content and your channels both compliment each other. This is also essential when creating interactive marketing campaigns as well.
Visme lets you design and shares your collateral across major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter and many others. Also, you can generate a link to embed the document on any website. And all this happens from within the Visme app.
5. Follow Design Best Practices
Now that you have your goals defined and selected distribution channels, check in on the visual elements of your marketing collateral. Though there are no universal guidelines to follow, you keep these things in mind.
- Choose fonts that make your text easily readable.
- Use brand colors and get your color combination right.
- Always use high-quality images.
- Make sure the color of the font pops from the background.
- Keep your design elements aligned.
- Ensure that all the design elements flow together.
23 Types of Marketing Collateral to Create
Now that you know what marketing collateral is and how to create one, let's learn about the 23 types of collateral your business needs.
1. Blog Posts
Blog posts are one of the most popular marketing collateral used among businesses of all sizes. From attracting your target audience to converting them into potential customers, blog posts can be used at any stage of the sales funnel.
Blogs can help you answer questions that your audience is looking for, educate and engage your existing customers, promote your products and services and many others. Hence, they can help you increase your website traffic SEO and position you as an expert in your industry.
And the best part is you can use the blogs across all your digital marketing platforms.
Design stunning blog graphics using Visme's web graphic maker that will increase the clickthrough rate on your blogs.
2. Landing Pages
As the name suggests, a landing page is a standalone page that a person lands on after clicking an advertisement or a link from a search engine result page. It is the first page your audience will see when they enter your website.
The primary goal of creating a landing page is to capture leads and nurture them with more personalized marketing campaigns to convert them into potential buyers. You can offer ebooks, white papers, email newsletters, online courses, event registrations, free trials and many more through your landing page.
3. Ebooks
Are you looking for a tool to educate and inform your prospects? ebooks can help you do this while positioning you as an expert in your industry. Moreover, ebooks are best to deliver exceptional customer experiences, build relationships, and establish credibility with your target audience.
So, if you don't want to miss out on such opportunities to connect with your audience, learn how to create an ebook and strengthen your marketing strategy.
Create and offer ebooks to your target audience for free using the free ebook templates in Visme. Here is an example of a stunning ebook template.
4. Infographics
If you are looking for marketing collateral to boost your content marketing efforts, infographics can be one of the best to consider. A survey by HubSpot shows, Infographics are the fourth most popular type of content marketing.
By combining aesthetics with easily digestible content, infographics can help increase brand awareness and communicate your core message while improving SEO.
Furthermore, they can be shared online across all platforms and printed in any format, giving you effective marketing collateral.
And the best part? You can create beautiful infographics for free using Visme's free infographic maker. So, you can include infographics in your marketing strategy without compromising the budget.
Choose from thousands of professionally designed infographic templates and customize them to suit your need.
Additionally, watch the video below to learn how to create an infographic as a beginner.
5. Digital Magazines
Digital Magazines are another popular type of marketing collateral that you can consider. You might think that digital magazines are dead. According to a recent study, the digital magazine segment is expected to generate $39,012M in revenue.
Digital magazines are far from dead and offer great benefits that are unmatched by other media channels.
Visme offers both magazine and magazine cover templates for beauty, business, food, marketing and many other industries. Read this article about creating your own digital magazine to learn more.
6. Case Studies
Reading and watching reviews is a part of most customers' buying journey. In fact, 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses. So, since the majority of people are looking for reviews from past customers, case studies can be extremely effective as motivators and objection removers.
Furthermore, they help you demonstrate that your offerings are valuable and the best in the market. Customize Visme's case study templates to create your own case studies and showcase the value of your offerings.
7. White Papers
A white paper is a research report on a specific topic that raises a problem and presents solutions. You can use a white paper to educate your audience about a problem and offer solutions through your product or service.
However, keep in mind that white papers shouldn't be product pitches. Also, this type of marketing collateral needs in-depth research to prepare and be written in a more serious tone. So, it would be better to learn more about a white paper before you create one.
Here is an example of a white paper that you can customize and download.
8. Brochures
In this digital marketing era, traditional marketing collateral like brochures could seem old-fashioned to some people. However, marketing through brochures has many benefits when it comes to networking. You can hand out the brochures after an event or meeting or distribute them to target your ideal market specifically.
Additionally, in a paperless world, brochures can be a surefire way to stand out from your competitors. Look at the 15+ customizable brochure templates to promote your business.
9. Product Catalogs
Product catalogs are a type of marketing collateral that helps buyers learn more about the features of your product and make a purchase decision. In a product catalog, you can include all the details about your product, such as features, descriptions, dimensions, weight, size, price, reviews and many more.
This type of marketing collateral is extremely helpful for sales reps, inside sales teams, managers and field marketers. Here is an example of product catalog templates from Visme.
10. Proposals
Proposals are prepared for prospective customers to persuade them to choose your products or services. They include information about terms and conditions, pricing and others to make the best impression possible.
In other words, it's a sales document that is a combination of other documents like estimates, bids and quotes, making it one of the necessary marketing collateral that should be designed carefully.
Thanks to the aesthetically pleasing proposal templates that Visme offers to help you create your proposal in minutes.
Additionally, use this article to learn how to write a proposal to get the most out of it.
11. Presentations
Presentations are one of the effective ways to present your business offerings and convince potential clients. As a marketer, you might already know that a successful presentation in marketing is worth every dollar spent on marketing.
A good presentation will always help you drive trust in your brand, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales. Also, while launching a new product or service, nothing can beat the impression that a presentation makes on your audience. Here's a presentation template you can customize:
12. Product Sell Sheets
Product sell sheets are the perfect way to showcase your product's most compelling features and benefits on a single page without overwhelming the audience. They are comprehensive and mostly rely on design to communicate with the target audience.
Look at the product sell sheet template below. It perfectly displays the latest features and benefits of the smartwatch.
13. Coupons
Who doesn't love a good discount? Offering coupons and discounts is one of the best ways to boost sales conversion rates and increase customer loyalty. According to Statista, 92% of U.S consumers use coupons for shopping. Plus, coupons are one of the most popular marketing tools even after 120 years of their introduction.
Besides this, digital coupons can be a successful means of increasing social media engagement, email marketing lists, mobile website traffic and more.
14. Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are the best tool to stay in touch with existing customers and prospects. They help you inform your customers about new products, services, offers, discounts and any other valuable news and information.
In addition to keeping in touch with every prospective customer, newsletters help you become an authority and increase ROI. In fact, email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is a whopping 4,200% ROI.
15. Reports
Optimizing marketing strategies is the primary goal of creating marketing reports. If you spend time on research, data, and findings of your business growth, sharing them with stakeholders and individuals is a great way to prove your professionalism.
Additionally, with so much unreliable information circulating cyberspace, preparing reports that are backed by research are a great way to stay ahead of the competition.
With a graphic design tool like Visme, you can create reports that use charts, graphs, and other visual elements to present your data in the most beautiful way possible.
16. Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are usually short videos that explain the primary features of your products and services. These videos are one of the best ways to boost engagement, credibility and relatability. According to HubSpot, 64% of marketers plan to invest more in short-form videos.
Now, you might be worrying about the tools and resources required to produce these videos. Keeping this in mind, Visme offers a wide range of explainer video templates that you can easily customize according to your needs.
Additionally, here are 27 explainer video examples that you can watch to get inspired.
17. Testimonials
Testimonials are one of the crucial marketing collateral you can use across all your marketing channels. They are a type of case study in the form of positive feedback from a consumer explaining their experience using your product or service.
They allow your prospects to review what past customers have to say about your business. And according to a recent study, 92% of the customers read online testimonials before making a purchase decision. So, contact some of your favorite customers and ask them for testimonials.
18. Press Releases
Press release, also called a news release, media statement, or news bulletin is a brief story or announcement about your company. It's more of a communication tool used to convey information to news outlets about a specific topic. You can use them to increase brand awareness and the online visibility of your business.
19. Business Cards
Though business cards primarily focus on carrying essential contact information of your business, you can use modern business cards as an effective tool to drive customers. They are also part of the branding exercise that marketers take up to stay ahead of the competition.
Turn your business cards into stunning designs using Visme's business card templates to make sure the design speaks favorably to your business. Whenever your clients look at your business card, they should instantly recognize your business.
20. Flyers
Flyers are considered the oldest and most cost-effective marketing collateral you can use without breaking the bank. They are relatively cheaper than other forms of advertising, can attract a huge audience and add a personal touch to your marketing strategy.
So, whenever you want to reach a broad crowd of people, create eye-catching flyers by customizing free flyer templates in Visme, print them out and distribute them to your target audience.
21. Social Media Posts/Ads
As of October 2021, 4.5 billion people were active on social media, making it the biggest platform to reach your target audience. Undoubtedly, social media posts/ads are the most effective marketing collateral for businesses of all sizes.
From generating leads, building brand awareness, and brand authenticity to building a community and growing a customer base, social media can be utilized for almost everything to market your business.
However, with so many brands on social media, it's not easy to stand out. Your posts/ads should be visually appealing enough to attract your target audience.
22. Lead Magnets
As the name suggests, lead magnets are one of the most powerful marketing collateral businesses can use because of their ability to generate leads. You can provide your online users with this content in exchange for their contact information. Thus, making it a great tool to build an email list as well.
Lead magnets come in various forms such as guides, checklists, cheat sheets, worksheets, resources and many more.
Here is an example of a worksheet lead magnet template that you can customize and download.
23. Loyalty Cards
Loyalty cards are incentive programs used by most retail businesses to gather customer data. The primary purpose of these cards is to build a repeat customer base and increase customer loyalty. So, this marketing collateral can help you reduce your customer acquisition costs.
Create your own loyalty cards in minutes with Visme's professionally designed loyalty card templates. Hand out the cards to your customers and offer them discounts, offers, coupons, credit points and more to make them come back again and again.
Create Your Marketing Collateral Using Visme
Now that you understand the value of marketing collateral, it should always be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. And the most critical part of any marketing collateral is the design.
Since a large chunk of creating marketing collateral goes into designing, it can be daunting to consistently create all the marketing collateral.
As you have already seen, Visme offers templates for all the marketing collateral mentioned above. So, you can design all your marketing collateral in one place.
Create a free account in Visme and take your marketing strategy to the next level.
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