The Difference Between Marketing Collateral And Content
For the better part of the past century a marketing department was tasked with developing compelling marketing collateral. That collateral was designed for salespeople to have something to bring along on sales appointments and serve as the center discussion point for their meetings with clients.
The difference between collateral and content lies in who is top of mind when it was developed. All marketing collateral is, when viewed through the lens of impact, a sales pitch. Whether it’s about features and benefits, or perhaps a lower cost, limited time availability, or other sales-centric messaging designed to drive interest in a specific solution, it’s a sales pitch. Simply put, it’s about you.
Content on the other hand is not just a different approach, it’s a different mindset. The central difference between content and marketing collateral isn’t about number of pages, colors, size of space, it’s about your customer and future customers. It has very little, if anything, to do with you (meaning your solutions, products or brand) and everything to do with understanding how connection occurs now vs. 20 years ago.
Questions like:
- What keeps this person up at night?
- How does EACH stakeholder find information related to THEIR OUTCOME related to making a purchase?
- What products or services do they source and why?
- Where does their stress come from?
- Where are they in the purchasing decision making loop?
- What should they be worried about that they aren’t?
- What should this be a higher priority on their list of concerns than it currently is?
These questions are designed to help you create a connection point with your customer. The two most important words in these questions are “they” and “their.” None of the questions include the word “we” or “us” or “our” and that is for good reason. That reason? IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU.
We need to rethink how impactful we truly are as a brand when we write what we consider to be content. Case histories, application notes, benefit highlight pieces, are important so please don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. In fact, they are required content and must reads along the buyer’s journey. The danger is when they represent more than 50% of your content portfolio. Without thought leadership content that takes the answers to the above questions into account, your case histories won’t have nearly the impact they could if delivered upon a foundational layer of issue-based content.
Remember, your customers and especially your potential customers want to engage in and learn about topics THEY find interesting. Hearing abut how incredible your solution is, unfortunately for you, is NOT interesting … yet. Set the stage for a connection and at some point, much sooner than later, they WILL find your collateral interesting. Let’s start by giving them a reason to engage and produce CONTENT first.
Image credit: "The Salesman" Trending Topics 2019 © 2019, used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/