Marketing and communication go hand-in-hand, and from print pieces to online documents, it’s important for successful businesses to have the right types of marketing collateral. Marketing collateral is used to support the sale products and services, and also to provide thought leadership pieces for the business as a whole. Each piece serves a purpose.
Typical marketing collateral includes:
- Brochures
- Case Studies
- Checklists
- Data Sheets
- eBooks
- Fact Sheets
- Flyers
- Infographics
- Landing Pages
- Leave-Behind Handouts
- Magazines
- Newsletters
- Presentations
- Pricing Guides
- Product Demonstrations
- Reports
- Sell Sheets
- Solution Briefs
- Testimonials
- Videos
- White Papers
For maximum impact, content must be actionable, current, educational and engaging. But content will look and sound (or read) a little different depending on if your business is B2B (“business-to-business”) or B2C (“business-to-consumer”). You may approach topics from similar angles and use the same channels, but you must understand your audience to write effective content. The “what” and the “why” of marketing remains the same, regardless of what you’re trying to sell, but the “how” of it all that will play an important role in the types of decisions you make moving forward.
B2B marketing is all about solving problems and showing how your solutions meets customers’ needs in the most compelling, logical, rational ways possible. B2C can play more to a person’s emotions. Instead of showing how your product can make someone’s job easier, you’re showing how your company can make a customer’s life better. Also, B2B markets are usually a little smaller with more niche audiences who care about the same core pain points. B2C markets are much larger, and messaging is broader.
For the rest of this blog post, we’ll focus on B2B content and how you can make it better.
Create Compelling Content
Your first step is the select the right format for your content. Do you need a piece that is very visual with graphs, chart, diagrams, iconography or photos? It’s good to include some kind of images in any piece of collateral you create, but some templates or collateral types are better for telling a more visual story.
Also, are you creating a highly-technical piece with a lot of details, including product features, government regulation codes, industry standards, mathematical formulas and more? Or is your piece more narrative and persuasive? Pick the best format to fit your story and best connect with your audience.
Next, outline your content. If you’re writing any piece that’s two pages or longer, you can typically use a structure like this:
- Introduction — Define the topic or explain the problem.
- Challenge — Mention your customer’s pain points.
- Body — Get into the meat of your discussion and resolve the challenge. Use subheads, bullets and numbered lists to better organize your content. If applicable, use stats, facts, visual elements and customer quotes to support your case. Be as detailed as needed, and show your expertise.
- Pitch — For many B2B pieces of collateral, it makes more sense to mention your products or services at the end of the document after you’ve fully described the problem and explained the need.
- Call-to-Action — Tell the reader what to do next, such a visit your website or request a demo.
In B2B marketing, many of your customers need and expect technical content. Through white papers, solution briefs, eBooks, data sheets, case studies and more, you must inform your audience will also captivating the reader, increasing trust, strengthening perceived value and building brand loyalty. Plus, let’s not forget that marketing is just once piece in the puzzle, and you’re also looking to generate new leads and create more sales.
