Marketing Collateral – Less is More

Challenge: Companies in B-To-B space will not win or lose based on product documentation

Rarely will a company succeed because its product literature is outstanding. Certainly, every company needs collateral that is clear, concise and informative, and this literature needs to answer questions from prospects that help them evaluate the solution when a sales rep is not close at hand. The collateral needs to reinforce key branding and messaging to leverage top line value propositions.

That being said, I have frequently seen companies over-invest time and resources into their marketing collateral, taking down inordinate amounts of time from product management teams. Furthermore, if the collateral structure is complex, it can require more marcom headcount at the expense of product management or product marketing personnel. The cycle gets worse with ongoing updates, maintaining print inventories, distribution, etc.

 Start with the end in mind, when it comes to most things, including your approach to collateral. What does your prospect need in the form of print and online collateral to learn more about how your product will solve his or her issues? Developing fewer pieces to meet this requirement can eliminate future drag on your entire team to keep these up to date with product releases and printed versions.

Lesson: Keep your collateral to a minimum and make your entire marketing team more efficient.

Author: Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies

For the last 20 years, I have led demand generation teams supporting high growth technology companies. Now working as an independent consultant, my responsibility is to apply best practices in the creation of these programs. My goal is to enable marketing teams to become self sufficient with a data driven culture of KPI's, test and measurement in service of achieving company revenue targets. My approach is to work with senior management identifying objectives and wildly important goals. With these in mind, we work together to build programs, processes and systems that will reach these goals along with the measurement KPI's to evaluate progress. Along the way we will enable the team to manage and maintain these systems so achieving these goals becomes a natural cadence of the marketing organization. View all posts by Larry Stein at TechMarketingStrategies