Creating Your Marketing Kit

A great website is an important tool in your marketing arsenal, but you'll probably want to have print pieces to support your online marketing. But we all know by now -- or should know -- that print is not the same as the web when it comes to effective content. People read print media differently, interact with it differently, and respond to it differently. Therefore, it has to be different. You simply can't cut and paste your brochure copy into your website and succeed -- or vice versa.

On the other hand, you want to maintain a consistent brand identity and a consistent message. So how do you harmonize print and online media?

Shopmobbing.com has a grand total of 158 words on their homepage -- one of the smallest word counts I've ever done. For their press kit (shown above), they need much more than that. So I started from scratch and wrote them a package of press releases that told their whole story. It has the same young, fresh, energetic tone as their website, the same fun, urban feel, but it shows the strength of their company, too. They used the same images as their homepage to tie the whole thing together, and they can send it as a print document or as a pdf file. The focus is on their new website -- the web address is the first and largest thing on the page -- but they've got scope in their print media to tell the whole story for investors and the press.

Landscape architect Chris Olsen started with a fresh press kit. He wanted a physical item to mail out and to hand out to people he meets at his presentations. His website is not a strong introductory marketing piece for him, but once people are interested, they can go there to learn more about him. Since Chris is a TV personality and a popular speaker with lots of opportunities for physical world networking, a physical object was the highest priority and a logical starting point for him.

I wrote this for LeeAnn Larkan at Vivid Marketing, and she used Chris's great garden shots and enthusiastic testimonials to put together an appealing brochure (shown above). We did a strong sales letter to go along with it for direct mail and following up on personal contacts.

Since this is intended to be read on paper, not on the screen, we can take advantage of the opportunity to have two pages visible at once, and we can use a lot more text and tell a story. Now, we're working with Chris to make his website as fine as his press kit. Vivid will use the same look, and I'll change the text for usability and search -- but keep the same message and feeling.

Sani-Service took a different approach. For this company, I wrote a complete marketing kit, with a number of seperate elements:

• case studies
• testimonials
• unique selling point briefs
• company story
• product and service descriptions
• educational materials
• homepage text

Sani-Service has been picking and choosing from this menu of elements for their website (shown above), their press releases, their training materials, their brochures, direct mail letters, and more. Whatever they want to say, they have the right phrases on hand to speed up the process.

Whether you start with your website, your print media, or a complete marketing kit, you can end up with successful marketing pieces for both online and print media. The key is to take the differing needs of the media into account.