5 Steps to Killer Marketing Materials

After hours and hours of your hard work, iterating through countless product designs, developing a reliable team, and conducting primary market research, you are finally ready to share your product with the world! You have already done all the hard work. All that now remains for you to do is to get people excited about your product. Promotional materials are perfect for this job and they include flyers, powerpoints, advertisements, and other visual media graphics.

Step 1: What is your company’s mission?

At the cornerstone of every successful business is their mission statement: it encompasses everything that the business endeavors to do and is currently doing. At Launch, we make our mission statements an empowering goal that we continuously strive to achieve. As a company, you should try to maintain a distinct and consistent design whenever you make marketing materials. The end goal is to make people feel as if the Marketing Material is from “X Company.” It should be easily recognizable and something that stays true to your brand. Apple, Samsung, Google, and Amazon are all behemoths of companies that masterfully craft their designs in a way to evoke feelings from the viewer. Similarly, every design your company creates should be able to tell a story, and have distinctive characteristics.

Step 2: Start Designing by Hand

As I have mentioned earlier, the importance of storytelling in your materials and designs is crucial. To truly connect with other people, and to maximize the potential of your marketing and advertising campaigns, there must be some form of human connection. To do this, it is always important to sketch potential ideas with a paper and pen. By establishing this human connection, the design becomes more meaningful and more effective. During this process, create several potential designs. Remember to keep your designs simplistic, but also complex enough to intrigue viewers. Try multiple different ideas to eventually stumble upons the ones you like the most.

Step 3: Translating Hand Designs into Digital Media

After you have picked out something you like, it is time to create a digital reproduction of that design. The first step is to scan your design into Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator (or any other graphics software of your choice). Then, using the pen tool, trace over your design until you have gone through it all. Hide the scanned layer and see how the design looks and see if you want to make any adjustments. Now that you have a black and white version of your design, you need to pick the appropriate colors for the design at hand. It is typically best practice to follow your branding color scheme or use appropriate colors that match most similarly with your task at hand. If you do not already have a color scheme for your company, I would recommend using coolors.co to determine a branding scheme. Each color symbolizes something different. Here is a general outline of what each color means so that you can determine which one will work best for your company:

• Red symbolizes energy, power, and leadership
• Green symbolizes calm and protection
• Yellow symbolizes optimism, education, and freshness
• Blue symbolizes stability, serenity, and trust
• Pink symbolizes love and beauty
• Orange symbolizes passion and enthusiasm

Step 4: Share Your Designs With Other People

In much the same way you did Primary Market Research, go out and talk to people! Ask for their unbiased opinions regarding each of your designs. After evaluating the feedback you receive, make the necessary changes and then repeat this step once more. Once it seems like the majority like your design, you are done. Now, you can use your design for marketing purposes.

Step 5: Refining the Design and Collecting Data

You can’t ever get enough feedback. Once you have the first version of your design established, it should be applied to the marketplace. If it surpasses or meets your projected goals, in terms of views, revenue, and other forms of traction, then your design was successful. Even if it didn’t, you learned some important information to change your design. Either way, after a couple days of using those materials, try to get feedback from users and from purchases of your product: using their opinion, change the design accordingly if you think it will do well.