Creating the Right Brochure

There are few better selling tools than an attractive brochure placed into the hands of your customer or potential customer. Creating such a brochure does not have to be a difficult task. Here are a few steps to follow.  

Decide on Your Purpose
Brochures fall into two broad categories — those that introduce a new product or service to a likely customer and those that turn an already interested customer into a buyer. To be successful, a brochure should have a precise objective and a target reader in mind. It's best to create the least elaborate brochure likely to achieve its objectives. The content of your brochure will depend on the specific service or product you want to promote. Product photos, testimonials, benefits, your unique selling proposition, and contact information are all components to consider.

Use Color
Today’s market place demands color. Full color is especially important if the product or service you are offering needs color to show its features. Most product brochures, for example, won’t work effectively in anything other than full color. Can you imagine any food, cosmetics, florists, or auto brochures being done in black and white? Even service businesses can benefit from a color presentation. Financial or legal services may get by with black and white or single color, but dental services, veterinarians, home improvement, hair stylists, or similar services will usually opt for color. Take a look at the mailers you receive or the ad inserts in the newspaper - color is now the norm.

Get Good Design
Of course, a lot more goes into an effective brochure than just color. Type fonts and sizes, white space, choice of images, and layout, along with the essential message, all combine to determine if your brochure will have the intended result. A professional designer who thoroughly understands your marketing message is the optimum way to go. If you do not use professional design, be sure to collaborate closely with your printer to insure that your final product will print as you intend.

Tie into Your Website
We live in a digital world. Your brochure, like your business card, should contain information that will direct your customer to your web site. You might even consider using a QR Code that will allow a customer or prospect to access your web site immediately with his smart phone.

 10 Common Mistakes to Avoid
 1. Not emphasizing the unique selling proposition of your business.
 2. Being concerned with the looks, but forgetting the sales objective.
 3. Omitting essential contact information.
 4. Omitting product information critical to the reader’s decision-making.
 5. Including details that become outdated too quickly.
 6. Giving insufficient thought to how the brochure will be distributed.
 7. Using text that is lost in the background color or too small to read easily.
 8. Including low resolution or poor-quality images.
 9. Allowing a busy or complex design to distract from the key selling message.
10.Not proofreading very carefully before submitting your file for printing

Promoting Your Brand

You may not have the budget to employ a high powered marketing firm for your company. But there are some steps you can take to get started promoting your brand that won't cost you a lot of money. First, you must be clear about what your brand is, and what you want it to be. Only you can determine what you want your brand to be. But only your customers can tell you what your brand really is.

Perhaps you have built your business around great customer service, or the very best quality merchandise. You want your customers to think of you in those term, helpful service or top quality. But it is not enough to claim great service or top quality. Everybody already does that, so it won’t set your brand apart. Instead, focus in on a specific of that product or service. Ideally, the specific also conveys a benefit to the customer.

There’s a plumbing company that advertises its staff as the “smell good” plumbers. Now that is getting specific! Chances are, you may not want to go there. But you can hone in on something that will resonate with potential clients. A dentist who minimizes discomfort for his patients may claim “You’ll always leave with a smile.” A pizza restaurant that believes it has the best tasting product could boast “a taste of old Napoli in every bite.”

In each case, the brand, revealed by the specific attributes, is aimed at the consumer you need to attract. And, in each case, it allows for multiple means of expression. The pizza with a taste of “old Napoli” comes in a box adorned with colors or scenes of Naples. Similarly, the restaurant is decorated and plays background music to evoke the same theme. Ads or flyers convey the same message. Likewise the dentist, who wants you to leave with a smile, decorates his office, trains his employees, and manages the conduct of his practice to elicit a smile or good feeling from every patient. His office will be cheerful, maybe even a little whimsical, and his ads will be full of smiling testimonials.

“Okay,” I hear you say, “but I manufacture submersible water pumps. What can I do?” Start with who is buying your pumps and why. What is it that makes your pump successful in the market? Maybe it’s reliability. If so, build your brand around the reliability of the product. It becomes the pump that “will never let you down,” or “just won’t quit.” Associate it with the most reliable things you can think of – “the Acme Pump, as reliable as tomorrow’s sunrise.” You might put a bright, golden sun in the background in your marketing collateral. You could also stress a benefit that is very important to your customer – “You’ll never get a call-back with an Acme Pump!” What is important is that your materials evoke your brand – whatever it is – and stress the benefit. Of course, developing those materials, brochures, ads, web pages, or whatever, may take professional assistance. But having a clear central message already spelled out, will save you time and money in the development of your marketing materials.

How do you know if your branding is successful? Well, as I said at the beginning, only your customers can tell you that. And that would be the subject of another post.

Every Door Direct Mail

Direct mail is usually regarded as the most effective advertising medium there is. But for a lot of small businesses, acquiring mailing lists and postal permits and meeting all of the requirements of the USPS appears to be too much of a hassle. This is especially true if your market area is small.  Now, suppose your business could reach all of the potential customers in your neighborhood without the need for a mailing list, permits or the associated fees? Well, that is exactly what Every Door Direct Mail is designed to do.

With Every Door Direct Mail, you can create a saturation mailing without applying individual names and addresses to each mail piece. You can target a location by a specified distance from your retail site. Your target area could be a city or a specific neighborhood within that city. Want to reach only those households on your side of the bridge? You can do that. Want to blanket all of the doors in the industrial section? You can do that too. By selecting specific carrier routes, you can pinpoint the geographic area best suited for your marketing message.

Of course, there are some requirements. You have to mail at least 200 pieces but fewer than 5000 pieces. They must be Standard Flats and each piece must weigh 3.3oz or less. You can plan your mailing yourself using tools provided online by the USPS. Or you can use a mail service provider, like CR Print, to plan, prepare, and deliver to the post office. Either way you save the cost of buying a mailing list, a permit, and individually addressing each piece. It is a great opportunity for small businesses to take advantage of the effectiveness of direct mail at a minimal cost.

USPS to Offer a Sale on Postage

Does postage ever go on sale? It looks like it will this summer. The USPS is set to offer a special 3% discount in July and August for any letters or flats that include QR codes.

QR Code for CR Print website

QR codes are those two-dimensional mobile barcodes that can be read by smartphones like the iPhone, Blackberry or Android. Smartphone users have to first download an app to read the code. Scanning a QR code with the phone's camera opens the app which launches a browser taking you directly to a page on the internet. The uses of this technology are limited only by your imagination. A printed ad can immediately take you to a web page with detailed information about the product or service in the ad. A postcard promoting a restaurant could have a QR code that opens to the menu, a view of the dining room, and a link to make an online reservation. Want to know what seats are available for a performance? Scan the QR code on the poster for a seating chart. The QR code on any packaged item might provide detailed information about assembly, warranty, accessories, nutrition, or innumerable other options.

So why is the Post Office offering a discount to mailers? The Post Office believes that, over time, QR codes can increase demand for mailing services. According to Thomas Foti, the Postal Service manager of marketing mail, “As customers continue to use QR codes, we think this increases the effectiveness of mail, which encourages the demand for mail, and hopefully longer term it increases our volume.” Marketers already know that direct mail is an very effective advertising medium. Adding the ability to connect quickly and efficiently to an internet landing page increases the power of that medium exponentially.

What is Branding and Why Should it Concern You?

The condition of the economy over the last couple of years has brought an increasing emphasis on marketing and, with it, lots of talk about “branding.” Just what is “branding” and why should it concern you?

Let’s deal first with why it should concern you. You have a brand, even if you do not know it. That brand may be something positive or negative. In the mind of your prospects or customers, you or your organization are identified with certain attributes. You can be identified with speed, integrity, youth, sophistication, comfort, fun, prestige, masculinity, reliability, pride, romance, the opposite of any of these, or a thousand other attributes impossible to list here. Your customers consciously or unconsciously connect you with your “brand.” Years ago my kids rented videos from a store where the owners did some cooking in the back room. To them, it became the “smelly” store. I don’t think this is what the owners intended, but we discovered that lots of people could easily identify the store by that attribute rather than its name. Hopefully, your brand is not an aroma – unless you are Chanel #5.

Your brand is the principal attribute, or sum of attributes that your customers associate with you or your organization. It can be elusive, a feeling or emotion, as in “the ultimate driving machine,” “you’re in good hands,” or “the happiest kingdom on earth.” Or it can be more tangible or measurable like Wal-Mart’s “lowest price” brand. Of course, these slogans are not the brand, but merely material that carries the brand. Large companies generate marketing collateral, their advertising, brochures, business cards, jingles, etc., all intended to convey the attribute they want you to associate with them. Thus, Nike will choose material for its marketing collateral, like the slogan “Just do it,” or the swoosh symbol, or the star athletes in its commercials. All are intended to convey athleticism or physical performance. You are not just buying the shoes; you are buying the brand - performance.

Odds are you don’t have the budget these large companies have to promote your brand, so you have to use your more limited resources wisely. There are steps you can take to get started that won’t cost you anything. I'll write more about those in another post.