Marketing collateral: Definition, types and best practices

Marketing collateral is any kind of content, media, or resource that you create to support your marketing efforts.

The term can cover anything from informal digital communications and social media content, right through to in-depth information and highly polished long-form content pieces. And it’s the breadth of this definition that makes it tricky for teams to master.

Marketers know they need strong collateral to achieve their marketing goals. But with so many options available, there’s one big question they need to answer before they can start creating high-value, impactful collateral…

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to creating marketing collateral. The type of collateral that’s most valuable to you will depend on what your marketing goals are, and what you ultimately want your content to help you achieve.

Here’s a quick look at some common high-level marketing goals, and marketing collateral examples that can help you achieve them.

There are many different types of marketing collateral and understanding which to use where may seem daunting. We’ve formed a list of different types of marketing collateral to help you see what you can create and how it will fit in to your marketing strategy.

Determining which types of marketing collateral are right for you is an important step. But practically, it’s only the beginning of your journey. Once you know what you need to create, it’s time to start bringing that collateral to life.

That’s where things get a bit trickier. To create great collateral, marketers must be able to:

• Pull together diverse information and present it in ways that are both visually engaging and immediately understandable
• Breeze through approval processes to ensure that collateral can be released and put in front of your audience at the right time
• Track use and engagement to understand who is using and viewing collateral, and what they’re responding to
• Adapt collateral with ease to make it as relevant as possible to different audience groups and keep it up to date

To rise to those challenges at once, marketers must adopt and embrace four key practices:

1. Attention optimization, where collateral is built in line with reader psychology best practice
2. Precise personalization, to help push deeply relevant collateral to every person in your audience at speed
3. Metric mastery, to enable detailed measurement of content performance, and help you deliver more of what your audience is really responding to
4. Content democratization, where every stakeholder can freely create and adapt collateral to meet their needs — without breaking it, or bending brand guidelines

To find out more about how these four key practices can help marketers hit their strategic goals, jump into our Turtl doc:

Click to read Four content keys for marketing leadership at your company | Turtl Guide

Creating effective marketing collateral is crucial for conveying your brand’s message, promoting products or services, and engaging your target audience. To ensure your marketing collateral is impactful and resonates with your audience, consider these best practices:

1. Understand your audience

This should go without saying, but, understanding your audience is key when creating engaging marketing collateral. Keeping your material relevant to your industry and customer base will increase lead generation. Creating content that only appeals to yourself, or people who aren’t relevant to you target market is just wasted energy.

2. Consistency

Consistency comes in many forms. In this case, consider consistency in tone of voice, brand colors, and frequency of communication. This ensures your brand remains recognisable to your audience and helps to tie all of your comms together.

3. Clear messaging and compelling visuals

Don’t waffle, and make it look good. People want the information, not your life story.  Creating clear and concise messaging, paired with visually engaging imagery, video content, or interactive elements, ensure your message gets across and is not lost in a sea of jargon and anecdotes.

4. Clear CTAs

A big shiny button that offers your lead something is much more enticing that just putting a boring link to your website. Your marketing collateral needs a clear direction for your audience to go after they’ve finished with that piece of content. Send them on a content journey with clear and concise CTAs. Consider: Book a demo, Start your free trial, or watch a free webinar.

5. Choose channels correctly

Knowing where and when to send out collateral is essential and goes hand in hand with understanding your audience. For example; your average TikTok user isn’t going to care about the intricacies of ABM and even a well-placed advert there would be a waste compared to LinkedIn. This also means choosing your content to suit the platform, don’t send collateral meant to desktops to mobile platforms and vice versa

6. Analyze

Without analysis of your data, you are cursed to repeat any mistakes you make along the way. Much like learning from history, use data to learn from your past efforts, whether successful or not. This will lead to a better understanding of your content, audience, and even your industry. Consider this the point where you loop back to step 1 on your next pass.