Choosing the Best Marketing Collateral for IT Decision Makers

Picking the right marketing
collateral to influence your target market may be a difficult decision for your marketing department. With so many options out there for messaging what is the preferable method to reach your potential customers? For IT companies that want to create marketing collateral that can influence purchasing, the following collateral have been found to be the most popular and successful:

• Product Brochures/Data sheet are the most disbursed collateral amongst IT influencers and decision makers. Data sheets provide non-biased and detailed product information to support purchasing decisions. Although popular, data sheets and brochures are considered supplementary collateral and are not very influential.
• White Papers are arguably the most successful marketing collateral at influencing an IT decision maker. White papers have a very high rate of readership because of the personal aspect and have the potential to become viral because they are often shared.
• Case Studies are the second most influential marketing collateral to IT buyers. Case studies are very beneficial to IT buyers because they are used to describe problems that can be similar to what another company is going through. The most successful case studies provide a company with useful information on options considered, implementation and evaluation, and an explanation of the technical process.
• Podcast/Videos are becoming an essential strategy to engage and demonstrate the usefulness of products. They can affect the perception of the customer and, if done right, are the preferred method for customers to receive information. Remember - the video is only as good as the usefulness of the content!
• Ebooks are historically popular, so it is not a surprise that there is a rapid increase of companies that are taking advantage of Ebooks as a marketing tool. Ebooks have been successful in replacing white papers, and can also be used in correlation with white papers to provide informational collateral about solutions and products.

To maximize your marketing budget the goal is to pick an effective collateral, but also a collateral that will benefit your company and its current marketing mix. Remember that the collateral you choose is as important as knowing what stage in the sales cycle that the collateral would be most useful.