Promotional and marketing materials are more relevant today than ever before. With the proliferation of media channels, all brands have to work harder to reach their target audiences.
The need to raise awareness, understanding and brand engagement never changes; it does however mean that the quality of design and creation of brand assets, including messaging and visual appeal, have to be more carefully managed if a brand is to make an impact; that is the same for a market leader or a small start-up.
What are Marketing Materials?
Marketing materials come in so many shapes, sizes and formats.
Whether you are creating brochures, flyers, posters, billboard advertising, outdoor promotions, merchandising and pop ups, or whether it’s websites, digital marketing, emails, social media and video, you need to integrate your online and offline brand and marketing strategy, including the teams that are responsible for the different areas.
Piecemeal digital designs and messages will detract from your brand image and brand value – and confuse your customers; although digital and print materials can be managed separately they need to be 100% in sync to communicate effectively.
For print, as a creative agency, we find what is most in demand is brochures, sales support materials and internal communications.
For digital, we are finding a high demand for digital brochures, digital sales decks, email marketing, websites and social media assets.
Digital Marketing Materials
Digital Brochures
For digital brochures, simple PDFs are proving the most effective for our clients; the key objectives being to keep things simple, on message, easily accessible and above all creatively appealing so as to satisfy both the emotional and rational needs of consumers and B2B clients.
Interestingly digital brochures are often required in conjunction with print runs as well; smaller print runs and flexible digital brochures seem to be a popular hybrid approach at the moment.
Read More: Guide to Digital Brochures
Digital Sales Decks
The swing to sales bids and pitch meetings taking place on video means the need for more professionally designed, slicker sales decks has grown at an unprecedented rate. Without the benefit of being in the room and being able to gauge body language and engagement first hand, clients have been saying that their sales decks need to work twice as hard as before.
Find out more about Sales Decks for Remote Teams
Email Marketing (EDMs)
EDMs still have some of the best engagement, response and conversion rates of all channels and are an essential part of most marketing tool kits, whether that’s for large organisations, SMEs or start-ups. As a communication channel they are cost effective, can be very precisely targeted and easily tailored with specific messages and calls to action to improve response rates.
Websites
Your company’s showcase or window to the world.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve found many companies are investing more time and money on their website’s user experience and the creation of effective content rather than ad hoc updates to text and/or imagery; this includes more focus on meaningful brand messaging, strong visual stimulus, correct tone of voice and accessible, intuitive navigation.
A large part of improving UX and content for clients in our recent experience has been about simplifying existing sites to ensure they cut to the chase for users and answer their needs at each touch point.
Social Media Materials
Social media needs no introduction; it is and will remain a key means of generating traffic overall – whether that is to your website, landing pages, phone, email or whatever your optimal call to action for conversion.
As it is not only a means to generate traffic but also one of the most valuable channels for brand engagement, feedback and dialogue, the need for social media assets to be consistently on brand, on message and integrated with all other channel content is critical.
Printed Marketing Materials
The power of communication in the real word versus the virtual is hard to ignore, particularly in positioning your brand and drawing customers in.
The quality you project through the combination of brand design and print will speak volumes about where you are positioned in your marketplace.
Printed materials will literally give the customer a ‘feel’ for your values, culture and vision, so viewing printed marketing materials as a valuable way to strengthen your reach and USPs (rather than just a ‘print cost’) is a good start to building a more holistic brand.
Printed Brochures
First impressions are lasting. As an introduction to your company, a brochure can convey a lot more than just words and a few images. Especially if you are launching a new brand, pivoting an existing brand, launching a brand extension or repositioning your business; a printed brochure can be a great brand booster.
Many companies use printed brochures as a great way to grab a customer’s attention. Whatever message you are trying to get across, your message will be strengthened and underpinned by the quality of the print, the texture of the paper and the use of special techniques such as foiling, weight of paper – even scent. Luxury products can benefit in particular from bespoke high quality creativity and print.
Quite simply a printed brochure often raises the bar of creativity.
Printed Sales Support Materials
Clients are using printed sales support materials to help keep their brands top of mind. They serve well when following up on a meeting, phone call or enquiry – effectively reinforcing brand quality and serving as reminders for links and contact details.
Leave behinds after a meeting such as abridged, beautifully bound and presented versions of longer digital or multi-media presentations are highly effective and easily shared. Importantly these sales support materials can give added confidence to your sales force during and after their face to face or video pitches and presentations.
Internal Communications
As well as engaging customers with your brand, all your other stakeholders need to be onboard too; we find that tailored versions of company print materials can go a long way to increasing engagement amongst colleagues and employees, especially when combined with the usual mobile channels and the many apps that are specifically designed for employee engagement.
Internally, print will augment real time digital communications, especially items such as brand books, brand training support and event collateral.
Note: IM London & IM Dubai are fully committed to using eco-friendly print at all times.
Using Marketing Assets to Promote Brand Awareness & Increase Sales
Designing the right brand assets are the key to making all channels work for your brand, whether digital based or print based. Using all key channels is the path to a successful holistic brand experience for customers, employees and other stakeholders.
Given the sheer volume of marketing materials out there in the marketplace, the need to make sure they break through and are meaningful is the name of the game; in particular design and messaging must be consistent to optimise measurable results including:
- Cut through
- Awareness
- Understanding
- Engagement
- Conversion
- Loyalty
Depending on your customer profiles, campaign objectives and budget, some of the above will of course be more important than others within the total mix.
Bespoke Promotional and Marketing Material Services
When we are approached to design and supply marketing and promotional materials, we offer a free consultation first off as we want to ensure we get to the bottom of each individual client’s needs.
Gaining insights and understanding commercial objectives, brand needs and internal resources, enables us to tailor a proposal that is to the point, cost effective and has a realistic time line.
We would love to hear from you. Please get in touch for a free consultation or explore our creative branding services.
