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.
