When it comes to building brand awareness and marketing your business to potential customers, marketing materials like flyers, brochures, and business cards are an important piece of the puzzle. Accessible design software like Canva and Photoshop has made it easier for small businesses to create their own marketing materials, but even with the best visual design in the world, if the content isn’t right, then the materials aren’t fit for purpose. If you’re worried about leaving something off, then here’s a quick checklist of six things that you should include.
Your logo
In business, your logo is like your signature and so it should be featured prominently on every piece of marketing material that you produce. From your business cards to your exhibition stand, your logo should appear at least once in plain sight. Every time your logo is seen by a potential customer, it imprints a little further into their mind, raising your brand awareness and making sure that when that person sees it again, they are able to immediately connect it with you and your business.
Your contact details
If your marketing material is successful, then the next thing that most potential customers will want to do is to get in touch, which means they need to be able to easily find your contact details. Make sure to include your phone number, email address, and website and you may even want to consider adding in your social media accounts if you have a good social media presence.
Engaging copy
The copy you include on your marketing materials will need to vary depending on what the material is (a flyer or a brochure) and at which stage of the customer journey it is aimed at. Regardless of whether it forms a part of the awareness, information, evaluation or conversion stage, all the copy that you use on your marketing materials needs to reflect your brand tone of voice and needs to be engaging.
Imagery
Pictures tell a thousand words, and particularly when space is tight it can be very beneficial to include a diagram or a picture within your marketing materials. Aside from helping to get your message across, the imagery will also help to make your marketing materials appear more accessible, by breaking up chunks of heavy text and appealing to the visual side of the brain that is stimulated by pictures.
A QR code
QR codes are appearing increasingly on marketing materials as well as product packaging as a means by which to direct the consumer to an additional source of information. A QR code can be linked to any web address and so can be used to take a person to your website, to a marketing video, or even to your store. You can easily create QR codes using sites such as Flowcode and they can be scanned using most smartphone cameras.
A call to action
Last but not least, every piece of marketing material should contain some form of a call to action. Whether that be to visit your new website, to get in touch, to download a white paper, or to follow you on social media. It may seem simple, but research shows that people are more likely to do something if you ask them to and so this will help you to get the result that you want out of your marketing materials.
