Welcome to this quick lesson, which provides 10 tips for producing professional, print-shop quality results when designing marketing materials and customized marketing solutions in-house. By taking this quick lesson, you'll:

• Learn about the relationship between your brand and your marketing materials
• Get an overview of the best options for printed marketing materials
• Discover how to achieve great printing results with in-house printing resources

Along the way, you'll encounter plenty of helpful, practical tips to achieve high-quality results for your marketing materials, which will help you effectively implement your marketing plans. By the end of the lesson, you'll have a good overview of how to get the most from your marketing materials and be ready to put your new marketing insight into action.

Collateral materials and corporate brands

Let's start off by talking about the relationship between marketing materials and corporate brands. What is business branding? Branding is more than a name or logo—it's the creation of an overall image that consumers hold of a company or its products, crafted and communicated by the company. A brand is not communicated only through products, but through any touchpoint: websites, logos, customer service, storefronts, advertising, marketing strategies and more. If a company called Anytown Sporting Goods has crafted its brand around extreme sports, for example, its logo might look like a cresting wave or steep cliff face, and its marketing materials would reflect the brand similarly. The CEO might have a blog on the company website with a focus on new travel spots for rock climbing, base-jumping, and similar sports. Everything should work back to a central brand or message as well as a consistent look and feel—a unified palate of colors and images.

First impressions are lasting

Your collateral marketing material may be the first piece of information a prospective customer sees about your company. What can it tell them? Besides the printed words, brochures, backgrounders and other marketing materials convey:

• Brand and message. People make judgments about the overall image of your company based on your marketing materials.
• Strengths. Emphasizing elements of design, style or communication lets you display your company's strengths, specialties and unique selling points.
• Business acumen. The quality of your marketing materials provides a subtle message about your company's experience in business and general health.

Given the importance of this first impression, you need to make sure the marketing materials created show your best side.

Deciding to print in house

One important decision in creating collateral is whether or not to print them in house. Sending business cards, effective marketing letters, letterhead, envelopes and note cards, not to mention brochures, to an outside printer can be costly and take longer than you'd like, plus you lose the opportunity to print smaller, customized print runs that target sub-groups of customers. With the right printer and a little time devoted to ordering the right paper and testing print runs, you can create a marketing plan for a versatile, high-quality library of marketing materials that you print yourself.

Here are the 10 printing success tips we'll be covering:

1. Know your colors.
2. Get maximum use from your toner, ink and printer settings.
3. Use white space wisely.
4. Choose professional-quality images.
5. Rely on expert guidance for layouts.
6. Choose the right paper for your printer type.
7. Match the paper to the type of materials you're printing.
8. Master duplex printing.
9. Become familiar with printing on various sizes of paper.
10. Always proof your work carefully—no exceptions.

Next up

Let's dive into the marketing tips, starting with color.