How to Create a Brilliant Marketing Brochure
Brochure printing has always been one of the back bones of marketing materials. They’ve been around forever and you can use them in a variety of situations – from trade shows to direct mail materials to sales presentation closers.
For something so important to your marketing arsenal, make sure your brochures are tops by incorporating the following tips.
1. Don’t expect your full color brochures to do all the work for you. Your brochure’s purpose should be to educate the customer or prospect and to generate some sales leads for you. Don’t expect a brochure to make the sale for you though; you need competent sales people to make a sale. If you put all the information needed to make a sale into a brochure, your brochure will be long and cumbersome to read. Design your brochure to bring in sales leads and to answer basic customer questions, but don’t expect the brochures to take the place of salespeople.
2. Keep the paragraphs and sentences short. Printed brochures are small by their very nature and people don’t expect to have to concentrate too hard when they are reading brochures. Don’t make them work to understand what your brochure is stating. Using short sentences with non-jargon terms is best to draw in a customer.
Keeping paragraphs short will not only help the customer read faster, it will also help you when designing your brochure. You can partner more paragraphs with photos or illustrations and it’s easier to move things around. If you use indentions to signal new paragraphs, don’t use spaces between paragraphs. You only need one design indicator to let people know where a new paragraph starts.
3. Write your brochure to stand alone from other marketing materials. Even if you are sending a brochure as part of a direct mail package, don’t expect people to read the cover letter before they read the brochure. Your marketing materials should complement each other but still make sense if separated.
4. Create a logical flow in your text. People generally read the cover of a brochure first, then the inside panels from left to right, and then they turn to the back. Start on the inner left-hand panel by introducing your product, its benefits, testimonials, features and then how to order while making your way across the panels to the right-hand panel. Answer any questions the reader might have in this order also. The back panel is generally reserved for contact information or the order form if you run out of room on the inside panels.
5. Add clear visuals. Photos and graphics can work wonders for explaining your product in a way that words can’t. (Or at least in a way that words can’t explain succinctly.) People process visuals faster than they do words, so use visuals whenever possible to explain your product. Use words to convey benefits or anything that can’t be seen in the visual.
6. Don’t forget to proofread. This is one of those last-minute tasks that are usually thrown to the wayside to save a few minutes of production time. But this is one of the most important steps you must complete; a brochure riddled with typos and misspellings will lower your credibility and will make readers question your quality.
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