Create a library of marketing collateral in 1 week
Usually in PDF form, marketing collateral includes written materials to support sales teams. Collateral includes brochures, media kits, and one-pagers breaking down your offerings and differentiators.
In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into collateral and a structured, templated way to rapidly generate. At the end, you will have a small library of collateral and a recipe to continue creating more.
Are you getting the most out of your marketing collateral?
Beyond sales enablement, your collateral can be the perfect place to house defined messaging. It can become the pillars of low-funnel content. Well-written marketing collateral can also:
Enforce consistent messaging - When everyone has access to collateral, it acts as the golden standard for product selling points. Everyone can clearly see and communicate product value.
Facilitate training - Circulate your collateral to affiliates, employees, content specialists, and social media teams. They can leverage it to train and learn more about products, find quick product facts, and write brief and compelling product content.
Provide pre-approved, pre-written copy - When teams are working off pre-written messaging, there’s less need for content specialists to edit - marketers can easily grab and go. Collateral copy can be repurposed for email campaigns, ads, website copy blocks, and more.
Organize information to generate a library of collateral
It’s much easier to write about products when you have all the pieces ready to go! By following this process, you’ll be able to mix and match elements to quickly create targeted content.
Step 1: Compile general information
Some elements throughout your collateral can be standardized. Write a couple of sentences for an introductory paragraph (that should work across any piece) and gather your product imagery.
If you’d like to add testimonials and partner logos to your collateral, you can compile those as well.
Step 2: Gather persona information
In a table that will be easy to reference, begin by listing your company’s personas. Then, next to each persona, list their pain points.
Step 3: Gather product information
Now, list your products. Include a description, their features, and value offered. To complete this step, you may need to conduct a brief feature and benefit analysis.
Step 4: Tie “value provided” to pain points
The core “sauce” of your collateral will be centered around pain points and solutions (or your value provided). When you pair these, your content will answer: what problems do buyers have and how can your product fix it?
Whether or not you decide to map this out (it can get complicated) think about how products support personas:
For example, here’s how a web development agency might complete a section of this table:
Many times, you’ll have 3+ solutions to support each pain point. It can get messy to map these out in a table, so use the example above to understand how pain points and solutions tie together.
Step 5: Decide your collateral types and write
Now it’s time to mix and match your product and persona information.
Decide which types of collateral you’d like to house in your library - for example:
One-pager targeting persona A
One-pager for product A
One-pager for product B
One-pager for a pain point
Full overview of products and solutions
Your customer-facing teams are the best people to define collateral needs.
NOTE: While it does not fit into this process of rapidly building your collateral library - you might also choose to write case studies, helpful infographics, and in-depth product breakdowns.
Example: one-pager targeting persona A
Do you see how each section stems from your predefined product and persona information?
Persona sections of your collateral can be titled “Who we can help,” “Who we serve,” or “People who use our product.”
Pain point sections would be “Problems we help solve,” or “Why people come to us.”
Product/value offered sections could live under “Our solutions” or “How we can help.”
Your new library of content
You should be able to complete each step in 1 day, giving you a week to complete your library of collateral. Of course, you’ll have to pass these copy decks off to designers for a finished product, but your part as a content specialist is complete!
This plan also assumes you have product knowledge or documented product breakdowns handy. It could take weeks to run the analysis on your own.
Where can you house marketing collateral?
Shared folders
Marketing collateral often lives in a shared folder as PDF documents. The problem - documents can be a pain to share and update.
Digitally, the collateral will be sent as an email attachment. Each time you make a design change, you’ll have to upload the new version to your folder and alert the team.
Furthermore, there’s no way to provide context around the PDF aside from the title and folder structure.
Website hosting
Storing collateral as website PDFs is a more up-to-date option. Teams will be able to access and share a direct link to the PDF.
You can also create a wiki listing each piece of collateral’s title and link wherever you like (a Google doc, your company’s wiki platform, a spreadsheet, etc.). This is a great place to house much-needed context: who does it target, a brief description, is it internal or external, etc.
As you make design edits, you can upload new versions under the same file name. That way, the link should stay the same, so everyone who uses it will automatically get the most up-to-date version.
Digital asset management solutions
If you feel disorganized with your volume of collateral, are working across multiple teams, and have strict brand guidelines, you might benefit from a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution.
Brandfolder, for instance, can help you manage versioning of website assets and grant separate permissions for teams. If you are sharing collateral with external partners and affiliates, a DAM solution can come in handy.
Ready to start producing your collateral?
Remember that there is no single, rigid process that works in every instance. If you are working with a large group of complex products or broad persona groups, you might have to make some adjustments like focusing on single pain points.
Regardless of your exact method, documenting your product and persona information (in a way that makes sense to you) will give you a jumpstart in rapid collateral creation.
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