A brochure is a small booklet or pamphlet, often containing promotional material or product/service information.
Direct-response or promotional brochures are ubiquitous in most business marketing. Their main function can be to educate, inform, explain, or sell. Often, they achieve all four.
Companies use brochures to pre-empt a sales call, for educational purposes during a sales call, to use as a leave-behind after a sales meeting, as an enclosure in a direct mail campaign, as a handout at events such as trade conferences, and to mail to a prospective customer in order to fulfil a sales enquiry.
Brochures come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from the one-sheet, six-panel ‘slim Jims’ to multi-paged, saddle-stitched formats that almost resemble a manual.
1. Know where your brochure fits into the overall buying process. Is it to be used as a stand-alone promotional device, or as part of a multi-level marketing strategy? Is it to be used solely as a customer-enquiry fulfilment? And so on.
2. Determine what results you want from your brochure. It might be that you want to inform people about the full range of your services, in which case it would probably be more educational than a sales piece. It might be to gain sales though, and it also might be positioning your business as a leader in employment, for instance.
3. It’s true for all copywriting and marketing materials: know thy reader. You really do need to know why your intended audience needs your brochure — why should they bother reading it? Because a brochure is often not aimed at one specific audience, this can be quite difficult to pull off. But do your research, and really try to ‘connect’ with your target market as much as possible.
4. Gather all the source materials you need to write your brochure, then sift through and jot down the relevant points. This will be useful for making sure you cover everything you want to, and also provide inspiration for sub-headings, etc.
5. Boil down your target market to one ideal client or customer and write your brochure for that one key person. You can’t appeal to everyone. Try and you’ll simply end up ‘weakening’ your overall message.
6. Spent ample time on your front cover — without a doubt THE most important page of your brochure.
7. Use bold font, different colours and size of font, bullet points, numbered lists, and sub-headings to break up the text into manageable chunks. As well as making it easier to read, it will ensure important points are not missed.
8. Talk about benefits, benefits, benefits. People always want to know what’s in it for them.
9. Put something important and/or useful in your brochure so that the reader is more likely to keep hold of it. You want people to have another opportunity of making contact if they don’t the first time round — and producing a brochure worth keeping facilitates that.
10. Don’t forget important contact details. I never cease to be amazed how many brochures omit this important information. Don’t go to all that trouble for nothing!
Copyright, T Dooley, mediaminister.co.uk — All Rights Reserved
