To get a successful business off the ground, there are a few key ingredients you need to have in place. One, obviously, is a desirable product. That's your starting point. Beyond that, you also need a capable staff for everything from research and development to sales and customer support.

You also need great marketing materials. After all, if your company is still brand new, how is anyone going to find out about it without a solid marketing campaign? Producing great marketing content is a complicated process, though, and it requires effective teamwork and careful planning.

How to plan your big campaign

Launching your plans for marketing activation can be a complicated process. There are a lot of voices within your company that will want to be heard, and it's best to incorporate all of them. According to the Industry Skills Councils, here's how the process works:

• Designing a brief: Your executive leaders, product developers, salespeople and more will all want to have a say. To start off, you should develop a brief that explains your marketing objectives and how you plan to accomplish them.
• Considering context: Think about the market around you. What are your competitors doing? What makes you different? What customers are you targeting, and why should they choose you? Answering these questions should provide context and help you devise a strategy.
• Developing a design: Once you've thought it through, it's time to get into the nitty-gritty design details. This includes deciding on the slogans, images, fonts and colours that will help drive your point home.

Come up with the right design scheme for your audience.

Making all the right design choices

When it comes time to put your actual design together, you've got to think carefully about every single little detail, as they will all affect your brand activation outcome. Design Shack advises starting with a succinct message. There's a common "20 percent rule" that dictates you should only devote 20 percent of your design space to text, so it's crucial that you come up with a clear call to action and feature it prominently. All the other designs and images should fall into place around that.

The future of your business may well depend on your ability to design compelling marketing content. For this reason, it might be a good idea to lean on the professionals for design help, whether you're doing something simple like a pamphlet or tackling more elaborate projects like trade show booths. Either way, you don't want to take any chances, and if you work with Exposure Group, you won't be leaving a thing up to chance.