In any business, marketing collateral is essential for communicating your brand’s message and engaging with customers. Yet, as the amount of collateral grows, so do the challenges of managing it. You need a clear strategy to maintain control over your materials. Creating a holistic ecosystem for marketing material management allows you to streamline processes and enhance the impact of your content.

What Is Marketing Collateral?

Marketing collateral is any media or materials a company uses to communicate its brand, products or services to customers. From blog posts and marketing videos to old-school flyers and business cards, these materials narrate your brand’s message and support your sales efforts.

Marketing collateral can be essential to business success, promoting a brand and driving growth. It also plays a role in shaping the public’s perception of your brand. By creating engaging material, you can capture your audience’s interest and communicate the value of your products or services. As such, customers may feel more inclined to trust your business and stay loyal to it in the long run.

Types of Marketing Collateral

Various types of marketing collateral are available, each serving different purposes within your business strategy. Common examples include:

• Print materials: These include brochures, flyers, business cards and catalogs. Print materials are best for attracting customers in person, whether through trade shows, direct mail or one-on-one meetings.
• Digital assets: Digital assets are the modern approach to traditional marketing collateral. Today, brands can use videos, email templates and website banners to reach a wider audience online.
• Sales materials: This category includes case studies, white papers, product sheets and presentations. Companies typically use these to educate potential customers about the benefits of their offerings. In fact, approximately 65% of establishments have implemented sales material like these because of how powerful they are in persuading shoppers.

The Importance of Managing Marketing Collateral

Effective management of marketing collateral is crucial for several reasons:

Keeps Content Organized

Marketing collateral management helps maintain a well-organized system. When content is organized, it’s easier to find, update and distribute materials as needed. 

Disorganization can lead to missed opportunities and a lack of motivation within your team.

In fact, about 77% of people cited that clutter decreases their productivity, and 53% said that it reduces their motivation to get things done. By keeping your marketing collateral organized, you streamline your processes and boost your team’s productivity.

Ensures Brand Consistency

One of the most common challenges in marketing is keeping a brand message consistent across all channels. When you have a strategy for managing marketing collateral, all materials align with your brand’s voice, tone and visual identity. Consistency is key to building trust, as they come to recognize and rely on the familiar look and feel of your brand in every interaction.

Enhances Collaboration and Communication

Different teams within a company often use marketing collateral. Effectively managing these materials ensures everyone understands the business’s goals and has access to the right tools when they need them. This builds better working relationships between team members, leading to more cohesive marketing efforts.

4 Key Components of a Holistic Ecosystem

To build a holistic ecosystem for sustaining marketing collateral, you must understand four key components:

1. Planning: Establishes clear goals for your marketing collateral. This includes identifying the types of materials needed, understanding your audience, and setting guidelines for content creation.
2. Workflow: Develops a streamlined process for creating, reviewing and approving collateral. This ensures you produce materials efficiently and consistently.
3. Collaboration: Fosters strong teamwork across departments. It involves all relevant stakeholders in the process to ensure the collateral aligns with your brand and meets the needs of different teams.
4. Visibility: Implements systems that provide easy access to your collateral. This includes using digital asset management tools that allow team members to find and use the right materials quickly.

Building a Holistic Ecosystem for Managing Marketing Collateral

Now that you understand the basis of a holistic ecosystem, you can take various steps to build one.

1. Audit Your Existing Materials

One tactic to help you get started is to look at what you already have. Auditing your existing materials will help you determine what’s working, outdated and missing.

Consider reviewing all collateral and determine whether each piece still aligns with your brand’s current messaging and visual identity. Whichever material no longer serves your business’s goal should go into the discard pile. Then, you can look for any missing pieces of content and reorganize everything into categories to make them easier to manage.

2. Align Collateral With the Customer Journey

Different types of collateral serve various purposes depending on where the customer is in their buying process. For instance, educational blog posts, social media content and infographics should align with customers in the awareness stage as they are discovering your brand.

As they move into the consideration phase, more in-depth content like case studies and white papers will help them understand how your offerings meet their needs. Then, they may proceed to the next stages, which means you must tailor your content to provide timely and relevant information. This will allow your messaging to stay consistent throughout their experience.

3. Collaborate With the Right Tools

When teams work remotely or across different departments, it can be easy to lose key information and spend time looking for it. This can throw your project off track and cause you to miss deadlines. 

Using project management tools, you can ensure all work-related discussions are in one place. Many cloud-based solutions offer a centralized platform where teams can track tasks, share files and stay up to date in real time.

4. Streamline Content Creation Workflows

A smooth content creation process is crucial, as it ensures material production is quick and consistent. One survey found that 66% of respondents say it takes numerous days to receive the material they need, and the same percentage often moves on without it because it is too difficult to create. 

With a standardized process in place, you can reduce bottlenecks and confusion, enabling you to keep every project on track. An efficient workflow starts with outlining each step, from ideation to approval. This includes defining roles for team members, setting deadlines and creating templates for collateral.

5. Ensuring Marketing Collateral Visibility with a DAM System

A digital asset management (DAM) system is a central hub where team members can access stored materials. Ensuring all collateral is in one place allows everyone to be involved in the creation process. It also prevents materials from becoming lost or overlooked during development.

Building a Strong Foundation for Marketing Collateral Management

Effectively managing marketing collateral is key to maintaining a strong brand presence. However, you need a holistic approach to support it and your efforts. With a well-organized environment, you save time and resources. Implement these strategies to create a sustainable system, and you will motivate your team to produce high-quality collateral.