11 Ways to Make Business Brochures 10X More Effective

Often a business brochure is thrown together. You grab a product photo or two, slap some verbiage together, and BAM you have a brochure. Unfortunately, you also probably have wasted your time and effort because your brochure will fail to communicate and invoke action.

Why? Because there are at least 11 points that most brochures for small businesses leave out that will affect the overall performance of the brochure itself.

By performance I mean results. The purpose of that beautiful full-color brochure is to move a customer to a decision to buy or at least closer to buying and to separate you from your competition.

How can you make your business brochures more effective?

The following are 11 powerful techniques that will improve the look and effectiveness of your business’s sales brochures.

Your businesses marketing brochures will create an impression of professionalism and competence or it will leave the impression of a small-time shady operation.

The bigger the ticket item the more important it is to have professionally designed and printed brochures and sales literature.

So, what can you do to make your business brochures stand out and, more importantly, be effective? By effective, we’re talking about the result of getting people to buy your products and services.

The following are 11 tips to help you create powerful sales brochures and literature:

1. Start your planning with the reader’s point-of-view in mind. Before you sit down and slap together a brochure, spend some time looking at the end-user.

• Who is your end-user?
• What questions do they usually have?
• What benefits of your product or service do they want?
• How does your product or service solve a problem for them?

2. What is the purpose of your brochure?

• Is it to help over-come buying objections for a specific product or service?
• Is it to educate the buyer about the benefits of a product or service?
• Is it an overall company introduction piece?

3. Promote only one product per brochure. Resist the urge to put every product or service you offer. The reason for this is your brochure will become too cluttered and will be hard to read and follow. The result is that no one will buy what you are trying to sell.

I understand you want to showcase and highlight everything your business offers, but you should do a separate brochure for each product you offer.

An example of this is your local bank; they have a separate brochure for checking accounts, credit cards, and mortgage loans. The reason is if you are interested in a checking account you want information about just checking accounts. Anything else in that brochure would distract you from what your main purpose is.

4. The headline. Your headline is your main attention-getter.

Your Headline has to convey the main benefit of the product or service expressed in easy to understand language.

The purpose of a headline is to get the attention of the end-user and create an interest in reading your brochure. (There are some tricks to creating good headlines that Wilson Print Marketing can help you with.)

5. Use of graphics. Choose graphic elements that help to communicate the message you want to convey. Graphic elements should support the message not distract from it.
6. Avoid using industry terminology. If you have to use industry terms always define them and do not assume your reader will know what they mean. This is also true about specific designations and titles. The quickest way to lose your reader is to use terminology they do not understand.

I have seen brochures that are so packed with big terms that it makes you wonder if they are trying to sell a product or impress you with how smart they are. What these brochures accomplish is in making the reader feel stupid.

Every industry has terminology that everyone in the industry knows. The error is in assuming your reader/end-user will know and understand your terminology.

When people come across terminology they don’t understand your intended communication is broken as a result. The reader’s eyes glass over and they throw the brochure away.

7. Avoid being boring. The quickest way to be boring is to use tired worn-out cliché’s in your brochure.

Avoid saying things like “conveniently located”, “in business for 50 years” and for god’s sake, do not put a photo of your building on the cover of the brochure, unless somehow your building is of some benefit to the reader.

8. White space is your friend. Avoid packing brochures with too much copy. We are in a sound bite, small clip era – keep it short and simple.

When your reader opens a brochure packed with information the instinct is to close it and put it down. This is called information overload.

Use white space to calm the piece down, highlight main points and help sell your message. When the reader opens the brochure you want them to instantly be interested. Your brochure must appear easy read.

9. Call-to-action is important. How do you want them to respond? Why should they respond now? Your call to action should be easy to see. Do not make the reader search around on how to respond.
10. The Buy Now Offer. What is your ultimate goal? You want to sell something, right? Give the reader a reason/benefit of calling you now as opposed to six months from now. The buy-now is a marketing basic yet I am surprised how often this point is neglected.

Without a buy-now offer, your piece is an image-branding piece. Branding and image are ok if you are a big company with a board of directors and investors you want to make feel good. Unfortunately, a small business needs and wants to sell something today and a sole branding piece does not sell.

11. Resist the DIY impulse. I know it seems easy but there is more to designing a brochure than arranging photos and copy. Mistakes commonly made by DIY graphic designers are:

• New Times Roman is not the best font to use.
• Using several different fonts that are not in the same font family.
• Boxy sterile-looking design.
• No eye trail. You want to guide the reader’s eye. There are several tricks a professional designer uses to do this.
• There is no color balance making your brochure look busy and difficult to read.
• Folds and margins are off and can make your brochure look unprofessional.
• NO, Vista Print template designers or any other online design templates are not good to use.

Online graphic design templates are there to help the printer sell printing not to help you sell your product.

You may feel like you are saving money on design but when your brochure does not work you end up wasting money on printing.

Hire a professional to help you design your brochure for your small business and other sales literature. Wilson Print Marketing has several designers on staff to help you create the perfect brochure for your small business.

Today more than ever, you need printed materials to market and sell your product or service. The problem with using only digital media and online literature is in 2 seconds your digital brochure is gone, a printed brochure is held, is real, and creates a lasting impression.