Hollister CREATIVE

Tips for upgrading your marketing folder

It's pretty common that a company's first marketing kit is an off-the-shelf pocket folder with its logo on the front and information sheets output from a desktop printer tucked inside. But as a company becomes more successful and competes at higher levels, it often finds that its home-grown marketing materials are no match for the polished, professional pieces put out by competitors.

The Metro Technology Services marketing kit makeover began when the client challenged us to write and design a piece as powerful as the Visual Alert software solutions Metro sells to public safety agencies. The steps we took could guide any effort to upgrade a marketing kit from Good to Great.

1. Hone the message to focus on the things customers care most about. In Metro's case, for example, we focused on the three things public safety agencies care most about when choosing software.
    
2. Establish an information hierarchy to organize company and product information into easily digested chunks.
    
3. Obtain high-quality photos. Nothing says amateur like a crummy snapshot. For Metro, we dispatched photographers to customer sites to capture images of real officers on the job and using the software.
    
4. Create a signature design inspired by the client's product. For Metro, the background pattern suggests movement, data transfer and technology.
    
5. Use design elements to make a kit with multiple elements a cohesive whole. For example, the rounded corner box shapes are echoed in photo and text boxes throughout. A strong color palette carries through the folder to the inserts, each of which emphasizes one of the colors to make it distinctive yet connected.