Creating a sales brochure is a great idea if you need some sales tools to give away, send out with orders or inquiries, or for your sales team to take with them to appointments. A good brochure will detail all the information about your company that any potential customer will need to know, but will not be saturated with information making it dull or difficult to read. There must be a good balance between the text and images.

Creating these brochures and having them printed is not a cheap exercise. However, you want them to look impressive and do their job (that is, bring people to your business and persuade them to buy something from you), so you need to ensure that you have designed it perfectly before you spend money bringing it to life. Here are some tips to create a company brochure that sells.

Who Is Your Customer?

Before you get down to the planning and writing of your brochure, you need to know who you’re creating it for. Who is your target customer? Who is going to buy your product or service and who, therefore, is your brochure going to be aimed at?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you will need to carry out some in-depth market research. You don’t want to create a brochure that teenage boys would love if your product is more often bought by middle-aged women, for example. You can engage a specialist market research firm to help you, but you can also speak to your sales team to find out who they sell to most as well as checking your social media followers.

Use AIDA

AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. Your brochure needs to give your potential customer all of these things if it is to be successful. Ideally, you want to grab the reader’s attention right from the start, make them interested enough to read through the brochure, create a desire for the product or service you are selling, and then persuade them to get in touch or buy something. If your brochure can do all of that, then it is worth having many printed and giving them away to as many people as possible.

Choose Your Front Cover Image Wisely

When you start to look at other brochures from other companies, you’ll see that they often have a picture of their office building prominently on the front cover. This is not a good idea. You may indeed be proud of your office, but your customer isn’t interested in that – they want to know more about your products and services, not where you work. A big picture of your building is wasting space that could be used for more selling opportunities, so make sure you take the opportunity, especially since so many of your competitors won’t.

Other Images

Now that you know what not to use as an image for your front cover, you will need to decide what you will use instead, and you’ll need to think about the other images throughout the brochure. These images will need to show the product or service that you’re selling in its best light, giving the customer ample opportunity to see what it is like, how big it is, what colour and so on.

Not all of your images need to be of your products (and if you only sell services, then it’s even more important to choose them wisely). You should choose images that are clear and attractive and that look professional. They also need to play on your customer’s emotions if possible, because that is more likely to stay with them; even if they don’t buy something that day, emotive images will keep your company’s products in mind for a future date. If you want to show your customers something familiar, you can turn pages of your website into PDFs using DocRaptor and insert them into your brochure too.

Be careful not to use any images that people might find offensive, however, as you might find you are remembered for the wrong reasons.

Show The Benefits

People don’t have a lot of time these days, so when you are designing your website it’s a good idea to break your text down into smaller paragraphs each with its own headline. The headline is what people will skim through when they first open your brochure, so they need to be emotive and exciting otherwise they might not want to read on. If the headlines are good enough, they will read the whole brochure and, if the entire brochure is good enough, they will buy something.

So starting with the headlines is the best idea. They need to be attention-grabbing, and they should also mention the benefits of the product or service you are selling. Letting potential buyers know the benefits of a product is a much better sales tool than telling them about the features of a product; they can work the features out for themselves, but the benefits to their lives may need to be explained a little further.

Bullet Points Work

Since so many people are so pressed for time, using bullet points in the brochure copy will work in your favor. The attention-grabbing headlines as mentioned above is a good start, but rather than lines and lines of text beneath, talk about your product and company using short, sharp sentences and bullet points where necessary. You could also include an infographic for those clients and customers who work more visually.

This will not only make the brochure quicker to read, it will make it easier too as you will be less tempted to use difficult jargon. A customer might be interested in what you do, but if they can’t understand what you are saying, then they might go on to buy from someone whom they can understand. It could be that simple as to why your competitor got the sale and not you. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and make things as easy as possible for them to enjoy what you are saying and to contact you.