Collateral Materials

Produce Marketing Materials On Your Own

The high cost of marketing materials can put a serious dent in a startup's budget. With a limitless variety of do-it-yourself resources available, producing your own marketing materials can be a way to reduce expenses during the early days of your business.

Your business needs brochures and other marketing materials.

But marketing materials are expensive and your start-up doesn't have the cash to outsource them to a high-end design firm and printing company. Now what?

If you're like most startup business owners, it's really a no-brainer. You're going to produce marketing materials on your own. These days, the marketplace is full of do-it-yourself design and print alternatives, and some are capable of creating some pretty impressive stuff.

Think Temporary

If you decide to produce your own marketing materials, go into it with a temporary mindset. Creating your own marketing materials is cheap, but it takes time. Ultimately the time you spend creating marketing materials will be better spent in other areas of your business. Also, professional designer and printers produce a higher quality product. As your business grows, people will start to wonder what's going on if your brochures look like you printed them in the back room.

Use Templates

In the "old days", entrepreneurs used to have to create their marketing materials from scratch. Not anymore. Today, software and online solutions offer templates that make it easy to create attractive marketing materials.

Be Original

Try to incorporate original graphics and design concepts into your marketing materials. ClipArt is convenient, but it communicates a lack of creativity and it can be seen as a sign that you aren't serious about your company - especially when you rely on ClipArt to create your company logo.

Know Your Limits

If you're a startup, you probably don't have high quality printing and copying resources in your office. Even though your software allows you to design attractive marketing material, your ability to print it in-house may be limited. If outsourcing the printing isn't an option, know your print limitations before you spend hours creating something you can't reproduce.

Leverage Technology

From a print quality perspective, everyone's marketing materials look the same on a computer screen. Whenever possible, flip your marketing materials into PDFs and distribute them electronically to save money and level the playing field.

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