Your sales and marketing department probably prints brochures for you, but do you really consider that an organizational and/or sales asset?
You may, but I don’t.
Here’s what generally happens to those things:
1. They sit in your trunk and get crushed by the golf bag.
2. Become instant wallpaper when you roast some poor schmuck and his office on his birthday.
3. The boxes of the brochures get all moldy when the basement floods, and draw bugs you have to clean up when the wife screams.
4. Fills up the organizations’ storage room, AND storage unit. Which then leads to hiring more storage units, the true foundation of the world economy.
5. Gets tossed in three years when the new marketing guy remakes the company brochure. Again.
5.5. Repeat No. 5 in about two, two-and-a-half years time.
6. The crap you spend big money shipping to the trade show…
7. …which is then tossed by all the trade show attendees when they get back to their office…
7.5. …or in the garbage can twenty yards from your booth.
8. They get stuffed into the nooks and crevices of your briefcase and backpack, which weigh the frickin’ thing down. And then when you reach for them, most likely to toss them two years hence, they give you papercuts.
9. The box of them on the backseat floorboard gets filled with the French fries and Milk Duds dropped by the kids.
10. And finally, they make for great filler paper when you package up the valuables for the next move!
[Official disclaimer: Now sure, occasionally you do run into a prospect who likes the brochure, and of course, you might be in an industry space where collateral works for you.]
I know I am being a little silly and harsh. Understand this is less a rant about brochures, and more about the fact that too many organizations aren’t thinking enough about building digital sales assets that can be spread easily (most friends won’t lick a stamp to mail your brochure to their friend), and can be consumed on mobile devices.
In my opinion, you need to be building long-term digital assets instead. Often on this site, you’ll hear me talking about blogging, podcasting, email autoresponder campaigns, and e-books (the pillars of your content strategy). I think these are the long-term assets you should be building.
Thanks to David Meerman Scott for the concept here. He was positing that too many organizations look at content marketing as a marketing expense, and not as a process of building real assets for the organization, assets that will continue to serve the organization well into the future.
In other words, assets worth investing in.
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Go deeper with understanding content marketing strategy here.
Drawing by Hugh.
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