Despite the fame of digital marketing, print collateral still has an important role to play in balancing the business marketing strategy. A professional brochure suggests a high budget and an established reputation to be in everyone’s eye. Brochures are versatile marketing tools that represent the whole business or you can say it is the face of your business. You can distribute the brochures at trade shows, put them in brochure racks, send them via direct mail, and even publish them on your company or business website. If you are up for publishing a sales brochure or flyer to drum up your business or to announce any new product or services then a brochure is the best way to ensure a good response.

A great design will attract your audience to read all about what you are offering and all about the business. In this guide, we will suggest to you how to create your business brochure step by step, from planning for your needs to writing the copy, designing the brochure, and, finally, printing it. The following tips will tell you how to design a brochure that will properly represent your mission, outline what you have to offer your target audience, and serve as an effective marketing and sales tool.

Target Your Customers:

Before you spend any time writing brochures, make sure you understand your customers closely. You need to figure out, why would they want to buy your product. What is the most important thing it can offer them? For a close counter, you can talk to your salespeople to talk to customers. You can take the help of their answers to decide which benefits to play up in your brochure.

Set a Good Budget For the Brochure:

Settle an amount that you are willing to spend on the campaign of your business brochure. In most cases, you might have to choose between higher quality paper and printing more copies or between hiring a designer or a copywriter and doing the job yourself as per the stipulated budget. But, as you are spending money, you must know where you need to stand with the budget that will help you to fulfill your priorities and figure out where you need to compromise.

Create a clear blueprint for Brochure

Before starting the content and editing part, you must keep a good structure of your brochure in mind. For example, let’s say your brochure is eight pages long where one page will be the front cover, so you’ve got seven other pages on which you have to advertise your business. Your pages may include:

• About us
• Our services
• Our products
• What makes us different
• Pricing
• Facts and figures
• Market research
• Large, full-out image
• Call to action
• Contact and social media details
• Link to your website through URL and QR code

Make a rough calculation and estimation about how much space each element should take up and eliminate anything that will not add any wow factor to your brochure.

Keep it short

Just try to keep your brochure informative and to the point. If you are new to this business world or a start-up company and you have not got lots of cash to spend on brochure printing, you must choose a sideway to meet the expectations. So it is better to keep your brochure short to save time too.

Write a compelling headline

The headline of the brochure plays the most vital role as your headline will determine whether a prospect picks up that will trigger a reader’s mind. Avoid using common and ordinary headlines. Choose a headline that does not tell the reader anything about the contents of the brochure. You need to provoke the reader’s curiosity without being vague. Use some “power” words like free, quick, easy, results, exclusive, proven, etc.

Here are some examples of headlines that will spark interest in reader’s mind while also telling exactly what they will get from reading the brochure:

• Scared of the Dentist? Learn How Sedation Dentistry Can Help
• The Ultimate College Prep Checklist: A Four-Year Plan for High School Freshmen
• 4 Reasons to Think Again Before Buying a Foreclosed Home

Highlight the Punches and graphics that will attract your audience

You should be aware of the fact that maximum readers take less than 5 seconds to look at the cover of a sales brochure and decide whether to read it further or not. If you add a headline or graphics on the cover page of your brochure, then it will be a bit boring, and few recipients will bother to read it. For example, if you put a photo showing a businessperson giving a thumbs-up sign to a small group of associates and a headline that reads, “Train Your Team To Land Big Sales,” is likely to get more attention.

Bullets are easier to describe the key features

The best style of writing a brochure is to describe the features of your business by describing the products in bullet format. Consumers and business people alike are pressed for time and have many ads competing for their attention. So they prefer to take a glance quickly through the brochure. Feature-rich bullet points will help you to focus on what your business offers and where it will lead them next.

Give Extra Emphasis on the readability

Low readability means the content will lose interest. So make it simple for people to read your brochure. Just like this simple example; Grey type on a white background and dark type on a dark background makes it difficult to read which will reduce the readability. So, there are so many things that you need to keep in your mind like font size, font color, wording, etc.

Always set a Reason to act now

It is very necessary to give your readers a reason to act at the instance. If you don’t urge the reader to act now or you don’t give them a reason to do so, you can never get their attention and interest. The most popular and common example of it is to add a buy now segment which may reflect some attractive discounts that are only valid before a specific date a gift for purchases before a specific date or rebates for purchases by a specific date etc. You can include a handy reference in your brochure to discourage readers from keeping it away such as:

• a map of a town marked with top attractions
• a “normal body weight” chart based on the reader’s height
• a list of program-specific student scholarships
• a cheat sheet for first-time homebuyers in a specific city

Make it easy to respond

Your business brochure must contain the business name, phone number website URL, etc through which readers can connect with you. If you have any Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pinterest, and Twitter accounts, then add them to the contact panel of the brochure. As the new trend, you can add a QR code that takes people either to your product page or to a page to sign up for your newsletter.

Proofread your brochure is a Must

Along with all the techniques, no matter how much effort you put into your content and design, errors and inconsistencies in your brochure are not acceptable. An error full of literature can kill your credibility. The tone of your brochure must match the rest of your brand messaging. So proofreading your brochure is essential before printing it out. You need a proofreader, who will refer to your brand style guide for how to handle things like numerals, dates, and titles in the text and also the correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Bonus Point: What extra should I put in my brochure?

Besides the contact information and the business feature, what else can I put in to make an attractive brochure? Well, here’s a list of content types often found in sales brochures:

• Descriptions of products, services, exhibits, or attractions
• Features and Benefits
• Product Specs
• Pricing charts
• Pros and cons
• Itinerary (e.g. winery tours)
• Narrative (e.g. history of a winery)
• How a product works
• How a service is delivered
• How to do something
• Checklists and questionnaires
• Images, illustrations, charts, graphs, and maps
• Frequently asked questions
• Company blurb
• Social proof: case studies, testimonials or media quotes, client lists, executive bios, etc.

Regardless of the size of your business, the above tips will assist you in creating a brochure that will properly represent your organization with a great impression. It will also attract potential customers and call them to action.