Designing Brochures

Brochures are the paper ambassadors of your business. They represent your company, your products, and your brand on your behalf. With that in mind, the design and layout you choose for your brochures becomes essential.

There are a few fool-proof methods for designing brochures that you can use to your benefit. The father of modern print design, David Ogilvy, put as much emphasis on research as he did the artist side of layout. His tried and true methods can serve as a blueprint as you design your brochure.

Pictures
The first thing that people look at when they pick up your brochure is the pictures. As Ogilvy notes, the eye finds the graphic elements the most interesting and typically goes there first. You can use this to your advantage by doing two things: use pictures and print in color. Just because you do not have a picture on your brochure does not mean that a customer will not look at it, but using pictures will only help. Knowing that this will be the first place customers look will aid in selecting pictures that guide the customer through the rest of your presentation.

Captions
After the pictures, the customer will look at your captions of the pictures. Captions can be omitted, but using captions to highlight features of products or to emphasize key points of the brochure will only help to drive your ideas home. Keep captions short and to the point. Make sure they also are relevant not only to the images but also to the brochure as a whole.

Headlines
The next place that Ogilvy states the customer’s eye will go is to the headline and sub-heading. Headlines should always be included any time there is more than a few sentences of copy or content. This helps the customer decide whether or not they want to read the “fine print” or details of the brochure. Headlines should highlight the main point of the following copy in a few words. Sub-headings give you the opportunity to expand on the headline and divide the content into smaller pieces.

Copy
The last thing a customer will read is the copy. This is not to say that the actual descriptive text is unimportant. Unless the other elements of the brochure (pictures, captions, headlines) guide the customer to the copy, then the customer may never get to the point where they actually read what you have to say.

Expand Your Client Base with These Low-Cost Tips

If your business could use some more customers (and whose business can’t?) it’s time to put the customers first. This means in all the marketing you do, from brochure printing to answering your phones, you need to focus on your customer rather than your business.

When you are designing your brochure printing pieces, think of what information your customers would like to know and in what order would they easily understand your brochure’s message? When you answer the phone, would it behoove customers to know about your current sale? “XYZ Corporation, where we now have all our in-stock merchandise 20 percent off.”

Nowadays, consumers are so used to advertisements that they often ignore them, unless the ad really speaks to them. Consumers have been schemed in the past, which puts them on guard for any kind of advertising you aim at them. Sometimes the best marketing is the cheapest. To do your best marketing and expand your client base, follow these no-cost and low-cost tips.

Ask your customers for their opinion. You can do this informally, while they are checking out with their purchases or while they peruse your store, or you can do this formally, with an email or phone survey. The point is to ask your customers their opinions about which products are great and which products are flops. Also, ask for suggestions on what you can do better. Oftentimes, what you can do better is something your competition does better than you. By asking for your customers’ honest opinions and letting them know that their suggestions will be taken seriously, you can not only improve your business, but you’ll also build a relationship with your customers.

Expand your target market. After you’ve sufficiently tried to reach a certain target market for a period of time (at least a year), you can try expanding to other markets to bring in new customers. It’s quite possible to tap out a target market, especially if that market is small to begin with. Take a look at your current offerings and figure out who else would like or need your products. Send out a small test advertisement through direct mail or take out a small ad in a magazine or newspaper directed at the new target market. Don’t waste money on unchartered waters; just spend a small amount at first and then spend accordingly depending on the feedback from the test market.

Follow up with current customers. Genuinely show your interest in how your customers are doing and whether they’re happy with their recently purchased product or service. The conversation about the product or service is just a small part of the follow up. Ask how things have been going and ask if you can help them with anything else. Treat your customers like friends and they’ll keep coming back.

If someone called inquiring about a product, make sure you get back to that person within 48 hours. Don’t let customers get away with bad customer service.

None of these tips will break your bank; if anything, they take more time than money. If you follow these tips, you’ll pleasantly surprise your customers and they’ll keep doing business with you to see how else you can surprise them.

Technical Considerations for Brochure Printing

Small business owners are finding that brochures can be easily created nowadays in their office on their own computers. With desktop publishing software on the market like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and Microsoft Publisher, it’s easy to design your own brochures and only use a printing company to do the actual printing.

Here are a few technical considerations that business owners who aren’t savvy graphics developers need to know.

Design for your print size
One of the most frequent errors do-it-yourselfers make when designing brochures is to design for the wrong print size. If you are planning on printing on 8-x-10-inch paper, don’t build your layout on an 8.5-x-11-inch palette. Many printing companies will return your file to you if it’s not sized correctly.

This is one of the hardest errors to correct at the printer – if they stretch or shrink the design to fit the paper size, your graphics and images will look funny and your text will be hard to read.

Allow your brochure to bleed
No, I’m not saying to torture yourself or your brochures for that design epiphany to break through! I’m talking about your print bleed. Print bleed is expanding your brochure design to go slightly past the page borders in your design program. When brochures are printed, they are printed in sheets, and are then sliced into individual brochures. The blade that cuts the sheets is usually right on, but sometimes veers just a bit outside of the established border. When that happens, you can end up with a white border on some parts of your brochure. Not cool if you have a great picture on one corner of your brochure, or if a picture takes up the whole front panel. Design your brochure with an extra 1/8 inch beyond the established borders to avoid any printing mishaps.

Your images and photos should be at least 300 dpi
To create a professional-looking brochure, you need professional quality photos. If you print a photo or image that isn’t high-resolution, your image will come out blurry or even pixilated.

The images that look good on the Web are 72 dpi (dots per inch). This is not enough for printing on paper – these low quality images would hardly be recognizable in a brochure. Your photo files should be at least 300 dpi to print sharply and clearly.

Choose a high quality paper to print your brochures on
Many printing companies offer 80lb or 100lb stock paper. Papers also come with a variety of glossy and matte finishes. 100lb paper is much more substantial than 80lb paper and doesn’t cost that much more. Paper weight is calculated by stacking 500 sheets on a pile. A heavier paper will make your brochure seem more professional and your images and text will look better because you can’t see through to the other side of the paper!

You can add varnish to the paper if you want it to look glossy and shiny, and varnish also helps prevent fingerprint smudges on color-heavy brochures. If you have a lot of ink on your brochure, it will look glossy anyway, so you may not want to spend money on making the small, inkless parts glossy.

How to Grab Them Right Away

The really good kinds of commercials and advertisements are the ones people are still talking about years after they debuted. This is the dream of all advertisers, I’m sure, and I’m seen my fair share of real knockouts.

The problem seems to be that most of these, especially in print, are left to magazines and other mainstream forms of entertainment. When I get the flyers or full color brochures in the mail they have little to no flair. You can tell whoever designed them didn’t care very much about doing anything but getting them out the door.

I think people assume that if their ad isn’t going to appear in one of those mainstream formats like newspapers or magazines they don’t need to put as much effort into it. It seems to me this should be just the opposite. Brochure printing doesn’t benefit from the fact that it will automatically be coupled with a magazine people are buying specifically to read. A brochure needs to live or die on its own merits and nothing else.

People should be putting the most effort into these kinds of advertisements. If all I’m being given is a flyer I want that flyer to be captivating or else I’m not going to take the time out of my life to even give it a once over.

The next time I get that truly wonderful looking brochure in the mail I’ll take the time to read what it has to say. Until then I’ll be dropping them right in the trash.

Jumpstart Your Product’s Debut With Color

There a whole lot of “maxims” out there when it comes to starting a business. There are almost as many opinions about how to go about presenting your product as there are people who have ever thought about the subject.

However, one “maxim” that is almost never mentioned, but should be, is:

INVEST IN HIGH-QUALITY, FULL-COLOR LITERATURE!

Far too many would-be entrepreneurs believe that promotional literature is an area in which they can save some money and help their startup budget. It is simply not the case. In fact, skimping on your literature could spell doom for your entire enterprise.

Think a customer is going to pick up your bland and white brochure, when there is a full color brochure right next to it? Probably not. Think your dull, commonplace flyer printing is going to stand a chance next to an attractive, colorful flyer? No way.

As you are planning your brochure printing, booklet printing, and poster printing, take the time (and money) to design intriguing, colorful pieces. Make items that will catch the customers’ eye.

You will be very glad you did once your product hits the market and you see the fruits of your investment. The profit will far outweigh the costs.