Since 1999
This article will restrict itself to visual marketing media types/marketing collateral. A fuller list of marketing materials includes blogs, landing pages, pillar pages, magazines, case studies, brand stories, presentations, proposals, newsletters, reports, and emailers. These content-driven strategies will be discussed elsewhere.
Before the advent of digital businesses, marketing collateral used to mean brochures, catalogs, and spec sheets that were used to support the sales process. Now, with most customer interactions happening online, infographics, social media images, digital advertisements, flyers, brochures, and ebooks have come to replace traditionally printed material. And as marketing outreaches increasingly center on homes and home offices in 2021, graphic design elements are emerging as the key differentiator for eCommerce, content publishing, and even support websites.
Good graphic design on your website or app makes for psychologically pleasant user experiences. In the same way, visually appealing promotional material, with its intention of informing, educating, and guiding prospects and customers in solving their challenges, can help foster trust, engender warmth, and at it’s most seductive, induce a prospect to keep returning and paying again. If you find this hard to believe, consider the trustworthy blue that runs through Facebook themes. Its intention is to lull users into believing that they can share their most intimate conversations without blowback. Coca-Cola’s crimson red is meant to invoke a sense of energy and excitement. But color psychology isn’t the only science-backed strategy that professional graphic design companies employ. Gestalt principles are another example of design psychology that impacts viewers. This is the tendency of the human eye to group together design elements based on similarity, proximity, continuity, closure, and depth perception for 2D figures that affect how we differentiate between the foreground and background. Here, we show you the situations in which service, sales, and marketing professionals can use graphically ‘strong’ marketing collateral to meet revenue targets effectively.
Flyers used to be an easy way to land your marketing communications into a prospect’s lap – literally. Some businesses still sell via face-to-face interactions, however, and flyers can be used to as a ready supplement for online information when rendering services onsite. They can be used to cross-sell or up-sell in situations where the sales rep’s eye is the best instant judge for a potential lead. Insurance salesmen and chain marketers will be quite familiar with these ideas.
These can be both paperbound and digital. You can hand over or send brochures to visitors at exhibitions, leave them around cafe coffee tables, summarize product information, start a conversation (as a sales rep), or throw a teaser to a cold lead. Here again, the quality of the art, structure, and layout are what are going to induce a lead to pick up and leaf through.
Sometimes, the best way to attract a prospect’s attention is by giving information for free. But that free information has to be useful and user-friendly at the same time. Leaving the content aside, the text, type, grids, and graphics have to have simplicity and contrast to get the reader to the most important parts quickly. The flow of information needs to be intuitive to the user. These eBooks can be exchanged in return for people’s emails which can then be used to nurture leads for future campaigns.
If a picture can speak a thousand words, combining the two should make an exponential difference. Even if that’s an exaggeration, there’s no doubt that visual guides have the power to make complex ideas appear comprehensible. Research has shown that online users will reward good infographics with ample attention, re-sharing them virally, visiting often, and warming themselves up for your future sales pitches. Having said that, these are one of the hardest items of collateral to make and only the most intelligent graphic designers will do justice to them.
These are similar to flyers in that they are meant to communicate an urgency – a restaurant opening on Friday, an event uptown, or a soon-to-run-out-of-stock inventory of special goodies. If you’re looking for what psychologists call a visceral reaction – a positive reaction to great art that comes from the gut – there are no better tools than flyers, pamphlets, and leaflets. Digital brochure and pamphlet designs, branding kits, eBooks, flyers, and infographics require the keen eye of a trained and experienced graphics practitioner. Being creative is not enough. Have a look at some great graphic design portfolio examples to review here.
