In the fast-moving world of Internet marketing, sales brochures don't always get the attention they deserve. This is a big mistake, because customers and prospects --
- Read brochures -- if they are engaging
- Save brochures -- if they are useful
- Act on brochures -- if they are persuasive
So, let's talk a little bit about how to make a sales brochure engaging, useful and persuasive. If you can do these three things successfully, you'll separate your sales collateral from the mass of material that is boring and useless.
How to Make Your Brochure Engaging
- Speak TO the prospect, not AT the prospect by using informal, second-person voice. Better to say, Here's how we help you than it is to say, Here is how ABC Corporation helps its customers.
- Write short sentences and short paragraphs, and then surround them with a lot of white space. Dense blocks of text scare readers away.
- Tell a story. Most brochures are dense-packed information-dumps; people like reading them about as much as they enjoy root canal. But add a storyline, and people can't resist. A simple but effective formula is: This was the customer's problem, this is how we solved it, this is how the customer's business improved.
- Include images that convey a message. Imagery should never be filler; instead, it has to make a point. The point may be a "hard" one, such as showing a key feature of a product, or it may be a "soft" one, such as conveying the comfortable atmosphere of the office. Use a caption to drive home the significance of the image.
How to Make Your Brochure Useful
- Concentrate on customer problems and customer opportunities. You want the reader of your brochure to take it to his or her boss and say, Boss! Here's how we can finally solve the problem that's been holding us back all year.
- Provide useful details. Customers are interested in facts that provide benchmark data, industry trends, ROI from a given product or service solution, etc. This is also a BIG factor in making your brochure persuasive.
How to Make Your Brochure Persuasive
- An obvious but all too often overlooked technique is to include a strong call to action. Make it absolutely clear what you want the reader to do as a next step in establishing a business relationship -- and how to do it. Call for more information is a weak call to action; Call xxx-xxx-xxxx to talk to one of our customer service specialists is stronger; Call xxx-xxx-xxxx to talk to one of our customer service specialists and save 15% is stronger still.
- Put your brochure where people can find it. Visitors to your site are eager to download brochure PDFs ... if they can find them, and if they are relevant. Brochure download links should be displayed in a prominent place on your site's page templates. Also, the more relevant the brochure is to the product or service page the link appears on, the more people will want it.
- Set up lead tracking by using a brochure-specific phone number. If you can determine how many leads are being generated by each brochure, you gain valuable insight into what's working and what's not.
- Test different messaging. If a brochure is not generating leads, perhaps a change in the messaging or call to action offer will improve it. Sometimes small tweaks can produce significant improvements in lead generation.
Over to You
How do you make your sales brochures effective lead generation tools?