With all the different types of marketing collateral in the world, it can be challenging to determine which content marketing solution is best for your business. Depending on the products and services you sell and what industry you’re in, some types of sales collateral may be more effective than others.
Marketing collateral can be a powerful asset to your B2B lead generation strategy if it’s used correctly and given to the right people at the right time. In this blog, we’ll highlight the following topics:
What Is Marketing Collateral?
Marketing collateral—also known as business and sales collateral—is the collection of sales and marketing materials designed to promote your company and the product or service you provide. Sales collateral examples could range from print materials like brochures and white papers to explainer videos of your company, product, or service. No matter what different types of marketing collateral you choose to use, it should effectively communicate your company’s value proposition, brand, and unique differentiators.
Why Is Marketing Collateral Important?
While marketing collateral can be a costly and time-consuming content marketing component, it offers significant benefits to your B2B lead generation program. Sales collateral is essential for the following reasons:
Tells Your Company Story
Not everyone is able to speak the language of your business. With the different types of marketing collateral, explaining your business and its day-to-day processes is made easier.
In addition to explaining complex processes, business collateral also allows you to demonstrate your company’s history, mission, and values. This allows prospects to feel more connected to you and your business, increasing the likelihood of converting them from leads into long-term customers.
One Asset Has Multiple Uses
One distinct type of marketing collateral can have many different uses. While business collateral examples are great to send to prospects, they are also ideal for helping your sales team improve their sales pitch.
Marketing collateral can be used in various ways. Whether you want to pass out your sales enablement assets to prospects during sales meetings or digitize them to increase your website’s SEO value, they can be used and optimized for in-person or virtual platforms.
Helps Guide Sales Conversations
While sales collateral is easy on the eyes and helps prospects understand complex processes, it also helps you and your team guide sales conversations.
For example, if a prospect wants to learn more about the types of roofs your commercial roofing company works with, hand them a brochure. If they want to learn more about the roof installation process, give them a sell sheet. If the prospect wants to see the work you’ve done with businesses similar to theirs, show them a case study.
There is a different type of marketing collateral that allows you to guide the conversation in any sales scenario.
Enables You to Close More Deals
Having business collateral examples for every scenario allows you to close more deals with prospective businesses. When developing a marketing collateral strategy, make sure you have different types of marketing collateral to fit the scenario. Creating content like a simple brochure or promotional video won’t always fit the scenario, so make sure you have content that fits the time, place, and conversation.
Best Sales Enablement Assets for B2B Lead Generation
While there are many different types of marketing collateral to choose from, it’s best to select assets that work best for your business’s sales efforts. Some of the most effective sales enablement assets include:
Corporate Brochures
Once upon a time, brochures were just foldable pamphlets that were printed and exchanged in person. Now, they’ve gone digital, and they’re better than ever before. They summarize everything important to know about your company: brief overview and history, products or services, and contact information.
When to use them: A brochure is the perfect introduction to your business. It briefly covers everything important and serves as a great reference point for potential customers. When accurately distributed, brochures can expand your company’s visibility and increase brand awareness.
For example, many material handling businesses hand out corporate brochures to prospects at trade shows. Using brochures early on in the sales process, after the first interaction with a prospect, is best. This is a good way to introduce your company and create top-of-mind awareness.
Case Studies
Case studies are a critical marketing asset to have in your ensemble. The purpose of case studies is to showcase your company’s success stories and the work that you’re most proud of. Components of a case study usually include:
- The problem
- The solution
- The result
- A client testimonial
- A summary of your company
When to use them: Case studies are the perfect consideration stage collateral. If you have a warmer lead in your pipeline who likes what you sell but wants to know more about your experience, a case study is a perfect thing to drop in their inbox.
For example, case studies are great for recruitment purposes, whether it’s for loan officers or real estate agents. Case studies can be attached in an email campaign, distributed across social media platforms, or embedded into your website for easy accessibility. This different type of marketing collateral allows the prospect to picture themselves working with your company.
Sell Sheets
Think of a sell sheet like a brochure, except more focused on one specific idea, concept, product, or service. These one-sheeters are great sources of information for prospects. For example, if you’re trying to find commercial cleaning leads, you may want to have a sell sheet handy in case a prospect has questions. Sell sheets can also talk about an idea and assist sales reps when talking to prospects. If you often receive the same objections from prospects over and over again, your sell sheet can outline common objections to your products or services and rebuttals as to why they’re wrong.
When to use them: Use a one-sheeter if you suspect the prospect has an interest in a particular product or service that you offer. Listen for queues, because a prospect may not be straightforward in saying what they’re interested in learning about. This is why sales development representatives (SDRs) must be good active listeners when selling. You can also use one-sheeters to inform about a larger idea/topic or for internal training.
For example, jargon-heavy industries like managed services providers are harder to sell to prospective businesses. Sell sheets are crucial for SDRs trying to pitch your IT services to prospects because they can overcome any objection or answer any question the prospect may have.
Pitch Decks
Pitch decks, also known as sales presentations or sales decks, are essential pieces of collateral for sales teams. Sales presentations are used by account executives when on a pitch with a potential customer. They help guide the sales conversation and tell a prospect everything they need to know about the product or service you offer along with benefits, pricing, and next steps.
When to use them: As you might have already guessed, pitch decks are used when an account executive has a scheduled pitch with a prospective customer. Internally, other organization members can use the sales deck to reference information (since they cover everything about your offering). Sales presentations are great, but make sure you’re using different types of marketing collateral at every stage in the buyer’s journey to improve your show rate; this way, the prospect shows up to the pitch and has a chance to see how great your sales presentation is.
Infographics
Infographics are probably the most visually appealing asset of all different types of marketing collateral. Infographics are visual representations of industry statistics and details about your business. They are designed in a way that presents information quickly and clearly. An example of an infographic for a construction company would be a graphic showing visuals about safety in the construction industry. This shows the prospect that the company takes safety seriously, and it can help generate more construction leads.
When to use them: Infographics can be used at every point in the buyer’s journey, but they’re most common at the awareness stage. While you’re still building awareness, it can be difficult to stand out. Infographics get the job done because they’re so visually appealing.
Promotional Videos
Did you know that 64% of consumers make a purchase after viewing a branded social video? Having branded videos in your collection of marketing collateral is one of the smartest things you can do as a business.
Videos can be made to include actual footage, or they can be animated to better explain complex processes, like software. Either way, your prospects will love to watch them, and they’ll likely result in more sales. Some forms of collateral videos include:
- Company profile: Tell the world who you are, what your mission is, and how you’re making people’s lives better.
- Product or service: There’s no better way to highlight a new product or service than with a video that’s easy to watch and even easier to share.
- “Why Us?”: Show your audience what sets you apart from the rest with a video that helps you stand out even in a saturated market.
- Case study/testimonial: Showcase a project success or long-term partnership by turning it into a case study or client testimonial video that speaks for itself.
When to use them: Videos explain your product or service in a simple, easy-to-understand, intuitive way. Branded videos should be used if a product or service can be described with visuals in 1 to 2 minutes. Once created, use them as often as you feel necessary. Including them on your website and social media pages wouldn’t hurt either!
How To Create an Effective Marketing Collateral Strategy
Like any marketing campaign, your marketing collateral strategy should reflect your target audience and their buyer personas. To create an effective digital marketing collateral strategy, your sales and marketing team must:
Integrate Collateral Into Your Overall Marketing Strategy
The different types of marketing collateral you choose should align with your company’s overall marketing strategy. It’s a creative way to tell your business’s story and highlight the products and services you offer to prospective companies.
While the business collateral itself is essential, so is the messaging. Marketing collateral that isn’t consistent with your overall marketing strategy could lead to confusion and mixed messages about what you want a user to do with the information provided.
A piece of content creation should reflect the wants, needs, and desires of a prospect. This could include the challenges they’re facing, pain points, and how your company can relieve their current issues. Identifying pain points and challenges also enables your sales team to understand where the prospect is in their buyer’s journey. This allows them to prioritize the lead or circle back when the timing makes the most sense. In the meantime, you can distribute different types and marketing collateral that aligns with their current stage in the sales funnel.
Develop and Follow a Corporate Style Guide
When you send prospects different types of marketing collateral, you’re sending them pieces of your business and what your business represents. No matter what sales collateral examples you use, they should consistently represent your brand’s voice and the message you want to convey to the reader.
Keeping your business’s branding consistent is key to gaining and maintaining trust from the prospect. The branding of your marketing collateral should reflect your company’s voice, so it’s easily recognizable by prospects. A style guide is vital to stay on track with consistent branding. This can include your company logo, color scheme, graphics, fonts, taglines, and terminology your company uses.
Minimize Text With Graphics
One of the most significant benefits of sales enablement assets is the visual appeal of the content. With marketing collateral, you can catch the eye of prospects while encouraging them to learn about the product or service your company provides.
By implementing more graphics into your sales enablement assets, you have the opportunity to catch and retain the attention of the reader. However, it’s essential to make the images relevant to the topic you’re discussing. Make them meaningful and serve a purpose.
While it’s important to include images and graphics in your content, you don’t want to over saturate your marketing collateral. Each different type of marketing collateral should serve a purpose, and you should be able to get your point across clearly to the reader. Use a variety of white space, imagery, text, and a call to action so the reader knows what you want them to do with the information. When it comes to engaging and effective marketing collateral, find a good balance of all these different components.
Create High-Quality Content for Any Platform
Whichever different type of marketing collateral you decide to go with, make sure it is high-quality, relevant, and easy to read. The only thing worse than having no marketing collateral is having low-quality marketing collateral that contains spelling and grammatical errors or doesn’t get its point across. This is a bad look for your company and could easily turn off a prospective business.
Sales enablement assets should be high quality for any platform you choose to put them on. From printing to email or digitized online, they should be easy to read and understand.
Digitize Your Assets
As more businesses are going digital, it’s important to have your different types of marketing collateral optimized for an online presence. All of your sales enablement assets should be designed for website and social media use so more people can see them. This also provides easy access to these pieces of content in case a prospect loses the physical copy you gave them. After you give prospects a physical copy of their marketing collateral, send them an email with the same piece of marketing collateral so they can have it both digitally and physically.
Key Takeaways
While there are many different types of marketing collateral to choose from, it’s important to pick business collateral examples that best align with your lead generation efforts. This ensures that you get the most out of your current strategy.
Ready to use marketing collateral to maximize your B2B sales efforts? Contact Abstrakt Marketing Group today to get started!
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