Exploring Basics – All elements together – Brochure

Agree or not. Brochures are exceptional marketing tools intended to persuade your customers to finally do business with you.

Interesting facts about Brochures before we proceed :
Successful when paired with niche marketing strategy
Preferred to check the market acceptance of product or service
Easy to alter, less cost compared to maintaining a sales force
Less expensive
Better place to provide detailed information

Planning for a brochure is a very important part of the complete process. It is preferred even to plan about every element that goes inside the brochure including design, content, and literally everything. Brochures are effective if it is highly customized, the design, content, graphics, visuals, logo, packaging, and all other things must be professional and targeted.

Important Brochure Design Elements :
When we think of creating a brochure the first thing hitting our minds is the front and back cover, product placements, photographs or graphics relevant to the industry and many more.

Cover page :
Should be visually attractive
Should feature Company name, Logo, Punch line if any
Should have attractive graphics, good colors matching the color of logo
No too much information

Selecting a front cover page image is a crucial job, experts should only do this. In case you are selling sporting goods, the image preferred on your cover page is an image that better represents your product or service to the customer. Using a persuasive image increases chances for the customer to empathize with your product.

Back Cover :
No too much information
Best place to feature new products or services
Never forget to include complete contact information – postal address, mail ids, contact numbers, websites, blog url, etc…
Best places to even put testimonials, clientele

To an effective brochure backside cover page is as important as the front page itself. Many people have the habit of reading the brochures from the last page.

Inside Pages :
Inside left pages are good places to highlight important information. This page catches the eye of the reader once he opens the inside page.

Upper Right-hand corner :
Also called as ‘sweet spot’ or ‘serious spot’ the right hand top corner is a two-page spread. Generally this place is used to mention the company information, vision, mission statements or highlights or achievements of the brand. This is also a place to push your most sellable business identity.

Type faces :
We make a brochure or catalog for people to read it. If your brochure is not readable then even carefully drafted product descriptions will never generate sales for you.

Some tips to make your Brochure readable :
Use not more than 3 typefaces
Using types smaller than 8 pnt is very risky
Vary types by using different colors, size, by making them bold, italics etc…
Don’t think of underlining or capitalizing
Using too many typefaces irritates customer eye and disturbs him to read.

What is the brand image you want to carry?
I remember an adventure sportz company making its brochure with a different hook of its own. They started including small adventurous stories. The result was there was a raise in sale of the bags and other accessories, and also the customers were always eager to receive the next issue of the brochure. This is very important as it clearly distinguishes your brand in the market from the competition.

Consider to :
Find special thing which you can include in the brochure which identifies and entertains your customer
Create a consistent design theme, so the reader gets familiar with your brochure
The packaging of the brochure should carry all your branding tools like – logo, color, punchline, or any other brand characterization

How to use the product images?
In case if your idea is to highlight a single product, then remember group photos never draw attention to individual products. When products are being photographed try to picture it with a white background to give a floating effect

Should you place Order Forms in brochure?
Misconception with the people is Order forms are for website and not for brochures. But research shows that an order form with the brochure is handy as it makes the customer work out details.
Remember – Forms are important t o even communicate policies, terms of sale, return policy etc…
Printing decides the effectiveness of the brochures –

As discussed earlier – it is advised to decide the format, color combinations, number of pages, paper on which the printing has to be done, final binding and other crucial things before designing or developing the catalog. All these factors affect the cost of printing.

Some most economical catalog formats
standard full-size (8 3/8″ x 10 7/8″)
slim jim (6 1/8″ x 11 1/2″)
digest-size (5 3/8″ x 8 3/8″)

Unique formats of brochures are always attractive and accepted in the market. Be cautious about the printing charges.