Ways to Make Your Business Brochures Work

Here are six pointers from marketing expert Bob Bly on punching up the marketing voltage of your brochures:

Define Your Task

Before you write a word or begin to doodle a layout, figure out precisely what you want your brochure to accomplish. Bly advises, “The narrower the topic, the more focused, specific, and effective your brochure can be.” Download a Castle Press storyboard of the folded brochure size of your choice.

Know Your Audience

Are you talking to engineers, financial people or general managers? Each audience reacts to a specific sort of information.

Stay On Message

“For instance,” Bly writes, “if the objective is to get a meeting for you to sell consulting services, you only need to include enough information to convince your prospect that a meeting is worth his time.”

Include Three Vital Pieces of Information

Tell your business prospect:

Everything he needs to know to make a buying decision
Why your product is the best possible choice
Why your company is the best supplier

Edit. Edit. Edit.

Never cram your presentation with unnecessary information.

“When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.” If you give every fact about your product equal weight, your prospect will not perceive the key facts that make your most persuasive case.

Reflect Your Selling Situation

Bly stresses that there are only three basic selling situations:

Your prospect is not acutely aware that he has a problem that your product will help solve. Your brochure must dramatize the problem and its severity, and position your product as its solution.
Your prospect is aware of his problem, but not convinced that your type of product offers the best solution to it. You might offer your prospect a copy of a laboratory test that points out your product’s capabilities.
Your prospect is aware of the problem, perceives that your type of product offers a solution, but is skeptical that your product is his best choice.

“One good way to demonstrate superiority,” Bly writes, “is a table that compares your product’s capabilities point by point with its competition.”