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Create Effective Brochures

Updated Feb 2006
Businesspeople love to debate the merits of brochures. Are they effective marketing tools, or a waste of time and resources? This article explores the value of brochures and gives you some tips for planning an effective brochure.

What Does a Brochure Do, Anyway?

The basic answer is that the brochure should stimulate the person reading it to take some kind of action. Most often, the action you want is for the reader to contact you and purchase your product or service. Failing that, you want the reader to take the much less obvious action of remembering your company in the future, at purchase time.

How do you get readers to take action? By showing them how the action is beneficial to them. Not to their friends, or their spouses, or to you, but to them. It follows that before you can do this successfully, you must know who your audience is and what constitutes a benefit to them.

Who Will Want Your Product?

Make a list of all the types of people who are likely to want what you offer. There may be more than one group. For example, if you're a realtor, you deal with two distinct groups: buyers and sellers. The reasons that will make one group take action (sell a home through you) may be very different than the reasons that the other group will take action (buy a home through you). In this case, the two groups have such different interests that it makes sense to have two distinct brochures.

What are the Benefits?

Once you're clear on who your brochure is speaking to, start thinking about the features/benefits that will make these people want to buy your product. If you really don't know why people buy your product, find out. Ask your current customers why they buy from you. These may be the qualities you want to emphasize.

As obvious as this step sounds, it's the point where most unsuccessful brochures go wrong. Too much attention is paid to listing what's for sale, and too little attention is paid to what will make people want to buy.

Especially look for qualities that make you unique. In general, people will not travel to your business or take the time to deal with you if they can find the same thing with less effort—but they will deal with you if you offer them something unique, or something they are unaware that they can get closer to home.

The element of uniqueness can involve price, product, service, or some combination of all three. The most effective brochures are the ones that flaunt a company's unique points.

Content and Theme

Once you've defined your market(s), how do you decide what to say to them? There are two guidelines to follow:

1. The brochure must be a complete selling tool. It must contain everything needed to make people want to take action. You cannot leave important things out, trusting that you will get a chance to tell the prospective customer later.

   This principle does not mean that you must include everything about your business. It means that you tell one complete story that makes the reader want to buy from you.

2. The brochure should have unity. The best brochures have some kind of unifying theme. The most effective themes are ones that emphasize the ways that a business is unique. The theme itself is often presented in words as a tagline.

   Why is having a theme so helpful? Because people remember concepts much more easily than they remember collections of unrelated facts. When the contents of your brochure have a sense of unity, the brochure—and your business—is more likely to be noticed and remembered. So pick one theme and emphasize it. Here are some examples:

   Example 1. You sell coffee. You believe that these points that will appeal to your customers: competitive price, personal service, the fact that the coffee is locally roasted in small batches.

   Your theme is: Quality at an Affordable Price. Your brochure should be dedicated to showing the ways that you deliver quality at a price that gives the customer value. In other words, you use your strong points to prove your theme.

   Of course, you could simply list your points (price, service, etc.) one by one, without any overall theme, but they would not have nearly the same impact they have when presented within the context: here are the ways that we give you quality at an affordable price.

   Example 2. You sell insurance. Privately, you believe that your policies aren't much different than anybody else's, but your service is great, you can explain your policies in common English, and you're the only insurance firm in your district. Your theme becomes Down-to-Earth Neighborhood Service and you stress those aspects of your business in your brochure.

   Example 3. You run a small, independent knicknack-and-doodad shop that specializes in not much of anything, really. How do you sell this? Simple: the unifier is your lack of consistency or predictability! You are the store with an "Eclectic Assortment of Goods" and your slogan (and theme) are: "Come see for yourself. You never know what you'll find."

Fire the Big Guns First

One last tip: your biggest selling point should be on the front of your brochure. People are in a hurry. If you don't grab them up front, the rest of your message may not even be read. However, once people see something that hooks them, they'll read on in hopes that there is more good stuff to come. Identify what you believe is the biggest benefit to your target audience, and feature it prominently.