Are you seeking to bring in more clients for your business?
If you’re passionate about your business, of course, the answer’s yes.
No matter how good you get at what you do, you’ll never reach your full potential if you don’t let people know about it.
You have something of great value to sell. You need to package it right and get it out there.
Creating a business brochure is easily one of the best things you can do marketing-wise.
They are extremely versatile and effective for informing customers of your products or services. What’s more, they are cost-effective as well as easy to produce and circulate.
A business brochure is like a movie trailer. If you do it right, people will want to see what you have to offer and spend money on it.
This article will give you 7 essential tips for designing an awesome business brochure that’s sure to catch your potential customers’ interests. Read on!
1. Get in Your Customer’s Shoes
To design a great business brochure, think about what would appeal to you if you were the client.
What do you respond to in general? What would put you off?
Then place it in the context of your business. Walk a mile in your customer’s shoes. What would catch their attention and make them want to enlist your services?
Think about what your potential customers see when they come across your brochure. Does it accurately reflect what you’re offering?
Most importantly, does it emphasize your strong suits and communicate them in an appealing manner?
You’re likely so caught up in your activity that it may prove difficult to get the distance required for a new perspective.
So don’t hesitate to enlist help from fresh eyes. Get input from people who aren’t involved in your company and will give it to you straight.
2. Make Your Business Brochure Look Professional
What would you think if somebody told you they had the best wine in the world for sale, but then presented you with a box of cheap wine?
Their claim might be true. But would you want to pay money to find out?
If you go to a high-end restaurant, you expect the setting, service, and presentation to match the quality of the food you’re being served.
This is your brochure’s purpose.
It has to reassure your customers that they’re getting quality service and not being taken for a ride. It eliminates red flags that they might be engaging with a mediocre business.
After all, if a company can’t even get its brochure right, it can’t be that good at what it does.
It’s not just about what you write in the brochure, it’s also about the brochure itself. Does it look and feel professional?
If possible, you’d want to have pictures taken professionally in there. Make the design look slick. Pick a font that suits your activity (and stay away from Comic Sans!).
You’re also going to need professional booklet printing to get the desired quality on your business brochure.
3. Use Relevant Images
Visual communication is extremely important in marketing.
Images speak to our instinct, something profound in us. Reading words requires the use of our intellect, but images touch our subconscious.
Pick your images wisely to connect with your customers. Images are what they’ll see before they read your content, so you want them to be enticing.
Avoid putting a picture of your building on the brochure’s cover. It’s just not that interesting, and doesn’t tell the customer what you’re about.
You may put up pictures of yourself or your team in your pamphlet, but reserve them for the last pages rather than the front ones.
The idea is that once your reader knows all about your services, they connect with you on a personal level by seeing your face and reading more about you.
It conveys to them the idea that you’re trustworthy and you’re not afraid to put yourself out there. It shows initiative and the willingness to take responsibility for your work.
As we mentioned before though, make sure to have professional quality pictures.
4. Use the AIDA Model
People nowadays mostly skim over content. And who can blame them?
We’re constantly being bombarded with various stimuli trying to catch our attention. As a result, we learn to filter very quickly what’s relevant to us or not.
What that means is that you need to optimize your brochure to account for this pattern. People are going to glance at your business brochure and make a very quick decision on whether it applies to them or not.
The AIDA model was designed to catch your reader’s attention and make sure they want to read your content.
AIDA stands for:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
In short, you want to start by grabbing your reader’s attention. This is the hook.
Having a nicely designed, professional looking brochure is already a hook in itself. It makes people want to look at it, hold it, and see what’s inside. Naturally, you’ll also need your text to be interesting.
But the brochure’s appearance is the initial trigger that decides whether someone will look into it more or just ignore it.
Once you have their attention, you’re going to generate interest in what you’re trying to sell.
You can use facts and figures, or relevant information to pique the reader’s curiosity. Let them know you know what you’re talking about.
Once they’re interested, it’s time to create a desire for your product.
After establishing the situation, you’re going to explain why and how your services are relevant. If you’ve done your job properly, it should flow naturally.
Finally, it’s time to tell your reader to take action. Reading your brochure is nice, but you want your customer to do something: for instance call you or purchase your product.
5. The Call to Action
We just saw the call to action with the AIDA model, but it bears repeating.
As soon as your potential customer’s finished reading your brochure, they should be able to take action immediately on what they’ve read.
Otherwise, what’s gonna happen?
They’ll simply read the brochure and forget about your company within a few minutes or hours.
If you have something that they want to buy, you should make it extremely easy for them to do so. Your customer shouldn’t have to track you down to purchase your products.
Incite them to call you right now. Naturally make sure to include your address, website, email address, and any other means of contacting you.
You can even include a coupon or promotional code that they can redeem in your store. What’s more, if you use different coupons in different locations, it’ll let you know where your brochures are having the most success for future reference.
You can then adjust your marketing strategy with the data collected.
6. Make It Highly Readable
It stands to reason, but your business brochure should be easy to read.
That means don’t pick a font that’s aesthetic but difficult to make out, or colors that conflict. Don’t use anything too garish that’s going to be obnoxious to read.
Being easy to read also means using a language that can be understood by the general public.
You may be an expert in your field and passionate about what you do, but this isn’t the case of your customers. Don’t get too technical unless your product really calls for it, otherwise you’ll lose your reader’s attention.
Instead, favor using simple language that’s straight to the point. Organize your writing in a logical sequence that’s easy to follow.
Give your content room to breathe too by keeping the paragraph shorts and spacing them out, just like this article.
7. Eliminate the Fluff
You may be tempted to fill your brochure with lots of words, just like when you were in school and you had to fill a quota for an assignment.
However, this is a bad idea for your business brochure.
Your customers may not be professional in your field, but they aren’t dumb. People can often see through someone who’s full of hot air.
If you just try to use lots of buzzwords without anything to show for it, they’ll sense it.
People generally respond better to honesty, knowledge and being treated with respect.
Naturally, you should sell your products and emphasize your strengths. Never shoot yourself in the foot. But if you’re confident in the quality of your products or services, this brochure will fill itself.
Keep it simple and accessible to everyone, but be precise and share high quality information.
Ready to Break the Bank?
Now you have some essential tips to design an excellent business brochure.
It should look great and professional to reflect the quality of your work. Don’t over-complicate it, play to your strengths and let your talent speak for itself.
The AIDA model gives you excellent guidelines to use, so make sure to study and apply it.
Lastly, don’t forget to include a call to action. You don’t want people to just forget about you, so compel them to engage you right away!