The Brochure Blog

As a small business owner, you know the importance of your company’s image. You also know the importance of spending your time running your company and letting the experts do what they do best. Unless you or your staff are graphic designers, designing your own company brochure is likely to be a misuse of your energy and resources. And it will likely result in a poorly designed, amateur brochure.

Does your brochure pass Darrell Zahorsky’s Design Trash Test? Zahorsky, About.com’s Small Business Information expert, challenges you to put your brochure to the design test.

Design Trash Test

You only get one chance to make a favorable impression with your brochure design. An effective brochure design that communicates to your prospects isn’t about spending your entire ad budget on design and development. It requires the use of good brochure design and brochure writing principles.

Take just 5 minutes to discover if your brochure design will pass the trash test. Score your brochure with a + or -.

5:00 Appeal to Emotions: The old adage in marketing is that consumers buy based on emotions and justify with logic. Does your brochure design strike an emotional chord with your prospects? Appeal to the heart of your markets emotion by connecting with their pains or desires.

4:00 Be Professional: Is your brochure design professional or cheap? Adding poor quality graphics or clip art quickly downgrades the brochure.

Use good quality photos, images, and graphics to avoid the trash.

3:40 Be Personal: A winning brochure design connects personally with your audience. If your brochure spends more time talking about how great your small business is versus life from the customer’s perspective, it will more than likely end in the trash.

3:00 Achieve Readability: Your brochure design should be pleasing to the eye and include bullet points, arrows, boxes or any other graphics to improve the readability of your marketing piece.

2:30 Speak the Language: An effective brochure design will speak in the customer’s language. It’s vital to remove any technical language your customer doesn’t understand. The simpler your communications are, the easier to connect with your target market.

2:00 Lead with Benefits: A sure bet to have your brochure trashed is by feature dumping throughout the text or copy. Customers don’t care if your series 700 widget has a multi-function control panel. Grab your target market’s emotion by selling the benefits such as time savings, enhanced productivity, or any other powerful benefit.

1:20 Have a Single Message: It’s tempting for the inexperienced brochure writer to want to include as much information as possible in the copy of the brochure. However, using your brochure to close the sale by packing it with a barge of messages only confuses your market and ensures your marketing dollars end up in the trash. Focus your brochure on delivering on a clear, compelling message.

0:50 Focus on a Product or Service: Your brochure is likely to be trashed if it reads more like a catalogue than being focused on a single service or product you offer. The more choices you offer your prospects, the greater the chance you will confuse and lose them.

0:20 Make an Action Call: Your brochure should direct the customer to take a specific action such as a phone call for more information or to visit your website. If your brochure lacks a call to action, you can be sure it’s heading for the trash can.

0:00 Add Your Score: Now add up the +’s and -’s. If you have more than 3 -’s your brochure is heading for the garbage can and it’s time for a makeover.

Avoid the common mistake to pack your brochure with endless information and lack of focus. Spend the same amount of effort in designing and writing your brochure as any other function in your small business. If your skills are lacking outsourcing can improve your odds of winning the business of your prospective customers.

At BrochureBuilders.com we specialize in designing brochures with purpose. To see samples of our work along with pricing visit our brochure design gallery.

What image do you convey when you hand out your business cards? John Williams, founder of LogoYes.com, explains in his article Top 5 Business Card Blunders the major mistakes people make when designing their business cards.

Top 5 Business Card Blunders

Nothing is more important to making a good first branding impression than your business card. In addition to the information included, a card’s look and feel also sends a strong message about your business. That’s why I’m perplexed by the many poorly designed business cards I see these days. Just because you can log on to various websites, “design” and print cards for free, doesn’t mean you should.The cardinal rule to creating a good business card is to ensure that it reflects your company’s image. From a branding perspective, this means it should match the look and feel of your logo. Yes, you want your card to be unique. Yes, you want people to remember you by it. But if you break the cardinal rule in pursuit of uniqueness, all people will remember seeing is an unusual business card. They won’t remember your brand or its attributes.

So in the interest of sparing you a potential branding misstep, here are the top five blunders I’ve seen new companies make when creating their business cards:

• Choosing low-quality paper stock. Inexpensive paper stock may save you money, but it often leaves you with a card that feels cheap. Touch is an important sense and plays a role in memory recall. How you appeal to this sense depends on your company’s image. For example, B2B companies wanting to convey reliability should use a substantial, mid-weight stock.
• Using a design template that does not match the logo. Assuming you want a business card to be taken seriously and help brand your company, you need a design that works with your logo. In other words, be extremely careful with template-based designs. If the templates weren’t developed specifically to match your logo–and most aren’t–they probably won’t. Many entrepreneurs fall in love with an over-designed template that distracts from their logo, or one that features an unrelated photograph. Photographs work well in marketing brochures, but if they appear on a business card, they will distract from your logo.
• Adding too much color to the card. When you want to get someone’s attention, do you scream? Probably not, if you want to avoid scaring them. So why scare potential customers with a super-bright, rainbow-colored card? Color is your biggest asset in branding your company. Research indicates that color is the most important factor in memory recall. Tie your business to one or two specific colors; this color should also appear in your logo.
• Making the card too unique. You want your card to stand out, certainly, but not so much that its difference makes people uncomfortable. Complex dye-cuts, extremely oversized cards, and odd card stocks (like metal) should be used only by companies engaged in highly customized or creative endeavors. Custom embossing, rounded corners, or varnishes are better touches for most companies. While it’s tempting to create an oversized card, keep in mind that many people still use Rolodexes or tuck cards into their wallets–both difficult to do with unusually sized cards. Function overrides form.
• Making the logo gigantic. In general, the bigger the company, the smaller its logo appears on business cards. If you want to look like a Fortune 500, size your logo appropriately. Instead of enlarging your logo for emphasis, employ white space to bring attention to it.

If you’re looking to make a lasting impression, don’t cheapen your first impression. Build a better business card and you’ll build a better business.