Marketing collateral is a broad term for the media that your company produces. It is more than just targeted advertisements, encompassing all content that you are pushing out to your audience. For business marketing collateral, this is often content that has implicit brand value rather than content that directly sells your products. This can include articles, reports, and infographics; marketing materials that educate prospective customers on specific topics. Their purpose is to demonstrate your expertise in the areas that matter most to buyers, imbuing your brand with a technical authority. Your marketing collateral is tied together through the thread of your service promise to your customers.

There is an extensive amount of differing marketing collateral that can be tied to your business. Generally speaking, anything that your branding touches becomes an advertising asset, regardless of whether it’s in a physical or digital format.

You can find plenty of marketing collateral lists online, and plenty of opinions on which are the most important. But, when considering what materials your business needs, there are four main types of marketing collateral to keep in mind. These are grouped by the intent of their message and they highlight different aspects of your company:

1. Knowledge documents – technical articles that demonstrate your industry expertise.
2. Core value evidence – coverage of your company supporting the issues that align to their values.
3. Statements on quality – testimonials, reviews, and case studies that detail the quality of the customer journey.
4. Brand associations – material that increases brand awareness by simply projecting your presence within a market. 

Marketing collateral is eclectic, spanning every platform and medium you can imagine. Trying to combine pieces of marketing collateral by format can lead to advertising campaigns overlooking some angles of market approach. It is much more useful in the long run to group your marketing collateral by its purpose, i.e. at what point in the sales journey do you want your customer to see it. As a guide, most marketing collateral has one of the following objectives:

• To raise awareness of your service, explaining to potential customers that they have a problem that can be solved.
• To show the customer how you can help them, demonstrating value and past successes.
• To drive the customer to act, being a call to action at the point of purchase.
• To retain customers by keeping them informed of the continuous benefit of your service.

Every piece of company content that influences your online brand presence is part of your digital marketing collateral. At times, the online environment’s focus on shareable media can make managing this collateral seem outside of your control. However, anything that comes about as a by-product of your company’s general operation or advertising strategy is an asset you can use.

It’s important to keep track of tangible digital assets, even if you’re not the one hosting them. Some examples of digital marketing collateral include:

• Blog posts, eBooks, and white papers
• Testimonials, reviews, and case studies
• Video tutorials and explainer videos
• Websites and landing pages

Before you can start creating marketing collateral, you need to scope out your advertising and branding strategy to identify what material is needed as a priority. This will often involve both physical assets, such as signage, brochures, and POS displays, as well as digital assets, such as promotional landing pages, articles, and websites.

Given the range of multimedia platforms at your disposal, it can be an overwhelming task to plan this out. This is where a Digital Marketing Agency like Spark can help. Drawing from our experience in rolling out marketing campaigns, we can develop a fully personalised project scope for your business. Then, our team of in-house designers can create unique marketing collateral to push out online and offline. Contact us today to see how we can help on your next marketing campaign.

The short answer: Yes.

It can be surprising how many different industries accrue business marketing collateral in the course of their general operation. Anything that can be branded, inevitably will be. So it’s best to proactively take charge of your collateral and control the message your brand sends. Some types of collateral that are often overlooked include:

• Real estate marketing collateral (business cards, property signage)
• Hotel marketing collateral (thank you cards, branded supplies)
• B2B marketing collateral (high-level knowledge documents)
• Restaurant marketing collateral (menus, packaging, and dining ware)
• Clinical marketing collateral (patient forms, stationery, signage)
• Marketing collateral for events (banners, bags, and all manner of trinkets)