Become Your Own Brochure Designer

When you look at marketing brochures what do you see? Don't know what a marketing brochure is? Have you ever picked up a brochure or pamphlet about a new destination, hotel, amusement park, or other entertainment business? Those are all marketing brochures and each one is designed to inform and entice you into visiting their place of business or making a purchase.

Brochures are great sales tools—if done right! Brochures help sell your product or service with informative information—enough that the reader knows about your business, but not too wordy that you lose the reader.Your brochure doesn't have to be fancy or expensive, but it should look professional—after all, it's a reflection on your business. Your brochure should be free of grammatical errors, smudge marks, faded lettering, poorly photographed objects or people, and it should follow many of these points:

• Address a target group or niche market
• Be more than just sales cop— informative
• One large graphic on your cover, versus lots of smaller graphics
• Graphics strategically placed within your brochure to recap—visual—what was said in print
• A photo with a person using your product or service—for greater impact
• A caption under your photos to bring home the caption's point
• A side box that recaps important information you want to stand out
• Quotations (or bold marks) around key points
• Bullet Points to draw readers to important information, fast
• Headlines and Sub-headlines
• Testimonies from real-life users
• List your guarantees
• Use 12 point font unless caption, side box, or headlines
• Printed on special paper:Highly Opaque, matte, heavyweight presentation paper—35 lb., 6.8 mil, 96 bright, 8 1/2"x11"

Once you've designed your brochure, you'll need to print it on high quality paper. If you'll be printing the brochure yourself, don't use everyday printer paper because you can't print on both sides without having the copy bleed through to the other side. Use a premium matter presentation or brochure paper. It is more expensive, but it looks crisper, cleaner, and more professional.

You could take your hard copy down to a copy store and have several hundred copies made, but the quality will be poor. If you can't afford a printer who uses a printing press, find a copy store who can take your brochure on disk and run several hundred copies off the master.

Once you've printed your brochures and are satisfied with the quality, deliver your brochures to prospective clients/customers by passing them out at craft fairs, business expos, with paid orders (you never know whom your client might give your brochure to), and wherever you go. You can also leave a few in hotel rooms and other public forums.