How to Create an Effective Sales Brochure
Who are you? What is your service or products? Who is your target customer? Who is your competition? How can your business stand out from all the rest? These are all questions that come into play when designing a company brochure. A brochure serves as a way to connect with potential clients, showcase your company’s best assets, and show-up the competition. An effective brochure can do all that and more. But how do you create an effective brochure?
First, start by answering the questions above:
Who are you?
Depending on who and what your company is depends on the type of design you want for your brochure. If your company deals mainly in high-tech then you want to design your brochures different from a company who offers horse-back riding adventures. Designing your brochure to match your company can be tricky. Using specific themes or colors can help identify your company quickly and effectively. For high-tech, use neutral colors such as grays, white, black. For horse-back riding, earthy tones will draw your customer’s attention.
What is your service or products?
What is the purpose of your brochure? Are you making customers aware of your new products? If you want to showcase specific products do not go over-board with excessive pictures. Too many pictures will make your brochure look unprofessional. The best bet is to use only one large photo per panel, or use two to three small pictures throughout the page to break up paragraphs.
If you’re looking to advertise a service, pictures are also beneficial. Use pictures of your services such as: horses for horseback riding, a boat or vehicle for your tours, photos of events you’ve planned, and so on. There are many ways to add pictures to your brochures that revolve around your services.
Only use high-quality pictures for your brochures such as: raw, tiff, or bmp’s. Jpeg’s have a lower compression rate and your pictures may become pixilated during the printing process. Avoid using graphics which can make your brochure look unprofessional.
Who is your target customer?
Understanding your customers is essential when designing your brochure. Better yet, where is your customer? Are you planning to send your brochures in the mail? If that’s the case you will want to design a brochure that is envelope friendly. A two or three panel, 8″x 11″ would serve best for mailing.
If your goal is to use your brochures to advertise a product, such as an RV, house, or major appliance, then a 11″x17″ large format would be more in order. Larger format brochures catch your customer’s eye and make your information easier to read.
Keep fonts sizes and types to a minimum. A brochure with too many font types makes it hard to read. Too large or small fonts also can play tricks on your reader’s eyes. Never use a font smaller than 9 point. If you’re target customer is older, 50+, think about using a larger font between 12 to 14 point, but any larger will, once again, make your brochure look unprofessional. Use larger fonts, 14+, sparingly. Better yet, save your large fonts for the title and only the title.
If you want to emphasize a headline within your brochure think of using a different color font. Choose one, two or three color fonts for your brochure, and always use the same color, preferably black, as your main paragraph text. Your brochures are meant to create attention to your company, not your artistic endeavors.
Who is your competition?
Have you looked at your competition’s brochures? Oddly enough, it’s a good source of ideas for your own. Examine your competition’s brochures and see what you like and don’t like about their design. You can use their brochures as a base of how you want to design your own. Is their headline too large? Are they using quality pictures? How about the format? All of this information you can utilize to give your own company’s brochures a leg-up on your competition.
One of the best things about brochures is you can create new brochures whenever you need. Many online printers offer template guides to help in the design process. Brochures are relatively cheap to print and easy to design making it a wonderful way to market your business.