Brochures – Where Design and Content Must Meet for Results

A good brochure design is like an effective offline advertisement – it establishes your company in the market and communicates with your audience. However, most companies tend to forget that a design alone does not do this. Content, which offsets design, is also an attractant, compelling readers to a favorable response.

Think from a buyers’ perspective and you will realize the importance of text content in flyer design…let us assume you want to buy computers and have come across a glossy brochure advertising the products. Without a product description however, will you want to buy a computer just because it looks cool?

You have to give your customers a “reason” to buy your products, which is why, content is such a key factor in successful designing.

Here are some writing guidelines for brochures:

• Design the cover of your brochure in a way it captures viewer attention immediately. Most people don’t read the flyer if they don’t like the cover design. Where content helps is if you make a clever statement enticing the user to flip the cover and read the text inside.

• If you have just started a business, you are probably in a hurry to introduce your products/services. Don’t forget however, that you have to give your customers a reason to buy from you. Knowing your target customers will help you write content that is relevant. Text itself should be informative and useful.

For any textual matter, people like to scan headlines first. Providing key benefits of your products in heads, sub-heads and image captions can help boost your business.

• Write the features of your products intelligently so that customers can easily identify the benefits.

For instance, if you write “our software helps you save an hour”, the time saving ability of your software is the “feature” and that extra one hour is the “benefit”; the time during which people can do what they want.

• Technical writing is boring and hard to understand. If you sell a product/service that is related to IT, try using lucid language to relay the message effectively.

Take this line for example, “Our shopping cart solution is based on highly secure PHP framework and it can be integrated in any third party CMS without any coding issue.” How many people will understand this gibberish? Instead, “Our shopping cart software is highly secure and you can install it in your e-commerce site within minutes” is understandable.

• Unless you tell people to take an action, they will read and forget the brochure. Provide a strong and direct call-to-action message to increase conversion rate.

For instance, if you are offering products, write “buy now from our stores near you” and give your store address below the call-to-action.

• Eliminate all the “ifs” and “buts” from your content. Don’t give
your customers an option; let them do exactly what you want them to do. Make sure all questions asked to buyers have a positive answer.

For instance, if you sell electronics products, you can write, “would you like to save your electricity bills?” The answer is obviously “yes”.

Without strong, catchy content, it’s hard to convince people about products/services. Make sure your brochure’s design and content complements each other perfectly.