Produce a stunning suite of marketing materials to promote yourself or your business. Whether it’s for a “hello world I am here”, a new product you are launching, or for a big conference, having a cohesive set of marketing materials is a brilliant way to disseminate your brand.
Here is a set of guidelines to help you create a consistent collection of marketing materials, to certify fantastic results and a professional finish.
- Mission Statement
Keep your materials directed, consistent and simple for your audience to understand by having an evidently resolute goal for your marketing project. Basically, what are you trying to achieve with your marketing push?
There are many reasons you might want to promote that are or aren’t directly related to your bottom line. Your goal may follow along the lines of building brand awareness or driving sales or could just be a way to familiarise customers with a new brand identity or logo.
Ensure your goal is the main highlight within your content, everything should relate back to this central theme. Make sure that anything else you add are just minor side notes to your main goal, it shouldn’t compete for attention.
- Past Materials
If this is your first-time creating marketing materials, you can skip this step.
However, if your seasoned at creating marketing materials you have a head start on design work without spending the moolaa.
Spend some time looking over your old marketing materials and decide what worked well, what didn’t, what you liked, what could have been improved. Look at imagery, layout, wording, and the physical materials you selected. Then consider your brand identity, and whether your objectives have changed.
- Audiences Shoes
Remember that you know how amazing your business is cause you put in all the hard yards to make it that way. You also know your products inside out and could talk for hours about all your products features and what makes it special in the market.
But people looking in don’t know that, and they probably don’t care enough to to find out…
While this is a harsh truth, it is key to creating your marketing materials in the most effective way possible.
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes… they are busy and have minimal interest in discovering new company’s and what they sell. So, think what would it take you to have a look? What would attract you? What you answer to these questions tells you what messages your marketing should lead with.
Headline your marketing with the most widely applicable benefits. As you will probably have a lot of different ideas, along with multiple different audiences. Identify what is most important to your archetypal customer. You could even check out CRM data and social media tools to identify what your customers find important.
- Testimonials
Testimonials are great because it’s not you boasting about your own products. It’s praise coming from an unbiased, balanced customer perspective. This can also link back to our last section on what is important to audiences, as testimonials can also bring out your products benefits and strengths.
Testimonials can also acknowledge benefits and features that might not sound right coming from you. For example, highlighting perceived weaknesses in product formats but saying how yours measure up in spite of this.
- Consistency
All your marketing materials should share a recognisable look. They don’t need to be identical, but they should be perceptible as one brand.
To do this, try take a single approach across your materials:
- Colour pallet
- Font family
- Heading
- Slogan
- Logo and iconography
- Illustration
- Design style
- Paper stock and stationary
So for example, if you have business cards that feature a red logo and are printed on matte card stock, then ensure these elements are also reflected in your flyers and stickers as well.
- Call to Action
A call to action should prompt the customer to take a next step, which could involve calling you, coming into your store, or visiting your website or social media pages.
It may seem obvious that customers who are exposed to your marketing materials will contact you. But remember, customers are busy and distracted and might not yet be a loyal customer or engaged with your brand. This is why call to actions are important, because it connects the dots in a customer’s thinking processes and makes the action simple to take. It will lead the customer onwards through their journey with your business.
Some call to action examples are:
- Call us now on 12 3456 789
- Find us on Instagram
- Visit us at yourcompany.com
Keep your call to action concise, focus on a single action not an overload of information with too many options to consider. By all means add all your contact information on your materials, but only designate one to the call to action and make it the most obvious in terms of design.
It is smart to place your call to action at the bottom of your marketing materials in order to catch the reader while they are scanning the document after reading.
- Crowding
Don’t overwhelm your audience by overcrowding your marketing materials with too much text or too many images. A cluttered document will only cause confusion and an unprofessional looking print.
Revisit your mission statement if you are struggling to narrow it all down. Your main mission should be supported in every word and every image should heighten your message or back it up with new, non-verbal information.
Stay focused on your mission statement. Don’t get caught up adding more and more to your materials, or having your personal feelings dictate what you think should be said. It is understandable that you want to add in every characteristic of your business, but for a high quality and professional print try to stay focused.
- Urgency
Adding a timeframe to your deals and promotions helps motivate customers to take action and make purchases.
Statements like “Limited offer” with the deal’s information following are a good example of how to create urgency.
If you provide a code or anything else that you can track, you can also take advantage of seeing how many people bought a product thanks to your marketing materials success. This helps gauge the return on investment and allows you to set any future budgets.
- Premium Materials
There is more to your marketing materials than just design and text. Good quality paper and card is essential to communicate quality and professionalism to your audience. High quality materials affect not just weight and texture, but also intense colour, and crisp imagery.
Marketing materials that exude quality are pleasurable to look at and touch and promotes positive associations with your brand. However, low cost and cheap feeling and looking prints portray low quality and customers will expect the same from your products.
- Templates
Your small business might not have the resources available to design marketing materials from scratch. Luckily at Waikato Printing Company we have templates available for quality and professional marketing material designs. Whether business cards, flyers, posters, brochures, stickers, or postcards, save on time and expense by using our customisable templates.
Using templates from the same provider can help create consistency across your marketing materials. Our templates are customisable, easy to use, and will create high quality products. You do also have the option however, to use one of our own inhouse designers.
