There are two important things to consider …
First, is there anything about your brochure that gives the customer a reason to hang on to it. Is it anything more than just a picture of your product, some technical specs and your contact details. If this is all your brochure is, you may as well just hand them a business card and a picture. In this case, if the customer wants to contact you again, they’ll hang onto it. If they’re not sure, they’ll probably throw it away. A brochure should achieve much more than this!
Second, does your brochure actually encourage the customer to ring you and buy? Does it actually SELL for you? Perhaps you’re thinking ‘a brochure is what the customer looks at first, then I sell’. Wrong!!
A brochure can do the whole job, so the customer simply calls you up and says ‘yes, I’d like to order’. Your brochure has to be really good, and well worth hanging onto. I mean, you’re asking someone to carry around and keep an ad for your business, considering how uninterested most people are in advertising, that’s a pretty tall order!
Where to start?
What (do you want to say)?
The first thing to work on is what you want to use your brochure for, and what you want to promote in it.
A brochure is different from a newspaper ad, in that you can include much more information and a lot more specific detail. You can give people almost the whole story, and take them right through the sales process.
What (and who) is it for?
The first thing to decide is whether you are going to use your brochure to promote everything you do or just one thing. This really depends on whether customers usually use more than one service, or if you offer a variety of things, yet customers generally only come for one.
If it’s a case of the latter, where people usually only buy one of your services, you’re probably best off designing a brochure for each separate thing you do. There’s really no point in confusing people with lots of info about other things they’re not that interested in anyway. You should give them a brochure wholly dedicated to the product or service they’re considering buying at that time.
If your business is a little more wide-ranging (such as a photocopy & print shop), it’s usually best to design a brochure that promotes all your services. Not only do you get to advertise your other services to people, but you’ll also have more than enough content to fill a whole brochure. If you were to just advertise one service (for example, photocopying), you’d be flat out filling one page! Of course, producing one brochure as opposed to a multitude is much cheaper and quicker. But that shouldn’t be your main reason – if your business is diverse and specialises in a number of quite different areas, you really should take the time and produce a brochure for each.
What should it look like?
The beauty is, you can create a template using this guide, then use it as the starting point for all your brochures.
That way, you get a consistent look across them all.
This is an advantage, as multiple brochures that all look completely different can be confusing. Next, you need to decide on your main selling point – the content of the brochure.
What is that you want to tell people about your business or product range?
For many business owners, they won’t really know where to start. As a general rule, it pays to work out your strongest selling point, then go from there.
Almost always, your strongest selling point will be your USP. This stands for Unique Selling Proposition. Your USP is the one thing that is truly different about you, or at least, the one thing that you can promote as being different.
That’s where to go next- Contact me for a complimentary Coaching Session on How to CLARIFY Your USP.
