Your collateral: make it a help not a hindrance | Milner Strategic Marketing

Your collateral: make it a help not a hindrance

Collateral_Road_Sign

It’s hard trying to communicate with target customers. Most companies make it even harder by using inconsistent or contradictory customer facing collateral.

Collateral can include:

  • brochures
  • customer presentations
  • website
  • white papers
  • press releases
  • boiler plate text
  • data sheets
  • exhibition stands
  • direct mail

The causes vary from multiple authorship, to gradual changes in the company’s market position or strategic emphasis, to loose controls over content production or simply out of date collateral still being distributed to customers. Nobody actively tries to do a bad job but few companies are perfect when it comes to collateral. All the key messages in your collateral need to be the same; similar is not good enough.

Examples

  • The sales presentation says “our customer focus is SMEs” but the brochure says “large Corporates”
  • The web says our “geographic focus is the UK and Ireland” but the conference stand says “Europe”
  • The Press Release Boilerplate says you are “the Market Leader in the Software Security Market” but the White Paper says you are “the Technology Leader in Anti-Spamming”

Solution

If your strategy is to be the leading company in a specific market, then your collateral has to say exactly that. We have a formal collateral analysis methodology (CAMFACE©) which allows us to measure the consistency, clarity, completeness and presentation of every piece of your collateral. We identify and log all inconsistencies and provide specific instructions for improvement. We provide an overall performance score for your entire company’s collateral. To date, the highest overall score has been 78% before the changes were made.

In our experience, most clients find it’s a quick win. The review, analysis, scoring, and report back with recommendations takes 3-8 days depending on the amount of collateral. To make many of the improvements can be even quicker since so much collateral is electronic.

Post-improvement benefits

  • You will increase the clarity and simplicity of your core customer messages
  • Your target customers will understand exactly who you are, whatever they see or read
  • It will support your market and brand positioning and increase the consistency of what the company’s employees say to customers and other stakeholders

To find out more about improving your collateral, get in touch.

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