7 Steps for Creating Effective Marketing Materials

Small business owners typically spend anywhere from 2-10% of their revenue on marketing. Marketing budgets include costs for online advertising, social media ads, traditional media, and all the support you hire to create your marketing materials. 

Learning how to follow effective marketing material design principles can help you save some money and reach the widest possible audience as you work to grow your business.

Creating effective marketing materials requires you to find a balance of compelling content and strong design. They are clear and simple, free from too much information or excessive design elements that drag the audience’s attention all over the image. 

The focus of these marketing materials is on the customer– not the company or even the product itself. They speak to the customer’s needs and how the available product or service can alleviate related pain points. 

Physical marketing materials often include business cards, brochures, and flyers. Digital marketing materials may include social media ads, email templates, and landing pages. 

Before creating marketing materials, determine exactly what your end goal is. Most businesses are working toward one of these objectives:

• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Customer engagement
• Sales 
• Conversions

Set SMART goals– goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound– instead of vague objectives. 

✅ We will grow our Instagram following by 10% within the next three months by posting high-quality content, leveraging Instagram reels, and partnering with X brand for a giveaway. 

❌ We will send more emails to our subscribers and engage them more. 

This is also time to determine who your target audience is. Gather data about their demographics, preferred communication channels, pain points, and buying behaviors. 

Finally, map out your marketing strategy. A strong plan includes a detailed timeline and budget to ensure resources are allocated effectively.

Your brand identity is what differentiates your business from your competitors and builds trust with your audience. Elements of brand identity include:

• company logo
• color scheme
• typography
• voice and tone

Your brand identity should align with your company mission and values. If you’re struggling to connect the two, ask yourself:

• What makes your brand stand out from competitors?
• How do you want customers to perceive your business?
• What core message do you want your marketing materials to communicate?

Consistency across all marketing materials helps reinforce brand recognition.

Without a single word, you can look at this logo and know exactly what clothing company it represents— 

And even sans logo, 4 bold colors are enough to bring to mind a specific tech giant. 

A strong brand identity results in instant recognition. 

It’s essential that you go where your audience is so that your messaging reaches them. The best marketing channels and materials depend on your target audience and advertising objectives.

For example, you may have better luck connecting with a younger audience using video content on social media, while older professionals might gravitate toward written content shared through email. 

However, instead of making assumptions about where your potential customers hang out based on their age or demographics, survey members of your target audience to determine what marketing channels and materials will appeal to them. 

Before designing any marketing materials, collect all necessary content including product descriptions and specifications, company information, testimonials, and promotional offers.

If you’re working with anyone else, whether it’s an internal team or a freelancer that you’re outsourcing to, use a shared document or content management system so everyone has easy access to all the pertinent information. Even if you’re a one-man-show, you’ll be more efficient and consistent if you have all the information you need in a single place. 

Your messaging should be concise and persuasive. Avoid using industry jargon or complex terms that the general public wouldn’t understand. Instead, focus on simple and clear wording that resonates with your audience. 

It’s generally recommended to aim for content written at a 7th or 8th grade reading level. You can use tools such as the Hemingway App to evaluate the reading level of what you’ve written. 

Keep your content scannable using headings, subheadings, bullet points, and visuals. 

Incorporate compelling calls to action, which encourage customers to take the next step, whether that’s visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase.

Visuals play a key role in capturing attention and reinforcing your message. Use professional-quality images, graphics, and videos that align with your brand identity. 

Low-resolution and generic stock photos can reflect poorly on your company, so it may be worth the investment to hire a professional photographer or graphic designer if needed. An hour-long brand photoshoot can net hundreds of photos to use across your various marketing materials. 

You can also use infographics to simplify complex information and make content more digestible. With Piktochart’s AI Design Generator, users just upload a document and have it effortlessly converted into a visual.

Errors in grammar and spelling can undermine your credibility and professionalism, so proofread more than once. 

Use tools like Grammarly and spell check, but have an editor or team member review the content as well. Humans can catch mistakes that machines tend to overlook. 

Your human editor can also review the content for tone and voice. Errors are about more than grammar– you want to make sure your marketing content lines up with the brand identity you’ve established.

You know that before creating any marketing content, you need to establish your brand guidelines. In Piktochart, you upload this information once and the platform saves it to be used again and again.

To set your brand assets, head to the menu on the left. 

You’ll be able to set your brand colors, fonts, and logos. 

Here, you can enter the six-digit hex code for your brand colors or choose custom colors from a color wheel. 

If you haven’t yet determined your brand colors, you can upload an image to the color scheme, which will pull six colors to create a brand color scheme for you. 

This is especially helpful if you have an idea of how you want your brand colors to ‘feel’ but haven’t yet identified specific hues that match. For example, for an outdoor-focused business we can pull a picturesque mountain scene and receive these woodsy shades.

Next, you can set the brand font. If you’ve already chosen specific fonts, you can upload them to your account. There’s also an option to scroll through the fonts available on Piktochart and choose your font for your display, titles, headers, body text, and captions. 

Finally, you need to set your brand logo. In this section, you’ll need to upload assets you’ve already created. If you don’t already have a logo, a few template designs are available for you to customize. 

Now that your brand guidelines are set, it’s time to head back to the homepage and start your project. In this example, we’re creating a flyer.

More than 100 event and promotional options are available. Let’s say I provide marketing support for a local gym and I want to advertise our upcoming enrollment special. I head to the promotional section and ultimately choose this one–

Sure, it’s not *exactly* what I need right now, but it will function as a solid base I can edit to make my own. As someone who considers myself a little design challenged, I need ideas to work off of instead of trying to pull something together from nothing. 

First, we head to the color tab on the left and select Brand to change the colors to match the color palette we’ve established for the gym. 

This instantly changes the feel of the flyer, but we’ve got more tweaks to make. 

We edit the text next to feature the Valentine’s Day special we’re featuring. The new text, however, is too big for the space. 

And when we adjust its size, it’s not centered within the speech bubble. Go to move it, and the entire section of graphics moves. See how it’s all highlighted? This usually simplifies the design process so you don’t have to move and resize each element one-by-one, but in this case we need to be able to change a single element. 

To adjust the text, we just head to the top and select this icon, which ungroups the section to allow individual changes. 

This allows us to center the text.

Next up is swapping out our images for something pertinent. Let’s click on the graphics icon on the left and search for ‘gym.’ You can filter for a specific kind of image, which makes it easier to add similar images without weeding through hundreds of choices that don’t share the same look.

This time we’re going to add stickers, because this type of image usually has a fill color instead of the simple outline of several other graphic styles. We’re going to go for this weight bench, then get really creative and layer some text over top. Add just a touch of valentine graphics, and the end result is a flyer that looks like this—

We can download this and then print it out, send it through text, add it as an email attachment, and distribute it wherever we think wherever we’ve determined our target audience is. 

These mistakes can weaken the impact of your marketing efforts and ultimately cost you money. Learn what they are and what you can do to avoid them while designing your new marketing assets. 

Less is more when it comes to creating your marketing materials. A cluttered design will confuse your audience and lose their attention due to the onslaught of information overload. 

Avoid this mistake by keeping your design simple with plenty of white space to ensure readability. Use a clear visual hierarchy and prioritize key elements like headlines, calls to action, and images. 

You can test your design by asking other people to view your marketing materials and then look away within a few seconds. What message did they take away in that short span?

Don’t try to create marketing materials that will appeal to everyone, because the end result is that you capture no one’s attention. Generic messaging doesn’t cultivate any sort of connection. 

Avoid this mistake by clearly defining your target audience based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Use language and imagery that appeals to that specific group of people.

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach for your target audience, customize your marketing materials for different segments. Take a different approach in the messaging, design, and visuals you use for each group.

Brand consistency is essential for building trust and recognition, but it can be challenging to maintain a uniform look and message across your marketing materials. 

Inconsistent branding can make your business look unprofessional and disorganized. Using different stylistic choices across your marketing materials makes it hard for customers to recognize your brand. 

Avoid this mistake by creating brand guidelines that describe your color palette, typography, logo usage, and tone and voice. Once these are in place, use them consistently across all materials. For example, decide where your logo will go on your assets and keep it in the same place no matter what you’re designing. 

Creating effective marketing materials involves following strong design principles, but the process isn’t just about making things look good. Marketing also requires a clear strategy, with clear messaging, strong branding, and strategic distribution. 

If you need support on the design side, Piktochart has templates available for almost any marketing asset you can think of. Choose from thousands of pre-made materials or use our AI Design Generator for a completely custom made graphic. 

Your future marketing materials are just a click away.