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Bulletproof Your Brochures

Updated Feb 2006
First, let's ask a key question: does your company even NEED a brochure?

The answer depends largely on what you're selling. Like any sales tool, brochures are good for some applications but not for others. The key to not wasting your money is to understand what brochures do well, and what they don't do well.

Here's the secret: brochures are ideal for getting the word out to many people about relatively low-cost products that you need to sell a lot of. The key words in the previous sentence are: "many people", "relatively low-cost products", and "sell a lot of".

Here's the reasoning: if your business has to make hundreds of relatively low-cost sales each month, you need a lot of people to know about you. It's simple cause-and-effect: you can't get a lot of sales without a lot of customers.

Yet meeting each of those people, and developing a personal relationship with them, is virtually impossible—there just aren't enough hours in the day. Enter the brochure. Brochures are an ideal way to get your name and your product in front of many, many people with a minimal investment of your time.

If, however, your business sells a relatively low number of high-cost items per month, brochures become less effective as a sales tool. Don't believe it? Mentally review your mail for the last month and compare the number of invitations to buy a pizza with the number of invitations to buy a Lexus. See the difference? Major advertisers understand that high-ticket items are more effectively sold through other types of advertising.

Now that we know what brochures are good for—representing low-cost products to many buyers who may not have had personal contact with a company—we can deduce some things about what makes a brochure effective.

First and foremost, the brochure must get your points across quickly. When people aren't spending a lot of money, they usually aren't willing to spend a lot of time researching a purchase. The points you need to communicate quickly are:

• what's for sale
• why people need it
• why they need it from you

Until you can answer each of the above questions clearly and succinctly, you aren't ready to design your brochure.

Simplicity is everything. The more crowded and complex your brochure is, the less likely people are to come away with a clear idea of what your business can do for them. Ideally, a person who has never met you should be able to glance over your brochure for 10-15 seconds and know exactly what you're offering.

Here are a couple of ways to help achieve this clarity:

• set headlines in a much larger font size and a different color than the body text. This contrast helps the reader to scan and focus on key points
• use white space. Grouping information makes it easier for the brain to process.

To test your brochure's effectiveness, hand it to a stranger. Ask them to take 15 seconds to scan it. Then ask them to describe what you sell and the advantages of dealing with you.

Of course, the drawback to achieving this kind of clarity is that people may scan your brochure, decide they're not interested, and toss it.

So what? Remember, your brochure is your screening agent. One of its purposes is to save you precious time by weeding out people who have no need for, or interest in, what you're selling.