Traditionally, marketers have used printed collateral to communicate key messages and build a consistent brand image among customers and prospects. Now that email and the web are our primary means of information exchange, there are new considerations for what we used to call “collateral.”

In the first part of our series on tips to consider when developing effective collateral pieces, we discussed quality and convenience. Check out our first few tips here (http://arketi.com/blog/archives/1122) and continue reading for more helpful hints.

3. One page at a time
This one can really hurt but makes perfect sense. When a potential customer prints a collateral piece, they will likely view it one page at a time. Few if any will read it in “facing pages” like a traditional printed piece.

This is causing marketing professionals to rethink spreads. It’s not that you cannot use them, but the challenge is to consider how the information could be presented. By not taking into account the single-page format, you could be hurting both your design and your message.

PDFs can be arranged to be viewed in spreads, rather than a page at a time. The user can make this choice, but a best practice is to assign the PDF’s properties to the layout you want it to be viewed in. Setting the “Fit to page” property is a good idea while you’re at it.

4. Remember content is still king
No matter how good your design, if your content is weak, your collateral will perform poorly. Ultimately, content is what the business reader is looking for. Structuring the content to be accessible and easily digestible is essential.

Today’s business reader is really more of a “scanner,” looking for items of interest that will cause them to stop and then actually read. Knowing this, here are some tips for content:

• Break the content up with headings and subheads
• Embrace short paragraphs (even one-sentence paragraphs)
• Put key information into bulleted lists (but try to limit yourself to 5 or 6 bullets per list)
• Highlight important words or phrases in bold and/or color

Simply applying these four tips when developing digital collateral will increase the readability of the resulting piece.

In some ways, digital collateral may be different from traditional, but the same over-arching principles of good communication apply: ensure your content is relevant and well-written; adapt your design to the user’s environment (whether on-screen or on a desktop printer); and communicate as simply and directly as possible.

Traditionally, marketers have used printed collateral to communicate key messages and build a consistent brand image among customers and prospects. Now that email and the web are our primary means of information exchange, there are new considerations for what we used to call “collateral.”

The printed collateral piece, truthfully, is not often printed – or at least not professionally printed. Today, collateral must translate well to both print and digital output.

How do marketers develop collateral pieces to be effective in our web 2.0 world? Here are four tips to consider:

• Print quality
• File size and email restrictions
• Single-page format
• Content construction

1. Print quality should always be in the front of your mind
Knowing a recipient may print your collateral piece on a home printer or otherwise “less-than-stellar” printer, marketers should be mindful of the colors and design used. A black-and-white printer does not deliver the impact a professional, color laser printer – so choose your color scheme accordingly.

Consider also how images and logos will appear when grainy or in low-resolution. Think twice about small graphics and charts if the piece you are developing will primarily be distributed electronically. Reversed out type (white text on a colored background) can also be hard to read when printed on a low-end printer, so avoid thin fonts, especially those with serifs.

Finally, consider bleeds. All printers have margins outside which they cannot print. If your document includes bleeds, these will be lost. That doesn’t mean bleeds must be banned – but don’t make them critical to your design. It might sound “early 80s” but consider whether the piece will pass the “fax test” – if it does then it’s good for an inkjet printer too.

2. Create files that are easy to send and receive
Spam and email-borne viruses are rampant and as a result spam filters and security software are a must. While these security solutions help to safeguard a company, they may also block the “good” along with the “bad.”

Emails with attachments can be problematic for many. Using standard file formats, like a PDF, can help ensure your attachment gets through. Less common formats such as SWF or PPS files are more likely to be blocked.

File size is another consideration. Most email systems limit the size of file they will allow to pass – 10 or 20 megabytes are common limits – and firewalls too may block large files. In addition, a large file can be inconvenient and time-consuming for the recipient, especially on a wireless connection or mobile device.

A good rule of thumb is to keep your collateral files under 9 Mb. And remember, it’s normally the images in a document that bloat the file size – so consider whether those big background images are really required.

Stay tuned next Thursday for the final tips on how marketers can develop collateral pieces for our web 2.0 world! These are simple tips that, when kept in mind, can both decrease cost while simultaneously increasing effectiveness.

Like a stick of butter in a Paula Deen recipe, the email newsletter has become the mainstay of every BtoB marketer’s arsenal, the “of course” ingredient in the marketing mix. But as the novelty of getting a newsletter in one’s inbox has worn off, and their numbers have multiplied, so too have open rates and clickthroughs declined.

Much of this can of course be remedied by making the newsletter more relevant, targeted and just plain interesting. Savvy marketers are focused on doing just that. But in parallel to content and segmentation efforts, can newsletter design be tweaked to yield better results?

Recent research from online usability guru Jakob Nielsen provides some useful tips; most of them, as he says, confirm established best practices, but a few were new to me. Mr. Nielsen says he has identified some 199 design guidelines for email newsletters, and made them available in a handsome 586-page report, yours for $497.

Fortunately for those with leaner budgets, he also provides some highlights for free, and of those, I think the following are especially worth taking note of. I encourage you to read the entire article for additional insight.

More clutter to break through. Research respondents reported an average of 300% more unread email in their inboxes that they had 4 years ago. Thus breaking through is more important than ever, which means:

• writing subject lines that speak directly and compellingly to user pain or benefit
• making sure the preview pane view shows enough “leg” to entice the recipient to view the full email
• placing high-value content at the top of the email

Think more about mobile. Many people report using their mobile device to kill time when waiting for a meeting, or a plane etc. So your newsletter, which they didn’t have time to look at in the office, is increasingly likely to be read on a mobile device; which means:

• Appearance on the small screen should be a key design driver (people rated the ease of reading newsletters on their mobile devices a miserable 3.3 on a 1–7 scale)
• And again, the most important content – from the user’s, not the marketer’s point of view – should be at the top.

Video is not vital. Users don’t expect – or want – video as a main component of a newsletter. Aside from the fact that video can’t reliably be embedded in an email, most newsletter readers are too hurried to want to watch a video. This means:

• Keep video a secondary medium and don’t use it as your key content
• Describe the video in words, and
• Pick a preview image that communicates the video’s nature instead of simply showing the first frame.
• Also, state the video’s duration.

Newsletters have long lives. Bear in mind the people may read your newsletter weeks, months or even years after it was written. A specific offer or time-related announcement may be long past, but the newsletter can still help grow and sustain your brand.

The good news is 50% of users said that email newsletters influenced their BtoB purchases, but the influence was only occasional, when the timing happened to be right. Often, the newsletter served to grow or retain a vendor’s reputation or to maintain a relationship during dry spells when users lacked the budgets needed to actively conduct business.

With budgets tapped out and resources running thin, Rory Carlton, principal of Arketi Group ( www.arketi.com ), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, advises marketers to try to reuse content across all marketing channels when possible.

Rory Carlton, principal of Arketi Group ( www.arketi.com ), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, discusses ways to get more mileage out of your marketing content.

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Rory Carlton, principal of Arketi Group ( www.arketi.com ), a high tech business-to-business public relations and marketing firm, discusses why marketers need to reduce the amount of information you communicate to increase its impact on technology buyers.

“That’s odd,” said my colleague in the nextdoor office, “why is ____ [another colleague] sending me an email that sounds like it’s meant for a prospect?”

“Uh-oh,” I thought, “that email wasn’t supposed to go out. What happened?”

At Arketi Group, we’re great proponents of email marketing, when used as a targeted tactic, and when respectful of the rules of privacy and of our audience’s willingness to receive marketing messages. Unfortunately, due to inattentiveness on my part, we’d just broken every such rule.

Frantic, I logged on to the email engine and clicked “Pause.” But it was too late.

I had just sent a personalized and supposedly “personal” email to every single individual on our list. Clients, prospects, employees, vendors, journalists, friends, family, strangers. All 11,000 of them.

The responses came flooding in. Unsubscribes. Bounces. And a great many “WTF?”s. The email – which was just a draft – was never intended for most of the people on the list, and to most of them, it made no sense.

We debated what, if anything, to do about it. Email everyone again, and apologize? Or leave it alone and hope it would soon be forgotten? Would a follow-up email, however apologetic, simply annoy people further? Or would ignoring the faux pas make them think we’re the kind of company that randomly spams our friends?

We decided to apologize. The mea culpa went out quickly and was to the point. It seems to have been the right thing to do – several people thanked us for the explanation and sympathized. We all make mistakes.

Our learnings:

• Email marketing is a powerful tool, but like any tool, that power can work against you; handle with care
• When an email is in draft, never assign it a “send” date, however comfortably far in the future that date may be
• When you make a mistake, apologize, and do so quickly.

In the end, only a handful of people unsubscribed; but it’s nonetheless disappointing that they are lost from our list forever. On the bright side, a good number more responded positively to the offer in the email, even though it was still a work in progress. And one respondent even thought the whole event – initial email and subsequent apology – was a strategy for stimulating interest and response.

I’d like to say we’re that smart, but in truth, this was just a case of “Oops!”

According to a survey on Americans’ use of the Internet by Princeton Survey Research Associates International, 60 percent of American adults are wireless Internet users, anyone with a laptop who uses a Wi-Fi connection to access the Internet, or one who uses email, internet, or instant messaging on a mobile phone. An equal number of American adults, 59 percent, access online information using either a Wi-Fi connection or a cell phone, a significant increase from the 51 percent who reported doing so last year.

Even though the number of mobile phone users has remained relatively the same, users are now beginning to take full advantage of the many features that today’s smartphones have to offer. The use of mobile phones for sending photos, watching videos, and social networking has significantly grown over the past 12 months.

Though the use of wireless internet is still growing among 30-to-49 year olds, young adults continue to have the highest levels of wireless data use. As the future leaders of business, it is this younger generation’s use of the Internet that confirms the importance of the wireless connection to BtoB marketers.

It’s not totally clear from this article just what counts as “advertising,” but one imagines TV accounts for the largest chunk. As the writers note, Apple seems to be on TV all the time – certainly as frequently as Microsoft – whereas I can’t remember the last time I saw an Ebay or Yahoo commercial. Perhaps I’m watching channels whose demographics better fit Apple/Microsoft?

Even then, I don’t get the feeling I’m seeing Microsoft twice as often as Apple. Which suggests Apple is getting more bang for its buck.  (I do like the “Windows 7 was my idea” spots, though, especially the French girl. There’s an infectious enthusiasm which the brand really needed.)

CHART OF THE DAY: Here’s How Much Tech Companies Spend On Advertising
Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova | May. 7, 2010, 1:12 PM
via CHART OF THE DAY

Yahoo plans to spend $80 million on the next leg of its big ad campaign. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. It’s almost double the amount Yahoo spent on advertising last year and 40 times what rival AOL spent on advertising in 2009.

WPP-owned Kantar Media provided us with data on tech companies’ 2009 total ad spend across print, online, radio, tv, and outdoor. We also plotted the ad spend as a percentage of revenue to see which company gets the most from the least.

Yahoo spent $45 million on ads last year, second most among Internet companies. eBay’s $89 million ad spend led the way, especially when shown as a percent of revenue. Of these companies, Google spent just $11 million on ads, which is the least as percent of revenue. (This makes sense, because Google rarely advertises on TV.)

Another interesting thing in the data: Apple spends half as much on ads as Microsoft, and appears to get more out them. This sort of surprised us, as it seems that iPhone ads are constantly on TV.

This article from BtoB magazine is certainly good news for PR and marketing firms (ahem!). But what’s really interesting to me is in the last paragraph –which I’ve bolded – and that’s what the budget will be spent on. Who’d have thunk it? No mention of search, social media or lead nurturing.

Gartner: Nearly half of IT, telecom companies plan to boost marketing spending
by Kate Maddox
Story posted: April 22, 2010 – 12:40 pm EDT

Stamford, Conn.—A survey by Gartner found that 44% of high-tech and telecommunications companies plan to increase their marketing budgets this year.

The report was based on an online survey of 206 global high-tech and telecommunications providers conducted in December.

Forty-one percent of executives surveyed said they would keep marketing budgets flat this year, while only 15% said they plan to decrease them.

Among those companies planning marketing budget increases this year, 30% expect to boost budgets between 1% and 15%, and 13% of respondents plan budget increases of between 16% and 30%.

When asked how they will allocate their marketing budgets this year, 22% of respondents said events will receive the highest portion of spending, followed by advertising (16%) and direct mail (11%).

via Gartner: Nearly half of IT, telecom companies plan to boost marketing spending :: BtoB Magazine.