Marketing collateral does not come cheap. Costs associated with textual content, graphic design, and production quickly add up. Obviously, you want to get an appropriate return on your investment. This article looks at seven common mistakes, or "sins," made when developing marketing collateral for the software industry. The sins discussed consider such concepts as targeting your market, lowering costs, and making it convenient for your potential customers to use your marketing collateral. Also considered are the various forms of marketing, such as hard copy, electronic, and e-mail. Finally, we consider the cost of changing marketing collateral and its reproduction.
However, before we start confessing our sins, we need to state the obvious. Marketing collateral must be tailored to your marketplace and products. To sell a car, you probably would emphasize miles per gallon, passenger accommodation, and maintenance costs. Applying these same metrics to software may not make a lot of sense or demonstrate the strengths of your software products. While it may go without saying, never lose sight of the obvious—know your marketplace. This simple statement is not considered one of the deadly sins because if you are committing this grievous offense, you need to go back to the basics and seriously rethink your marketing plan.
The good news is that committing one sin may not condemn you to marketing hell, but committing enough of them surely will. So, grab your holy water, prayer beads, or whatever your religion provides for protection, and let's proceed.
Sin #1. Hiding Your Message
Have you ever gone to a web site that is plastered with customer testimonials, but with either no indication of what it is selling or, at best, with its products or services written in small print? It's like lighting a candle and covering it with a basket. You need to tell your audience what you are selling, what services you offer, and what support you provide. Tell them up front that "We offer software designed for the process manufacturing industry," "We cater to the food and beverage industry," or "Our software was developed to support the field services industry."
To avoid the "hard sell" approach, it may be helpful to ease into the description of what you have to offer. Consider the example below for the food industry.
They say that "it's the ingredients that make food taste good." However, in a rapidly changing marketplace, it takes a lot more than ingredients to compete effectively and efficiently in the food industry. Our software is designed to take care of the production and operational issues of the food industry so you can focus on the freshness of the ingredients.
Don't assume that your audience already knows what you do. If they did, they probably would not need a marketing brochure in the first place. In creating marketing collateral, assume that the reader is seeing your company and its products for the first time. Stating the obvious is not a bad thing. With marketing collateral—hard copy or electronic—readers already familiar with a particular content can simply read on or scroll down.
