“Content is king.” And in 2025, it’s the entire front half of your sales engine.
Last year, 6sense studied B2B buying behavior and released their 2024 Buyer Experience Report. In it, they revealed that buyers increasingly value autonomy in their purchasing process.
- The average buyer makes it through 70% of their buying process before engaging a vendor.
- 80% initiated the first contact, not the other way around.
- 81% already have a preferred vendor in mind by the time they have their first touchpoint with a sales rep.
So, in most cases, the entire first half of the sales cycle happens before your sales reps can get a word in. Outbound alone won’t work. You need web content.
In today’s article, I’ll break down exactly which types of marketing collateral every B2B company needs to stay ahead this year.
What is marketing collateral?
Marketing collateral is any branded asset, digital or printed, that you use to promote your products or services and move prospects through your funnel. Examples include web content, social media posts, e-books, case studies, and demo videos.
There are a four main reasons to create and distribute marketing collateral:
- Educate potential buyers
- Reinforce your brand’s authority
- Overcome objections
- Accelerate decision-making
Now, this isn’t just about making case studies and writing blog posts based off of a keyword list. It’s dynamic, digital, and strategically aligned with your customer journey. Every asset should serve a clear purpose: to move prospects closer to a “Yes.”
The role of marketing collateral in the sales funnel
In B2B, single-person deals hardly exist. The average buying group includes 10 people, each of whom has their own priorities and pull in the decision-making process.
- Some care about technical specs.
- Some care about ROI.
- And some just want to know it’ll make their lives easier.
But, like I’ve already pointed out, most of their decision-making happens without you. Your sales rep won’t be in the room when they’re Googling solutions, comparing vendors, or presenting your pricing to the CFO.
That’s why your marketing collateral isn’t just support, it’s strategy.
Full-funnel. Multi-persona. Always on.
B2B sales cycles can stretch from a month or two (for simple SaaS products) to 12+ months (for enterprise deals). That means you need a library of collateral that works at every stage of the funnel and speaks to every type of buyer.
- Top of the funnel (TOFU): Here’s where you attract attention from technical researchers, analysts, or ops leads who are exploring options. You’ll use blog posts, SEO-driven landing pages, one-pagers, and infographics to show up early in their journey.
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU): At this point, you’re engaging stakeholders doing deeper due diligence, like product managers, department heads, or power users. So you offer explainer videos, product walkthroughs, comparison sheets, and downloadable guides that prove your value.
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): By now, decision-makers like CFOs, CTOs, or the full buying committee are involed. You need business case decks, ROI calculators, case studies, and security whitepapers to close the gap between interest and approval.
When you aren’t showing up, someone else is.
Marketing today is zero-sum. When a buyer searches, only one brand gets clicked. If your content doesn’t rank, isn’t visible, or fails to answer their question, guess what? Your competitor’s does.
So your job is twofold:
- Create strategic content that helps prospects sell your product internally, even if you’re not in the room.
- Distribute that content smartly through search, social, email, and your website, so the right people find it exactly when they need it.
7 types of marketing collateral you can’t grow without
We’ve made it clear: your buyers are doing the research with or without you. That means every piece of content you put out needs to work hard, speak clearly, and support different decision-makers across the funnel.
Strategically distribute enough of these seven kinds of collateral, and you’ll have a never-ending stream of MQLs that actually align with your ICP:
1. Branding collateral
Before you impress anyone with your pitch deck or case study, your brand needs to look and feel consistent everywhere. That’s where your logos and brand guidelines come in. This is what guides everything from your sales PDFs to your LinkedIn graphics.
When done right, they:
- Create trust
- Build recognition
- Present you as professional
- Make every asset feel cohesive, no matter who’s viewing it
Good news is, you don’t have to overcomplicate this. Even a basic brand kit (logo files, color codes, typography, and tone-of-voice guide) goes a long way.
2. Sales enablement collateral
Sales enablement collateral is the content your team uses to move prospects from "interested" to "ready to buy.”
- Sales decks and presentations
- Case studies
- One-pagers
- Product sheets
- Testimonials and review assets
These are the materials your reps share with prospects to help them make the right purchase decision.
But they’re not just for your sales reps. They’re for your buyers as well. They’re the ones forwarding your deck to their boss. They’re the ones pulling up your case study in a budget meeting. They’re the ones pitching your product for you.
You need to give champions inside your prospect’s company the tools to sell on your behalf. That means collateral that’s simple, skimmable, and laser-focused on value.
3. Digital marketing collateral
Digital marketing collateral is any visual or written content you use to promote your brand online and drive inbound traffic. It’s what fuels your demand gen engine and captures attention across social media, email, and paid ads.
Social media graphics stop the scroll and reinforce your brand on LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram (yes, even for B2B). They reinforce your social proof and marketing content through short-form posts. Your employees should also use it on their profiles.
Email campaign templates are layouts you can use across newsletters, product updates, and nurture sequences. They should be mobile-friendly, skimmable, and designed to convert clicks.
Digital ads like banner ads, retargeting visuals, and paid search graphics are similar to social media graphics, and they need to be tightly aligned with your landing pages to drive conversions.
For instance, this ad I just got for a new Qualtrics X Forrester report…
…matches Qualtrics’ website aesthetics perfectly.
4. Print marketing collateral
Even in a digital-first world, print still plays a role. You’re still showing up at events and in-person meetings, and print collateral is perfect for when you want to leave something behind that doesn’t get lost in someone’s inbox.
Today, though, most of your information is online. So it’s less about bulk brochures and more about high-impact, well-designed assets that feel intentional.
- Business cards
- One-pagers and leave-behinds
- Event signage and booth materials
- Sales packets and folders
Keep these things short and visual, and include a QR code where your prospects can learn more.
5. Content marketing collateral
This is the part of your marketing that people are actually reading. The things prospects find on Google or ChatGPT, bookmark, forward to colleagues, and use to justify buying your product. In fact, you’re reading ours right now.
Content marketing sits at the core of your demand gen, lead gen, and conversion strategies. Some of it’s TOFU. Some of it’s BOFU.
- Blog posts (for SEO)
- E-books and whitepapers (for lead capture)
- Infographics (for shareability)
- Landing pages (for conversions)
- How-to guides and paybooks (for authority)
- Interactive tools (e.g., ROI calculators to show results)
A healthy mix of each will help you pique interest at the top of the funnel and nurture high-value leads up until they’re ready to book a call.
6. Event and trade show collateral
Event and trade show collateral is the physical and digital material you use to attract attention, communicate your value fast, and leave prospects with something they’ll actually keep.
It includes:
- Booth design assets
- Promotional giveaways
- Banners and signage
- Interactive demos
- Branded swag
Just like with digital collateral, brands that blend bold visuals with clear messaging win.
7. Internal marketing collateral
Internal marketing collateral is the behind-the-scenes material that ensures your team knows how to talk about your product, share your message, and deliver a consistent experience, whether they’re in sales, support, or engineering.
A few of the things you’ll develop:
- Internal brand guide for new hires and cross-functional teams
- Messaging playbooks to clarify positioning, product benefits, key talking points, and objection-handling language
- Launch kits explaining upcoming campaigns, product releases, or rebrands
- Internal FAQs and cheat sheets for your team to use in calls, emails, and meetings.
- All-hands and sales kickoff slides that rally the team, share progress, and preview strategic moves
This kind of content helps you train, align, and activate your entire org so everyone’s pulling in the same direction.
How to create great marketing collateral
Most marketing teams crank out assets just to “check the box.” They know they need it, so they post a few below-average blog posts, put up a few testimonials, and call it a day. Then they wonder why they don’t rank or convert.
If you want collateral that drives pipeline, closes deals, and makes competitors irrelevant, here are our six best tips:
Build for the buyer’s conversation, not yours.
Don’t just talk about features, reverse-engineer your content from the actual buying journey.
Ask: What’s happening in the buyer’s head at this exact moment?
- Early stage: They’re asking, “Is this even worth my time?”
- Mid-stage: “Is this better than what I’m using now?”
- Late stage: “Can I justify this to my CFO and team?”
Use real call transcripts, objection logs, and buyer enablement data to craft collateral that answers their internal questions within your content.
Create once, slice a dozen ways.
Smart marketers don’t make 100 new things. They make one killer asset and spin it 12 different ways.
Let’s say you write a whitepaper. From that, you can extract:
- A short webinar for prospects
- 3-5 different blog posts
- A sales deck slide or two
- A teardown-style LinkedIn post
- An internal FAQ for reps
- A one-pager summary
- Email drip content
You can also repurpose customer feedback for marketing content. Using a platform like Deeto, you can collect input from your customers in the form of testimonials, product feedback, and results (e.g., ROI or a % increase in sales).
From there, our generative AI builds full case studies and clips use cases and testimonials you can distribute across your website and socials.
Map every piece of collateral to a revenue goal.
Too many marketers create for vanity. Real growth comes when every asset ties to one of three things:
- Drive awareness
- Increase pipeline
- Accelerate sales velocity
- Improve your close rate
Before you make anything, ask what metric it’ll move, then track it. If your new case study didn’t get shared by reps or downloaded by buyers, figure out why that type of content isn’t making a difference and what might be more effective.
Personalize your highest-impact pieces.
You don’t need to personalize everything, but you should absolutely personalize the stuff that touches money.
- Create 3 to 4 versions of your sales deck by industry or persona.
- Swap out vertical-specific stats in your one-pagers.
- Let reps plug in custom ROI data into calculators or proposal templates.
- Tie everything to an outcome, don’t just talk about features.
Buyers will always respond better to something that feels like it was made for them.
Design for skimmers, not readers.
No one is reading your 20-page PDF cover-to-cover. Design for skimming.
That means:
- Strong subheads that tell a story without reading paragraphs
- Visual cues and icons to guide attention
- Quotes, stat blocks, and micro-copy that cover key points
- CTA buttons that don’t hide in footers
Remember: formatting is part of storytelling. Bad design makes good content invisible.
Run content like a product: with version control.
Great collateral evolves. A few simple habits, like setting quarterly reviews for core sales materials and centralizing everything in one source of truth (Deeto does this) makes all the difference.
Deeto helps you store and share marketing collateral from one place.
It’s one thing to create great collateral. It’s a whole other to actually use it consistently, correctly, and across teams that rarely sync. Deeto simplifies that. It’s the platform you’ll use to activate your customer base, and it gives your entire team a single, organized place to store, manage, and share customer marketing content.
You can upload any type of file - PDFs, decks, videos, UGC, case studies, and tag it by persona, industry, or funnel stage. Built-in search and version control mean sales reps aren’t sharing outdated content, and marketing isn’t chasing down files before a launch.
- Need a case study for a healthcare CTO you just logged in your CRM? Deeto pulls it in seconds.
- Need a testimonial to drop into a new landing page or LinkedIn post? Marketing has it ready to go, filtered, approved, and pre-formatted.
It also makes collaboration easier. Sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams access the same library, and role-based permissions keep the system clean, and updates happen in real-time.
And with built-in AI tools, you can repurpose, distribute, and personalize marketing assets across your whole funnel without starting from scratch every time.
Want to see it in action? Request a demo today.
