Creating an effective 
sales brochure

This extract examines the importance of your company's sales brochure and explains how you can create an effective brochure that will help you to sell your products and services.

It also alerts you of pitfalls to avoid and will walk you
through the design of a perfect brochure with just the right message that will be read by your customers.

Why do you need a brochure?

• It keeps your product or service in the forefront of your customers mind.

• It distinguishes your company from the competition.

• It presents new information or updates your company's capabilities.

 What makes a successful brochure?

An effective brochure needs to be read by your target market and it must make the reader respond as you desire.

To do this, the brochure must be well designed so it is visually appealing; well written, so it sparks the readers curiosity; satisfies a need and sends a specific message; and well planned so it hits your target market while meeting your budgetary goals.

What constitutes a well-designed brochure?

• It is uniquely different from all other brochures.

• It makes the reader want to open the brochure and read inside.

• The design and paper stock mimic the tone of the written material and the image of the company.

• There is a sensible mix of typestyles together with a symmetry and balance in the presentation of the material.

What makes a well-written brochure?

• It intrigues the reader enough to read further.

• The headline clearly appeals to why the prospect needs to know the information.

• This theme is carried through and backed up with supporting material.

• Sentences are clear, crisp and grammatically correct with no typing errors.

• The tone is appropriate to the content.

• The reader understands immediately what is in it for him/her.

A brochure is well-planned when you have defined your target market and have a thorough understanding of your customers profile…your intended customer receives the brochure at an appropriate time….the information is pertinent to the targeted audience… the format fits the industry standard and effectively walks the reader through the reading material.

Your clients tell you they want to know more about what they read in the brochure and the cost of writing, designing and printing your brochure (if printing is appropriate) is within your proposed budget.

Some further considerations.

There is no such thing as an all-purpose brochure. You must target your audience and decide on the specific message you want to send. A broadly focused brochure appeals to no one and rarely stirs any kind of response.

Brochures are a passive form of marketing. Alone, they will not sell your product or service. They are intended to inform and should be used as the tool they are meant to be.

Brochures should not be used as a substitute for an aggressive sales effort.

When several brochures are used by an organisation, they should have a similar "look." This includes similar typestyles and sizes, as well as a common design. Margins, graphics and borders should be consistent.

To differentiate among brochures, you may want to vary the colour - either choose a different colour (but same typestyle) stock, or change the colour of your print or graphics.

The process of creating your sales brochure
The process of developing a sales brochure follows four distinct stages:

1. Plan in advance

2. Write

3. Design

4. Print / Publish

1. PLAN IN ADVANCE

Brochures are not a simple task. You will need to allow on average two months to produce a brochure.

Determine your message or the results you desire from the brochure and choose your target market. Who are the potential buyers for your product or service? These customers will have certain distinguishing characteristics that identify them as prospective customers. Beware of targeting too broad a market. If your potential customers have several distinguishing characteristics, try dividing them into segments. Different groups may require different messages. If you develop too broad a message, it may not attract any prospective customers.

Do some free and simple research. As time permits, save as many brochures as you can - even ones you do not like! See what you have to compete against? Separate the brochures into two piles - good and bad. Incorporate the good characteristics into your brochure and be aware of the bad.

Decide on your format. Your prospects need a snapshot of your capabilities within the confines of your brochure. There is no standard format for brochures - they can be prepared in a wide variety of shapes and sizes.

Develop your budget. Decide what you can spend and apportion it accordingly into writing, designing and printing / publishing. Also, don't forget your distribution costs!

2. WRITE

Identify the tone you are seeking. The tone must be compatible with your marketing image. The tone can give a warm feeling to a threatening topic or it can be helpful, exciting, shocking, emotional and intellectual. The appropriateness of the tone varies according to the industry, customer profile and the message you are sending. Write the brochure.

A brochure's design may vary, but its components usually remain the same.

They are:

• Front cover headline

• Inside subheads

• Body of the brochure:

• Introductory paragraph / page

• Identification of your product /service

• Benefits of your product / service

• Your competitive advantage

• Optional - testimonials, client lists, awards and honours

• Back cover

Results-orientated brochures start with a great front cover headline. The headline needs to scream a benefit to a target customer. The headline is one of the most important parts of your brochure. If it is enticing, the customer will read on. If it's lacklustre, you've wasted your money and maybe lost a prospective customer. Your headline needs to catch the interest of the reader by providing the answer to their question of "What's in it for me?"

The inside subheads must get the prospects attention and reinforce your cover headline. Frequently, the subheads describe the components of the body copy - your products/services, benefits, and competitive advantage. Subheads should also be kept concise and, when appropriate, interesting.

Your introductory paragraph should address the issue presented on the cover. If you asked "Would You Like to Lose 10 Pounds?" you must answer it, "You Bet!" Entice your prospects, but don't overwhelm them with thesis-length sentences. Most important, the introductory paragraph should establish the need for your product or service. If your product or service does not fulfill some type of need, then it has no value and you have no customers. You must describe in the introductory paragraph why customers cannot live without your product/service. You can't bury this in the body copy. If you don't tell them immediately few will read on.

Your body copy must include a description of your products and services, their features and major benefits and what sets you apart from your competition.

Again, remember your target market and the message you are trying to get across. Be selective - you do not want to be exhaustive when developing your benefits and competitive advantages. List only those that are relevant to the prospective customers you are trying to reach. If you try to list everything the most important features may get lost.

Use adjectives that best describe your business. Are your products one of a kind, exciting, innovative, high quality, cutting edge, results-orientated, creative, dynamic or distinguishable?

Describe only your primary products and services. Don't provide a laundry list of all the things you do. State what you do and why you do it best. Sell yourself and your business.

People buy a product or service because they either need or want to. In order to create a need or a want, you must promote the benefits of using your product or service.

Many companies advertise the features of their business and neglect to promote how the product or service will benefit the customer. Features enable the product or service to perform its function. Benefits are the results a person receives from using the product or service.

What sets you apart from the competition?

What will make a customer choose my company over a competitor's?

What can I do that will make my business stand out from the rest?

These are your competitive advantages.

Be careful not to use industry standards as your competitive advantage. Each industry has a set of standards that customers expect from a business. For instance, when a customer goes to a restaurant, they expect the food to be fresh, the location to be clean, the staff to be friendly and the food to be tasty. These are not attributes; they are "givens."

You've now created the all-important body of your brochure. If space permits, try including testimonials. Before you do, be sure to get their permission. Testimonials are an endorsement of your business and will provide a type of reference. Prospects are influenced by them and will make comparisons of industries, job titles, services performed or products sold.

The back cover should include all of your pertinent company information including your logo, contact details and, when appropriate, opening hours, branch locations, parent company or subsidiaries and your name.

You are now ready to write your brochure! Take some time to draft the contents understanding that they may change a bit after you've settled on a design.

3. DESIGN

Identify the design you are seeking. Many FTSE 350 companies spend enormous amounts of money on developing their look. All visuals - including your paper stock, colours, graphics and typography reinforce your image.

But you must remember the market you are targeting, the products/services you are offering, the message you are sending and the tone you are projecting.

All of these must compliment one another.

Lay out of the brochure. Keep in mind that your brochure will be competing against many others for your reader's attention. You'll want the design to be unique without distracting from the message.

Select the typestyle that best suits your image. Fonts, typestyle and size, and the way they are configured on a page influences the appearance of your brochure more than any other visual element. The typestyle you choose can either help or hinder your brochures readability.

Choose a typeface that "speaks" to your readers in the tone you've selected for your brochure. Some typefaces project authority, others are friendly, others look expensive and others have a classy look.

A typeface generally falls into two categories - serif and sans serif:

-Serif type has small strokes or feet at the ends of each letter. Besides adding character to the letters, they also enable the reader to see words and sentences rather than individual letters. Serif typefaces are most often used for body text. Some of the common serif typefaces are Times and New Century Schoolbook.

-Sans-serif typefaces have no feet on the letters. Sans serif is most often used for display type - headlines, subheads, captions etc. Helvetica and Arial are the most popular of the sans serif typefaces.

Add effective visuals. The three major categories of visuals are photographs, illustrations and graphs. All three may enhance the effectiveness of your message and the overall attractiveness of your page:

Photographs can add a sense of familiarity by letting readers see with accuracy and detail who or what the brochure is written about. Often, however, the camera may capture material that you may not want to include in your brochure, so some type of photo manipulation may be necessary.

Illustrations, consisting of either hand or computer generated drawings can offer even more advantages than photographs. Not only do they convey accuracy and detail, but they also add an aesthetic touch.

Graphs combine the communication power of charts, diagrams and tables with the artistic appeal of illustrations.

Allow for pockets of white space - remember, elegance is found in simplicity. White space also provides contrast, as well as a place of rest for the reader's eyes! Your goal is to make the brochure attractive and to get your prospect to read the brochure and act accordingly.

4. PRINT / PUBLISH

Studies have shown that colours invoke fairly universal emotions in people. There are three primary colours - yellow, red and blue. Yellow is associated with light and warmth, red is emotional and active and blue is passive and calming. When using colour, make sure there are distinct tonal contrasts, not just different colours. Your colour selection, along with your typestyle and visuals, should reinforce the image and the message you want to send.

Don't underestimate the impact of black and white! Together with a non-standard paper colour and attractive visuals, black and white can produce a very professional brochure.

Select your paper stock. The look and feel of your paper should reinforce your image. Hundreds of paper colours are available to you as are different textures such as linen, laid, parchment, vellums etc. For the environmentally conscious, there is also a large selection of recycled papers from which to choose.

However, with the Internet revolution now a reality, you should consider whether your message would be more effective if sent electronically, as opposed to the conventional way of distributing brochures.

With the widespread use of e-mail, your target audience may respond more positively to a different method of marketing. Electronic brochures may not only compliment your deployment strategy, but are faster to update and less expensive, because they avoid the necessity of incurring print and re-print costs.