Marketing Materials: Writing Tips to Help Grow Your Business

The phrase “marketing materials” covers everything from your logo and business cards to your ads and giveaways (like pens, keychains, etc.) to e-mail campaigns and direct mail. It’s a broad topic and includes design as well as copywriting. Here we’ll focus on the writing, and we’ll leave the design to the designers.

Coherent Customization

Your marketing materials are your public face. It’s critical that they work together in a coordinated effort. You want to get the same message across in all of them, but keep in mind that different audiences and different media call for different approaches. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel for every piece, but do customize your materials by where they will be distributed and who will be seeing them.

Use Marketing Materials to Show, Not Tell

The most important thing to keep in mind when writing copy for your arsenal of marketing materials is that customers don’t care about the product or service you are selling—they want to know what its benefits are FOR THEM. In other words, don’t tell the customers what you are selling—show them what they are buying. Show them how your product meets their needs and desires, how it solves problems they have, how it prevents bad things from happening to them. Show them how your product or service is better than other similar ones or how it’s unique.

Make It Easy to Follow Through

Make your potential customers want to learn more by using catchy headlines and concise, persuasive prose. Don’t forget to tell them HOW they can purchase your product or contract your services by including a call to action —at the very least a URL and/or a phone number, but in pieces with more text, you can tell them exactly what to do: “Call this number…” “Contact us at…”