Marketing collateral drives your business. Effective marketing collateral can mean the difference between a near-sale and a loyal customer for life. Your target audience and potential clients are being bombarded by overwhelming amounts of generic and dull print materials on a daily basis. How can you make your marketing collateral, direct mail, and other printed materials stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons, regardless what your budget is? Here are our top tips for creating marketing collateral that performs better.

1. Include a clear call–to–action. Marketing collateral should have an instruction prompting its target audience to take action. Prompts such as “call us now”, “visit our  depot today” and “find out more” can all be powerful as long as the relevant contact information is clearly stated on the marketing collateral.

2. Have clear key messaging. All marketing collateral should communicate the product’s unique value proposition. The benefits should be clearly outlined for the product’s target audience. The messaging should also include an exact description of the product in language easily understood by the target audience. Make sure your message answers the “What’s in it for me?” question for your target audience.

3. Find balance for your graphics. The effective use of space and positioning is of crucial importance. Successful marketing collateral must be easy to read and must grab the attention of your potential customer immediately. Catch the reader’s attention by having a balanced composition, well positioned and sized text as well as relevant and interesting images.

4. Ensure the branding is consistent. Your marketing collateral should reflect the qualities of the original brand the target audience already likes, relates to, trusts, and knows what to expect. For this reason, With every piece of collateral there should be a consistent look and feel with the visual design as well as tonality of the copy.

5. Use the right tools. Employing graphic designers can be very expensive especially if your company has a small marketing budget. docs24 is an effective and inexpensive to free cloud-based portal to create all sorts of marketing collateral. By using a vast array of pre-designed templates, you can create flyers, banners, booklets and other items within minutes.

6. Use quality prints. Print quality can also make a huge difference in grabbing your potential customer’s attention.You want your company to appear professional and reputable, which means that you need to have the highest quality paper and printing that is economically feasible.

7. Data. Do not go to all the effort of creating a great marketing piece then send it to the wrong audience. We can help you reach better customers by providing business and individual address data covering the whole of the UK, which is updated regularly and is broken down to household/ individual level. You can apply filters such as age, gender, annual salary etc to save sending mass campaigns to unknown recipients.

With the use of these tips you can now build your brand and support your sales efforts more efficiently, while standing out from your competition.