Encourage More Direct Sales By Using Printed Booklets For Small Businesses

I am sure you have found that advertising and marketing your small business is expensive! Many times I have felt with our own marketing that I am wasting good money. The truth is, if you want to grow your business’s direct sales you have to market and advertise.

Marketing your business’s products and/or service you probably will encounter four basic challenges:

1. How to get noticed?
2. How to get your prospects to read your marketing materials?
3. How would you establish your credibility and authority on the matter being promoted?
4. And the biggy, how to get a return from the money you invested in advertising?

Your sales people can sit in front of a prospect or customer and tell them your company is the bomb, that you do what you do better than anyone else, or more effectively, your sales people can show them!

Buyers today are very savvy. They have seen it all and have been told and promised all sorts of things. There are very few things you can do marketing wise that do a better job of the above three points than printed booklets or brochures for business. Your customers and prospects love and rely on tactile to help them to make a decision. Printed booklets and brochures provide the tactile your customers and prospects need.

There is nothing that pushes direct sales better than printed booklets or full color brochures. Normally, the so-called experts will tell you to advertise and promote several different products or services in a booklet. This is okay IF your prospect is likely to buy all these products and services. Most of the time your prospects will have different interests and a one-size-fits-all approach will not work.

Brochures for business should almost always be dedicated to selling one product or service. The next time you go into your bank, look at the various brochures they have displayed. Bankers discovered a long time ago that printed brochures are needed to get you to part with your money. Bankers are some of the cheapest business people you will find. They would not waste money on printed brochures if they were not able to get a return from them.

Now you may be thinking, it’s the 21^st century—every thing is digital! Printed materials are passé. You are correct, we are in the 21^st century and digital media is a big part of our lives. My point is digital does not and can never provide the tactile that your customers need to make a decision.

When was the last time you looked for a PDF brochure or flyer someone sent you via your email? Digital brochures get lost in a sea of digital marketing. I am not saying do not use digital means to promote your business, that would be stupid. There are many customers that prefer email communication. There are others that prefer holding, touching and feeling communication. There are many others that if you ever are going to have a chance of getting their attention and selling them something you are going to communicate to them both digitally and with hard printed materials.

You may have printed material that you feel is not very effective. In fact, you may have boxes of printed booklets and brochures sitting in a room somewhere, collecting dust. The reason marketing materials don’t get used is one of two reasons, 1) poor design and/or they look bad, or 2) because they didn’t and don’t work mostly because of poor copywriting and/or bad graphic design.

Your printed booklets and other marketing materials for business should help you create direct sales—if they did they would not sit in a box and you would use them up.

Printed booklets for business allow you the space to do a very good job of direct sales. You have the space to get attention, tell your story, show how your product or service helps your prospect, use testimonials for validation, promote a special offer and give an urgent buy now incentive.

Road Map For Creating a Direct Sale Printed Booklet

• Keep your printed booklet on topic. In other words, do not try to cross promote EVERYTHING you sell. Yes, I mean one booklet for each product or service you offer.
• Use stories that present a problem and demonstrate how your product or service solves that problem.
• Explain the benefits of owning the product or having the service fully.
• Present tips on how best to use the product and give ideas to your prospects.

Closing The Sale With Your Printed Booklet

Once you have gotten attention and built interest with your booklet, it is now time to close the deal and you do this by giving the prospect a reason to buy now. To create a “buy now” in your booklet you can have a 5.5 x 8.5 card made that you can insert into the booklet easily. The purpose of this card is to give your prospect a special price and a buy now offer, complete with an expiration date. By separating the booklet from the special it allows you to change your specials and offers without having to reprint the entire booklet. The 5.5 x 8.5 insert card is very inexpensive to design and print, so you can test different specials and offers to see what would work best. It allows you flexibility in handling competitive pressures quickly.

The printed product booklet with the special insert card can be a powerful tool to help your business close more direct sales. The design of your booklet does not need to be complicated; in fact, the simpler and more straight forward you make it the more effective it will be. Hiring a copywriter to help write to content will be worth it or team up with a company like Wilson Printing USA who can help you with copywriting, graphic design and give you a great price on printing.

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