How to produce a great booklet
Booklets can be a fantastic way to impress potential customers, generate more leads and ultimately make more sales.
But you can’t assume that any old booklet will do. Instead, you need to put some effort into thinking about who you want your booklet to reach, what you want it to say and how you want it to look.
If you want your booklet to produce a return on investment, you need to follow these five steps:
1. Know your booklet’s audience
2. Know your booklet’s message
3. Make the booklet’s message easy to understand
4. Make the booklet memorable
5. Give the booklet a call-to-action
Let’s explain in detail how to nail each of these steps.
1. Know your booklet’s audience
The most important part of producing a great printed booklet is being crystal clear on who you want to read it.
Why? Because that will make it easier to craft a marketing message.
For example, imagine you owned a suburban mortgage broking firm and wanted to produce a booklet to promote your business. You would want your booklet to be read by your core customer base – which, in this case, might be first home buyers.
Drilling down, your audience would probably be couples, aged between 25 and 35, with average incomes, limited financial knowledge and a desire to move on to the next stage of their life.
So that’s where your marketing message should be aimed. Everyone else should be ignored – upgraders, investors, 50-year-old first home buyers. That’s not to say your broking firm would never deal with these types. But you’ll get a better return on your print marketing if you fish where the fishes are.
2. Know your booklet’s message
Once you’ve become crystal clear on who you want your booklet to reach, you should become crystal clear on what you want to tell them.
So what message do you want to deliver to your first home buyers? One option might be: “We know buying a home is hard. We will guide you through this complicated, stressful process and help make your home ownership dreams come true.”
That doesn’t mean you’d have to use those specific words in your booklet. What it does mean, though, is that your words, images, fonts and colours should work together to create that message. Conversely, any design element that didn’t send that message should be discarded.
3. Make the booklet’s message easy to understand
Once you’ve decided who your booklet will target and what it will tell them, you should focus on crafting a clear message. For example, here’s how your hypothetical broking firm might communicate with first home buyers:
● The booklet would include photos of staff offering guidance to couples
● The staff would look friendly, helpful and knowledgeable
● The couples would be everyday Australians aged between 25 and 35
● The booklet would contain only plain English – absolutely no finance jargon
● There would be big, simple headlines, such as “We’ll get you the best loan” and “We’ll hold your hand through the entire process”
● There would be minimal text – just the key points
● The booklet’s colours would be bright and reassuring
All those design elements, working together, would clearly deliver the marketing message chosen in section #2.
4. Make the booklet memorable
Every time your produce a booklet, it should contain at least one memorable feature.
Why? Because you want people to remember your company and your marketing message!
There are several ways you can make a booklet stand out:
● Images
● Colours
● Size
● Shape
● Tone
● Humour
For example, our mortgage broking firm might realise that because most companies choose standard A4 booklets, a simple way to stand out would be to use a wide A5 booklet. Or the brokerage might decide that because most finance businesses seem boring and stuffy, it could stand out by using colloquial language and ‘dad jokes’ throughout the booklet.
5. Give the booklet a call-to-action
There are two reasons why you should include a call-to-action in your marketing booklets.
First, if you don’t tell your customers what you want them to do next, you can hardly be surprised if they don’t do it!
Second, your customers have short attention spans and get bombarded with hundreds of marketing messages per day. So when you get their attention, you need them to act – immediately. Otherwise, they’ll forget about you five minutes later when the next marketing message comes along.