Turn Your Brochure Into a Value Focused Marketing Tool
How to Write A Brochure for Your Business? Choosing what to say, how to design it, and why you're making a brochure is important. Support your team, hone your message, and view your sales brochure as a purposeful tool to drive value.
The following ten steps summarize the phases of making a brochure. I worked with Matcha Design to produce a brochure that met the purpose my client had, while supporting their brand values. It has since been tremendously effective, and was awarded the 2019 SIA Awards Gold for Brochure Design.
How to Write a Brochure for your Business?
Find Examples from companies like yours.
Look at the top of your industry.
Ask how your customers learn best.
Identify a Purpose for your Brochure.
Understand your relationship with the reader.
Develop content.
Write great copy, or hire a copywriter.
Create intelligent design, or hire a designer.
Revise.
Update.
1. Find Examples from Companies Like Yours.
This exercise is the logical first step any operator or sales manager might take. It's not to find something to copy, or hold as a rubric, but to understand tone and expectations.
Your first couple brochures to study don't even need to come from organizations that do what you do. In fact, it would be ideal if you first looked at companies you already work with. These could be your own customers, or vendors, or peers. The goal here is to start by imagining a new brochure with a familiar tone. You want it to feel like the firms you already have a positive working relationship with.
2. Look at the Top of Your Industry.
Look for killer brochures. Find examples from the best in your region, the best in the nation, and the best globally. Only look at companies that operate the same type of business that you do.
While these organizations might dwarf you in scale, there's no reason you can't go toe-to-toe in marketing.
Start drawing goals and inspiration, and organize your ideas into a structured format. Look at the people you think are doing it the best, and see where you can identify good ideas. With the ideas that you feel might work with your brand, imagine how you can use your own content to do the same.
Break down these examples into raw tactical elements, and translate your own ideas through that lens.
3. Ask How Your Customers Learn Best.
This is where detailed buyer personas can come in handy if you have them ready. Think of the questions, or problems, your customers have. Which ones can you solve? What is the best way to present or instruct them about your solutions?
As you ask yourself and your team these questions, remember your desire is to give the reader (your customers, or potential customers) piece of mind. You want them left curious to learn more.
Curiosity is important, since that can come from an emotional source. It's the best way to start connecting with your customers, so consider how your brand aligns with them. What do your customers feel is most important to them? What is your company doing to support it? These topics could be practical and routed in business, community driven from your local area, or even based on a universal mission or set of ideals.
Whatever it is, find out how your customers read information that's important to them. Then, keep that in mind when you start to work on your own brochure. Your goal is to keep the tone and sense of values similar to what they're used to reading.
4. Identify a Purpose for Your Brochure.
What's the purpose of your brochure? Careful. This can be easily overlooked. What you don't want, is to cram everything that comes to mind into your finished brochure. It isn't a paperback novel.
Think of a single topic or solution you have. That's the focus. As you develop content, make sure that each element works to fulfill that purpose. If a word, sentence, or piece of content isn't doing that job, then cut it.
What is your brochure trying to do? Who is it trying to help, and how are your team members assisting? Why will your readers find value in your brochure? What do you want them to do, after they read your brochure?
If you can answer those questions, start to write an outline of your brochure. Make sure every word you pencil in supports your answers.
5. Understand Your Relationship with the Reader.
What is the relationship your brochure will have with its readers? The relationship it will have with your business? Is it going to stand alone? Are you leaving your brochure so readers can pick it up and learn by themselves? Will members of your team be there to walk readers through it?
These questions will shape your brainstorm and creative process. You need to solidly know where your brochure (or extension of your business) sits, before you can act.
Will there ever be a situation where a reader will pick up your brochure without having a guide? If your brochure is to remain an in-hand tool to forge new business relationships, write it that way. If you plan for people to wade through the copy unguided, it needs to be written in a different way.
Above all, you want to drive new sales and clients. Understand the type of reader your brochure will have, and maximize the chances for it to be valuable.
This will mean varying the level of technical information to include. It also marks your brochure being used strictly as reference material, or rather as an introduction to your brand. Maybe it's somewhere in between?
This next part is crucial-- if you plan to have certain roles present to guide readers through the brochure, then you need to have them present within the revisions process.
Pertinent members of your team must voice their opinion as you develop content.
6. Develop Content.
Start organizing the content you want to include after you've established some parameters. Make sure you know what the topic of your brochure is. That seems obvious, but it's easy to get carried away, and lose focus. Your brochure (and this goes for most pieces of media) should be about only a single topic.
Have a goal in mind, and a purpose that helps establish the steps toward that goal. Anything else, even if it's an important part of your business, should be eliminated.
Think of your brochure content like a story. It should have a beginning, middle, and an end. Like great stories, yours should be compelling and relatable to the reader. It will also need conflict, a climax, and resolution that ends in a reward for your characters.
In this metaphor the main character can be someone very much like your reader. They are an ideal future customer, and have a conflict or problem that your company can solve. The story you're telling is how your character triumphs over their problem with your help.
Continuing with the story concept, write each new section within your brochure to stand alone. Like a chapter in a book, every section should have a clear topic and add context to the subject of the brochure as a whole. Each piece works together to achieve your goals.
No matter what, don't talk about more than one thing at a time.
7. Write Great Copy, or Hire a Copywriter.
What you talk about is important, but so is how you say it. Anyone can swipe up their phones to google something. The value in what you're presenting isn't necessarily the cold hard facts, but how you're doing it.
Don't be robotic. Lay out your talking points in the same way you'd say it in person. Use trade terms your readers would understand, spell out any acronyms. As the reader learns to recognize them, interacting more with your industry will feel comfortable.
Keep in mind how your brochure will be read, or how the information will be absorbed. If it's being handed to someone by one of your team members who guide them through it step by step... that will create a different atmosphere than if the reader is left alone with it.
Self guided brochures need to be a lot less technical or heavy. If someone is there in person to help the reader along, intimidating details can be added if that delivers proportionate value.
This is a fine line that can take (and should take) many revisions and versioning to get just right.
Remember you're writing a brochure, not an encyclopedia. Understand your purpose, and realize the product is primarily a visual aid. You can't fit in everything at full length. You should also allow for breaks or white space and other design elements.
Readers will retain information best when they learn it through multiple media types. Images, photos, graphs, and illustrations can also build emotional resonance with your reader.
Try to condense the content as much as possible, rephrasing sentences to be shorter. Cover what's important, still get your point across, but without fluff.
As you write, keep in mind if your brochure is being guided by an industry professional or not. You may have freedom to gloss over some detail in exchange for focusing on the big picture.
Use as few words as possible. Don't be fancy. Be direct and clear. Write like you speak.
8. Create Intelligent Design, or Hire a Designer.
Your written copy is important, but so is the visual vehicle you use to convey it. Find examples from both within and outside your industry. Collect and study those design strategies to see what you like.
Brochure templates exist at almost every level of cost. You can find them pre-loaded into your word and design processors. Most stock and media services have a slew of templates and design concepts to choose from. And of course, you can hire (or assign your in-house designer) to create a brochure from scratch.
Reaching out to a dedicated designer, or a full blown media agency, has the benefit a final product tailor made for your purpose. For this brochure, I worked with Matcha Design in Oklahoma. A powerful layout with clean design elements helped convey a lot of technical information easily.
Whichever route you choose, be sure to use images and visual collateral that supports your company's story.
Look at the interactions you already have with customers, as well as your community. Include local landmarks or prominent success stories you've been a part of. That will go a long way toward building an emotional connection with your reader.
Another benefit of bringing in professionals, is they often have a network of trusted team members.
Keep in mind that using media specific to your team, your brand, and your service should be your goal. That said, you don't want to age-out your content by including elements which might become out of date.
This might be specific pricing, named third party partners, or any other aspect of your brochure topic that could change in the future. That level of detail can be covered later. You can do so with supplemental written and video content you publish regularly.
9. Revise
You now have a workable brochure! Congratulations!
The draft you're using should have every piece of content and media in place. This makes it very easy to comb over, and make corrections and revisions as needed.
When you're revising, experiment with the iconography, infographics, charts, images, copy, and white space. If you're looking to reduce long passages of text, see where you can use an image or icon instead. Illustrations can add levity, improve the tone of your message, and make the content easier to comprehend. Not everyone learns in the same way, so you want to speak to as many senses as possible.
Look for any visual balance issues, or for sections that take longer to read than others. Switch around the order or structure so readers can have a uniform experience... and they are getting the right story as they read panel by panel.
If your design is folds, make sure the content on the face and rear stand alone, and can be helpful in their own right.
The most important factor of the revision process is including your team. From your leaders, down to the people on the ground who will be using them, everyone's input is crucial. You don't want a design that only satisfies the home office, but is cumbersome or confusing in the field.
This is your chance to bulletproof your brochure, and test to see if it accomplishes the purpose you had in mind at the start. It might even be worth it to seek the opinion of some long-term customers.
Take as many rounds of revisions as you can. No detail is too small to ignore.
10. Update
Think you're finished after printing?
Always ask for feedback from the salespeople or personnel that have the most contact with your brochure. Collect some thoughts, and identify what works well, what doesn't. Ask if after reading the brochure, customers bring up new questions.
This can be an opportunity to update the content over time in new versions. Changes in how your sales team approaches the process can create the need for more supplemental material.
For the most part, enthusiasm for brochures can be universally low. This is true for sales brochures, or technical guides used by the service and engineering industries. There are flashier and more attractive marketing materials and formats, but those tend to have a short lifespan.
A solid brochure that has a specific job, designed to do it well, can be a solid workhorse. This list has a lot of common sense in it, and it isn't the only process you can use. It is one that I've used in the past, and it comes with proven results.
I feel that is due to the focus on brand purpose, and the use of a brochure as a tool to tell a compelling story. If you place your customer at the center of a narrative, and show you can solve a problem they have, you will win.
You can find a short case study here on my blog that illustrates some examples of this list put to work. If reading this helped you plan your own ideas better, let me know in the comments or share it on social media. If you've made your own brochure you're proud of, link it there too... I'd love to see it!
