By jfuchs@hubspot.com (Jay Fuchs)

It goes without saying, but your marketing materials shouldn’t be limited to conventional outbound advertisements — particularly if your business is B2B. Sure, capturing attention is part of the battle, but what happens when a prospect visits your website and sees nothing but some product descriptions and a pricing page?

There has to be more there. You need to have some material to show that you can walk the walk. One kind of content that helps get you there is known as marketing collateral, and it can come in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Here, we’ll get a more in-depth understanding of the concept and go over the five most important marketing collateral formats you can use to help establish legitimacy and supplement your sales efforts.

At its core, marketing collateral is a way to let prospects know that you know what you’re talking about. It’s not supposed to be as flashy as conventional advertisements. In creating marketing collateral, your first priority generally isn’t to capture attention — it’s to retain and enhance it.

In most cases, the prospects who are looking at your marketing collateral are curious about your company, but they might not be intimately familiar with you or what you’re offering. Well-crafted marketing collateral can put them at ease. It can help build the kind of trust necessary to start and sustain a customer relationship.

Now you might be wondering, how does marketing collateral relate to marketing materials in general? Good question.

Marketing Materials vs Marketing Collateral

In general, the difference between marketing materials and marketing collateral comes down to showing not telling. While other marketing materials might tell the reader explicitly why their company or offering is the best, marketing collateral is focused on showing why their company or offering is the best.

That’s why marketing collateral tends to be educational in some capacity. When done right, the informative nature of the format lets you separate yourself from the competition by letting you showcase an extensive understanding of your industry that others in your space might not be projecting.

If all of your marketing materials are solely dedicated to talking up your product or service, you’ll be selling yourself short. When prospects are deciding to buy, they’re not just considering what’s for sale — they’re considering your company as a whole.

They want to know they’ll be taken care of by a competent, capable, knowledgeable organization that they can rely on to address any issues and concerns they might have as they arise. Creating thoughtful marketing collateral is one way to help that cause.

1. Blog Posts

Producing good marketing collateral is often a matter of consistently providing value to your audience. One of the better forums to create and promote the kind of material that does that on an ongoing basis is a well-maintained company blog.

It allows you to supplement your sales efforts with helpful insight and audience engagement — driving traffic to your website and generating leads …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron