Digital marketing collateral is important for reinforcing your online marketing strategies. The collateral is a vital arsenal in your armory when facing fierce competition in your industry.
Marketing collateral offers you a unique perspective in dealing with marketing competition. It allows you to shift from conventional outbound advertisement strategies to modern customer-focused ones.
But, what is digital marketing collateral, and which collateral does your business need? Find out below.
Digital Marketing Collateral
Marketing collateral is any media material a business uses to promote its products or services. It is the branded assets a business uses to promote its products or services. Examples include e-books, videos, graphics, digital magazines, and blogs.
Digital marketing collateral is essential in your business's objective of building and maintaining relationships between your brand and audience. You’ll use the collateral to introduce potential customers to your brand, grow brand awareness, and educate prospective customers about your brand.
Unlike your conventional advertisements, marketing collateral is not meant to be flashy. Its main priority is to capture your customer's attention and to retain and enhance it.
When using marketing collateral, your primary focus should be communicating the business to prospective customers. Communication will help you build sustainable relationships with customers.
How to Create a Successful Marketing Collateral
One of the most important rules of creating market collateral is that you should be consistent with your brand message. Only then will you be able to create an emotional connection with your target audience.
Therefore, it would help to adhere to the following guidelines when creating your digital marketing collateral.
Define your objectives – what you hope to accomplish from promoting your products and services online will influence the type of digital marketing collateral and the brand message you send.
Focus on the target audience - marketing collateral allows you to communicate a specific brand message to your target audience. How well you understand the needs of these customers will determine the impact the message has on your relationship with the target audience.
Include your branding – since you plan to reach your target audience with your marketing collateral, there is no harm in including your branding -- brand colors, logo, and taglines.
Keep your marketing channels in mind – your marketing channel will influence your choice of marketing collateral. It will also influence the presentation of your brand message.
Using these strategies, start building the following collateral for your business.
1. Automated Emails
Emails are one of the common forms of digital marketing collateral because they can be used across the sale cycle. The seamless integration of emails in every sale and marketing stage makes them ideal for developing and sustaining customer relationships.
You can use email marketing as:
Promotional collateral for creating brand awareness
Marketing your products and services
Informative collateral to share personalized brand messages with your customers.
Automation in email marketing has made emails a favorite marketing tool for most businesses. Emails are now a key marketing tool for about 70% of businesses.
Emails as marketing collateral are also highly customizable. For example, you may send your customers a monthly newsletter to inform them about your business, products, and services. In addition, you may also send a personalized email to remind them of an abandoned cart and use the opportunity to reengage with the customer.
Remember, measuring your ROI when using emails as your marketing collateral is also possible. Do this by setting performance metrics and KPIs for your email marketing campaign.
2. Blog Posts
As mentioned, one of the primary objectives of marketing collateral is to create and sustain customer relationships. Blogs are vital in cultivating customer relationships as they keep your customers engaged.
A blog is a good tool for keeping in touch with your customers and showcasing your business. It also offers you the opportunity to influence a larger audience.
The secret is to perform search engine optimization (SEO) of your blog posts. Take your time to research relevant keywords in your industry and use them in your blogs.
Applying SEO techniques to your blogs will help you generate enough website traffic and new leads. You do so by writing content that addresses the specific problems your target audience is facing. Continue creating content that helps your prospective customer through their journey of finding viable solutions to the challenge they face.
While you are at it, remember to position your brand as part of the solution to the challenge your customers face. High-quality blog content will help you maintain authority in your respective industry.
However, while your blogs shouldn't entirely focus on your business products and services, you should use them to trigger action from your target audience. That means writing persuasive content and including a call to action. You’ll reach your targeted audience when your blog ranks high on the search engine results pages.
3. Landing Page
A landing page is a standalone online page separate from your business website designed to achieve a specific marketing objective. That objective will depend on your target customer's life cycle stage.
For example, a customer in the awareness stage will likely be attracted to your running page via your targeted paid ads. Customers' quest for knowledge triggers them to click your strategic ads on strategic marketing channels like social media. Eventually, this action leads your target customer to your landing pages.
A landing page is crucial, particularly if you have a sales funnel. It’s effective marketing collateral in generating and managing new leads.
Note: when creating your landing page, prioritize your customer's needs. Then, don't forget to incentivize your target customer to provide their target information. Examples of such incentives are coupons, product discounts, or digital magazines.
4. E-Book
An e-book is a must-have marketing channel to develop customer relationships in the awareness stage. An easy way to describe an e-book would be a 'non-technical manual.' You use an e-book to share your expertise on some issues with your target customers.
You can use a combination of the landing page and e-book marketing channels to a greater effect at this stage.
Just like the lion roars to exact its dominance in the jungle, an e-book will enable you to exact your business expertise in specific fields in your industry.
A customer going through the trouble of accessing and reading your e-book means that they trust it to have what they need about a particular challenge they face. Therefore, the best reward you can offer such a customer is to ensure that your e-book is thorough on the topic you are discussing.
A common usage of e-book marketing collateral is when making a 'how-to-guide.' In such a case, ensure the guide is understandable in layman's terms. Use images, diagrams, or graphics to deliver the message more effectively.
The best part about e-books is that they provide ample opportunities to create awareness or market your products or services. For example, you can show off expertise by including images of you doing the things you are teaching your audience to do.
5. Infographics
Did you know that about 91% of consumers now prefer interactive and visual content over traditional static or text-based media? A video of a 'dancing baby shark' will go viral faster than warnings of a looming recession.
Remember how we discussed using graphics, images, and diagrams in your e-books? Now throw in some illustrations, graphs, charts, and well-researched statistics; you have nailed it with infographics.
Such a perfect blend of infographics in your marketing efforts allows you to hook into the visual learners' category of target audiences. It is also a creative way to draw enough attention to your brands, products, and services.
6. Testimonials and Online Reviews
Regardless of your efforts in your marketing campaigns, word-of-mouth significantly impacts your brand performance. Honest customer reviews of your products or services are equal to electronic word-of-mouth about your brand.
Customer testimonials and reviews also play a massive role in influencing a prospective customer's purchase decision. Just like you assess reviews of a product on Amazon before buying it, so do your customers when they’re buying from you.
Positive customer testimonials build a prospective customer's trust in your products and services. So, don't be afraid to show off such positive reviews on your website and your brand's social media pages.
Create Your Digital Marketing Collaterals
Okay, the message is home. But how do you create various digital marketing collaterals for your brand when you’re busy designing your product? The answer is outsourcing. Hire us as your online marketing experts to create and help you maximize the benefits of the above digital marketing collaterals.