Today, we live in an informed economy. Anybody looking for any product/service can do a proper evaluation before he makes a purchase even without getting in touch with any sales person from that company. It is important to get your marketing collateral up and available at your digital properties. A prospect will look through the collateral available at the company website and at independent forums. I really classify the collateral into 2 parts,
- Tactical collateral, without which your sales team/website is entirely ineffective Examples are web copy, brochure, case studies, presentations on offerings
- Strategic collateral that helps others form opinions about your product/service in a subtle way. Examples are white papers, article posts, webinars, PR
While companies can make a choice about when they would like to launch into strategic collateral, they just have to get their tactical collateral in place before they define their go-to-market.
How does one go about generating this, then in a structured form. Here are some simple steps that will ensure that you can get your marketing collateral up and ready for sales engagement in less than 2 weeks.
1) Define primary and secondary level messaging
Assemble your major stakeholders, management, sales of your company and conduct a workshop on what the company/solution messaging should be. A good idea is to find out why some of your top clients decided to and continue to work with you. Primary messaging levers will include max 1 to 2 items, while secondary messaging levers could be another 3-4 items. Try and restrict your total messaging areas to less than 6-7.
2) Customer engagements audit
Having identified the messaging levers, identify a few of your valued customer engagements and try to find out if the messaging levers played a part in winning these deals. You can use a weighted average system to come up with refined scores during this audit. This will help validate your findings from step 1
3) Brochure & Case studies theme
Focus on the messaging elements that you have shortlisted as a result of the above steps and make sure that you highlight them through the case studies that you create for your customer engagements. You may be tempted to highlight a variety of issues, but make sure that the focus is on the messaging elements identified. Univocal messaging across different artifacts will help carry the message further.
4) Web copy replication
Avoid having an entirely different theme and messaging for the website. Replicate what you have identified as themes in your brochure/case studies and make sure that you harp on it further through your web-copy. Today, we are in the world of dynamic websites, but what you define as core elements of your product/solution could have a shelf life of about 12-18 months.
5) Engage an expert
Engaging an expert brings in a very important third party opinion to this whole exercise and also identifies this as a project with firm deadlines. Also running these moderated workshops and audits becomes a lot more structured.
If you need help in to get your marketing collateral up , do visit our services page. Let me know if this was useful and any more ideas/thoughts. How to design and write case studies to help you win new business