If you want to succeed as an eCommerce brand, you shouldn’t just focus on the quality of your products. A good marketing strategy is just as important. After all, how else will ideal customers know about your high-quality offerings if they don’t know they exist in the first place?
A key component of a good marketing strategy is your collateral. Marketing collateral refers to the resources and materials that support a brand’s marketing efforts. It can come in different forms, from brochures to social media posts and even logos and brand colors.
With its eye-catching visuals and compelling text, effective marketing collateral can help showcase your brand identity, boost awareness, and drive sales.
Ready to reap all those benefits for brand success? Here are seven types of marketing collateral you can leverage.
7 Must-Have Marketing Collateral for Every eCommerce Brand
Although you’re not required to have all these examples of marketing collateral in your arsenal especially if you have a limited marketing budget, know that the more you have of these, the better results you can expect. Each marketing collateral caters to different segments (social media posts cater to social media users and blog posts to avid readers, for example). That means the more of these types of content you use, the more potential clients you can reach.
Now let’s get into the details!
1. Website
This is perhaps one of the most important types of marketing collateral for eCommerce brands. A well-designed website allows you to showcase your offerings and drive sales. Just make sure it provides an intuitive shopping experience. It should also reflect your branding. Generate a domain name that best showcases your personality and include visuals and text that reflect your brand values.
2. Logo and Brand Colors
Logos and brand colors should be a mainstay in every brand’s sales and marketing asset. A logo is a graphic design element that represents the brand. Brand colors, meanwhile, are a key component of a brand’s visual identity. They’re the colors that best reflect the brand’s personality and values.
Once you choose a logo and brand colors, make sure you stick to them throughout to ensure brand recognition.
3. Product Catalog
A product catalog shows your brand’s entire product range. This product list includes high-quality images of your offerings and outlines everything from their specifications, pricing, and key features.
Although physical product catalogs are still common, digital ones are fast-becoming the norm, especially for eCommerce brands. This piece of collateral includes interactive features like clickable links. Embed it on your website and marketing emails to increase its accessibility and reach.
4. Reviews and Testimonials
User reviews and testimonials help support an eCommerce brand’s marketing efforts in much the same way a website does. However, unlike a website which the brand itself creates, reviews and testimonials are created by actual customers. ECommerce brands like you can get the most of reviews and testimonials as marketing collateral by displaying them on their other sales and marketing assets like their website and emails. They’re excellent social proof and may just be the final nudge potential customers need to take your desired action.
But you need to ensure the reviews and testimonials are positive in the first place. For this, just focus on offering high-quality products and a good customer experience. If you put your customer front and center at all times, expect them to heap praises on your brand even when you don’t ask them to.
5. Blog Posts
Blog posts are one of the most powerful marketing materials. After all, when optimized, they can drive traffic to your site and increase your eCommerce brand’s visibility. As part of your content marketing strategy, they can encourage customer engagement as well. They can elicit discussions that help you build relationships with your potential customers and enhance brand loyalty.
To reap these benefits, apart from optimizing your blog posts for SEO, make sure they’re also high-quality and offer actionable insights.
6. Emails and Newsletters
Marketing emails are great for nurturing relationships with your potential customers. Whether they’re promotional emails, newsletters or informative content, they can enhance brand loyalty. Email campaigns can also drive traffic to your site and position your eCommerce brand as a thought leader in the industry.
You’ll need to build an email list first for these email marketing campaigns. Offer a lead magnet in exchange for the email address of prospective customers. Just make sure the lead magnet is of value and aligns with the products you sell. For instance, if you’re selling dog products, why not offer a comprehensive guide to proper dog nutrition? This will help ensure those who subscribe to your email list are actually dog owners who are more likely to buy your products.
7. Social Media Posts
With their billions of users, social media platforms like Instagram, X and Facebook enable you to effectively showcase your offerings. Social media posts can also direct traffic to your site, with their eye-catching visuals and engaging copy.
You can create different types of social media posts to cater to your audience’s different preferences, from quizzes that engage to teasers that pique curiosity and infographics that inform. To ensure a single post reaches as many people as possible, increase your number of Facebook, X and Instagram followers first. Make sure you also respond to each social media user’s comment on your posts to further boost audience engagement.
Tips to Create Great Marketing Collateral
Now that you know the types of marketing collateral your eCommerce brand should have, let’s take a look at some general tips on how to create them:
Define Your Goals
The only way you can create an excellent piece of marketing collateral is if you define your goals for creating it in the first place.
Some types of marketing collateral already come with intrinsic goals. For instance, a brand’s goal for designing logos and choosing brand colors is always to create a visual identity for itself and boost brand recognition. For other types of marketing collateral, however, the goals for creation may vary. You may aim to sell or simply inform with your marketing email, for example. A social media post may seek to drive traffic to a site or just engage.
If you take the time to define what you want to achieve with your marketing collateral, you can ensure all its elements exist to help you reach that purpose. You can also set the right metrics you’ll use to gauge whether your marketing collateral is effective or not. For instance, if your aim was to sell with your marketing email, then a potential metric is actual sales.
Know Your Target Audience
Always remember that your marketing collateral exists for an audience. You want this audience to consume this content so it follows that it should align with their preferences.
To ensure this alignment, then, marketing teams need to get to know their target audience prior to creating blog posts, product catalogs and emails. Look at your analytics tools to determine everything from their demographics to their interests. If you don’t have this historical data just yet, send them surveys to know their pain points and other key insights.
You can create an audience persona, a fictional representation of your target audience, that gathers all the data you found. This persona shall serve as your guide in marketing collateral creation.
Collect Other Types of Data for Informed Decision-Making
Audience data shouldn’t be the only data you collect. Once your marketing collateral is published, you need to monitor whether it works as intended.
So, check your analytics tools to monitor your set metrics such as clickthrough and conversion rates, and traffic. If your collateral meets your success metrics, then leave it as it is. But if it doesn’t, you’ll need to make changes to it until it does.
Maintain Brand Consistency
Your target audience should be able to associate all the pieces of marketing collateral with your brand without exerting much effort. That’s why brand consistency is key. Your blog posts, emails, social media posts, and even your reviews and testimonials should be written in the same language tone. They should also carry the same eCommerce logo and brand colors.
When you maintain this level of consistency, you can enhance brand recognition that’s key to eCommerce success.
Conclusion
Effective marketing collateral is key to any eCommerce brand’s success. Everything from websites to blog posts and reviews and testimonials can help you stand out.
Whichever marketing collateral pieces you opt for, just make sure you follow the general tips for creating it for the best results. Define your goals, know your target audience, and collect other types of data to make adjustments to your relevant content if necessary. Also maintain brand consistency.
Ready to edge out the competition with your marketing collateral?
Author Bio:
Nico is the founder of Launch Space. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions. When not strategizing growth, he enjoys building practical tools like the Domain Name Generator.
