A brochure can be a great way of giving your customers and contacts a complete introduction to your company, it’s services or products and a way of keeping your contact details at their fingertips. However, unlike a website once your brochure is printed you can’t make changes to the details contained in it, so it pays to be organised when you are putting your new brochure together.
Here are a few tips from Create Design Studio on planning your brochure:
1. Think about the style and mood your brochure should aim to convey to the person reading it. It should reflect the personality and brand of your company and fit in visually with the other marketing materials you hand out. Perhaps the brochure is destined to sit on your customers coffee tables, or on their desk, each of these places will require a different style.
2. What do you want to include in your brochure? Your contact details, your services or products, information on your location or staff, an introduction to your organisation? Make a list of every idea you have and then work out how they can be fitted together to form the whole document. You can always edit out any ideas that don’t work.
3. Make a paper mock-up of the brochure. Use folded A4 copy paper to make a miniature mock-up of the entire brochure by writing the page title on each page and draw in a box for each page that requires a photograph. This will help you work out how many pages you need to have quoted by your printer and if you need to edit out pages or find extra content to fill spare ones.
4. Write the text and source your photographs. If writing isn’t a job you relish consider finding a copywriter to write the text on your behalf. A professional copywriter can give your brochure sparkling copy that customers will enjoy reading and in a major marketing investment like a brochure this can be invaluable.
Photographs for your brochure should look professional and if you can’t take them yourself consider either getting in a photographer or choosing some stock photography that can be used in the brochure.
If you sell products and your brochure is also a catalogue then it is important to have clear photographs of your products so that customers can see exactly what they are buying. Consider also the scale of the products you sell, can customers tell what size the item is from the photo?
5. Work with a designer to get the brochure laid out and typeset. You should get together to discuss your ideas and ask for a sample layout for the cover and the content pages to make sure you like the design before having the rest of the pages designed. A good designer will be able to give you ideas that you may not have considered for the brochure. They should also make each page easy to read and arrange the text and images so they are simple for your customers to understand. Collect up all of the text and photography and provide it to your designer on a CD or a USB stick so they have all of your brochure content to place in their designs.
Create Design Studio have plenty of experience helping organisations to plan their brochure. We can design the pages and arrange the printing of your new brochure. Call David Woodroofe on 01962 737989 to talk about your brochure.
