Tips for Creating Your Marketing Toolkit

A marketing toolkit can be an effective tool for organizing your efforts and increasing efficiency. While your toolkit’s nature and complexity will depend on your business, having one on hand is always a good idea. 
Let’s discuss how you can create a marketing toolkit for your company and some essential tips to keep in mind.

How to Create Your Marketing Toolkit

To create an effective marketing toolkit, you’ll need to understand at least three key elements about your company:

1. Your brand. What is your brand identity? In other words, what is your company known for, and how do consumers view it? How do you want them to view it? Understanding your brand is vital to creating a workable toolkit.
2. Your audience. Who are you trying to reach with your marketing materials? What are your audience’s demographics, needs, and interests? For example, are they older or younger? Professionals or consumers? Affluent or budget-conscious?
3. Your platforms. Once you’ve clearly defined your brand and core audience, it’s also vital to pinpoint which platforms your consumers frequent — whether video, audio, digital, OTT, or other channels. Only then can you efficiently and consistently deliver your messaging to them.

 
With those three elements clearly identified, you can begin to develop your toolkit, which will likely include items related to branding, content creation/distribution, ad placement, and so on.

Brand Elements of a Marketing Toolkit

There are a few key brand elements that you should develop as part of your toolkit. In this regard, it’s essential to:

• Develop a brand overview. Your brand overview should list your target personas, describe how your products/services will appeal to these customers, define your unique selling proposition (USP), and establish your brand identity (among other things).
• Create your style guide. You should compile a style guide, preferences, and appropriate images to standardize your look across websites and platforms. Brand consistency is an integral part of building trust with customers.
• Compile existing content. You also need to make an inventory of your existing content, such as blogs and email marketing. By doing so, you may be able to reuse or repurpose content instead of developing it from scratch.

Creative Composition Elements

Once your toolkit’s brand elements are in place and you clearly understand your brand identity, you can find further success by implementing these processes as part of your toolkit:
• Brainstorm topics. Having trouble coming up with ideas for your content? Gather lists and verticals to create an easy reference for whenever you’re stuck. These can be topic lists, trending news sources, or suggestions from sales reps. Occasionally, you can set aside time for a focus group to discuss the topics most relevant to your core audience for more insight.
• Create a content calendar. Content creation and distribution must be intentional and consistent to yield a high ROI. A content calendar is indispensable for planning your content and topics and staying organized throughout the year. 

• Schedule upcoming events for timely campaigns. It’s often more impactful to frame marketing campaigns around specific seasons, industry events, or company publications. Map out when those key events take place, and then schedule your efforts around them. Be sure to sync these up with your content calendar!
• Develop a final publication checklist. Your content is a reflection of your brand. With that in mind, developing a standardized checklist to follow before submitting your content for final publication can ensure quality control. You don’t want embarrassing typos or inaccurate information to creep into your copy and erode customer trust.

Keep Organized to Stay Ahead

Creating a marketing toolkit is a great way to supercharge your efforts. By clearly understanding your brand, audience, and preferred platforms, you can develop an effective toolkit that includes critical elements like a brand overview and a style guide. You’ll also be able to stay organized through tools like content calendars and final publication checklists.
A strong marketing foundation will help your company get ahead in the long run. A well-developed marketing toolkit can be one of the “cornerstones” of that foundation. If you haven’t created one already, consider doing so soon, perhaps with the help of an experienced media partner. You won’t regret it!