How To Design The Perfect Promotional Material

Whether you are running a small brick-and-mortar setup or a new eCommerce brand, scaling is not possible with good marketing. Promotional material comes in many forms and sits at the very center of your marketing campaign. After your product/service and your marketing strategy, the quality of your promotional material will play the most important role.

In fact, exceptionally good promotional material can even overtake the product and overcome weaknesses in a poor marketing strategy. However, there are a number of factors that determine how good a piece of marketing material really is. Let’s look at how you can design a great bit of marketing material and use it to your advantage.

Have A Goal

Before you start brainstorming creative ideas, start by defining an objective for the marketing efforts. Ideally, this should be a measurable objective that should be achieved within a given time frame. Marketing can, and usually is, an ongoing effort however to get the most out of each promotional campaign, it needs to be defined and measurable. According to research, businesses that set marketing goals are 376% more successful in their marketing efforts. Generally, businesses want to increase sales, grow into a new market, capture a bigger share of the market, raise capital or reach a new demographic, as their marketing goals.

Each of these tasks can be broken down into smaller, measurable, and easier-to-achieve missions. Look into how you can make this work for your product/service and then start working on the specific kind of promotional material that will help you achieve that goal. Goal setting is a critical stage because it will help you outline the rest of the journey and will also dictate how other areas of your marketing efforts should be structured.

Consider The Audience

The marketing campaign is geared towards your potential customers. Knowing who those customers are, what kinds of things they will be most receptive to, and what the best way is to reach those people will be very helpful. For instance, a marketing campaign designed for B2B customers is going to be quite different from one designed for B2C customers.

In either case, you still need to know who the customer will be within that category. This is a bit easier if you can break the customer profile down into a few traits or features. This could include things like age, location, income, gender, and even profession. These things will vary depending on your particular product/service.

Research

Research for your marketing campaign will involve researching your market and audience as well as the different forms of marketing and how they work for your product/service/business type. Thanks to the internet, there is a lot of marketing research available online for everything from a single-owner store to a multinational company. Most businesses are working within a limited budget and they only have so much time to achieve their objective.

Narrowing down your focus on the most effective strategies will save you both those resources. Moreover, it may also help you uncover marketing techniques that you hadn't previously considered and also give you some additional insights into how to achieve your campaign goals.

Have A Unique Selling Point

When you launch your marketing campaign, simply advertising your products/services is not enough to gain the attention of customers or have them take any action meaningful action. If your marketing doesn’t show the customer why you are better than the hundreds and thousands of other sellers in the market, they have little motivation to purchase from you. The quality of your marketing does say something about you but it doesn’t convey the value that the customer will get from doing business with you.

This is why it is important you understand your competition and create a marketing plan that not only addresses the pain points of the audience but also tells them why you are the best option in the market. Doing your homework before launching the promotional campaign will help you understand how you can make yourself stand out which will ensure you get the most out of every marketing dollar you spend.

Branding

Your promotional material needs to stand out but all your different strategies need to show that they all come from the same pavilion. This is the element of branding in your promotional material. Using the same font, the same group of colors, the same styling, etc. across all the promotional materials is key. According to the marketers at custompinsnow.com it’s the little things that count the most. Making sure the staff uniform is the same color as the marketing material, having a recognizable office space, wearing printed company items, and generally making everything seem like it is coming from the same source makes it a lot easier to get your audience to recognize your brand.  Moreover, it helps to make your company seem like a legitimate business and also gives your organization some authority.

Call To Action

You can use promotional material for any purpose. Whatever your objective is, the material itself needs to have some kind of call to action with it. Even if it is just material meant to inform people about a new service you launched or a new product that you will be releasing in a few months, a simple call to action such as 'visit our website' can have a huge impact. On one side it will get people to look into your band and educate themselves about you but on the other side, it will give you some feedback and tell you how effective your marketing campaign is.

This is crucial if you want to optimize your marketing techniques and continue to get more out of the money you spend on advertising. Moreover, there are lots of customers who see ads but they are on the fence about it and they need a little push to get them to pick a side. With a good call to action, they will take the first step into the conversion funnel. Once they begin, they may or may not buy but the important thing is to put your rods in the water and see what you come up with.

Clarity And Precision

A lot of marketers confuse 'highly impactful' with 'loaded with content'. Whether you are creating a video, a brochure, or just a social media post, the focus should be on making it clear and precise so that you can drive the kind of action you want. Loading it with too much information or making it intricate might seem great on the drawing board but such marketing often backfires in the real world. The consumer doesn't know what to do with all this information. To the marketer, it makes sense because they understand what they are saying but to the average consumer, who knows nothing about the product or service, the fact that it is too much to internalize also stops them from taking any action.

When formulating promotional material focus on making something that is designed for someone who has absolutely no idea about who you are and what you do with an action plan that is very easy to understand and carry out. This is particularly true for marketing platforms where you will only be able to capture a few seconds of your audience's attention. If you do want to go in-depth, use a platform where you can get more of their attention, through a direct email for example.

Make It Appealing

There are two main ways to make something very actionable for your audience. Either you will understand exactly what your customer wants, and offer them that thing, or create an attraction that everyone will want, and offer it to a bigger audience. This depends on how much you know about your audience and how easy/possible it is for you to create a customized offer. For instance, if you have an email list that you want to reach out to, it is much easier to create customized offerings based on the previous performance, preferences, and interests of the registered users. If you are sharing an ad through a local newspaper, you want to offer something that will attract the masses, such as a small discount on your entire stock, rather than a big discount on one or two specific items.

Today, there are a lot more avenues through which you can market your products and services. This is largely due to the internet because, just through the web, there are dozens of things you can do to reach out to potential customers. Traditional marketing is not dead just yet, so you don’t need to rule that out, but digital marketing is also important. Ideally, you should be using a combination of the two, if you are just starting out and have no knowledge of your audience. As you begin to understand where your audience is, and what kind of marketing channels are most effective in reaching them, you can narrow your focus on those channels. Moreover, as you start to develop a profile of your ideal customer, you can start optimizing your promotional materials to drive higher conversions. Marketing is all about trial and error so don’t be surprised if things don’t always go your way, and even things that work today are not guaranteed to work tomorrow.