5 Tips to Creating Successful Brochures
by Mike Parkinson

Your corporate brochure is often the first impression your potential clients receive of your company. For this reason alone, you need to ensure that it captures your corporate solutions succinctly and communicates your professionalism and expertise. Use the following five tips as guidelines when creating your company brochure:

1. Focus first and foremost on client needs.
Your lead paragraph should detail client problems and your solutions. How does your product/service solve their problems? Why is your solution the best? How have you helped clients in the past? What kind of support can they expect from your company?

2. Make the brochure market specific.
Many large corporations offer a wide range of products and services, but all these solutions are not for every market. Leave the laundry list of services for the corporate report. If your specialty is presentation coaching but you also offer design services, focus on coaching in your brochure. You can add a small blurb at the end to highlight your other services, but your main copy should tout your management solutions. The potential client is reading your brochure because they are interested in your presentation coaching expertise, not your design experience. Don’t confuse your audience. Make it clear that you have the solution to their primary need.

3. Keep it simple.
Make your solution clear and easy to understand. Don’t communicate your information in verbose paragraphs. Use bullet points and short paragraphs broken up by headings and subheadings to organize your information. Use photographs to show your products and happy clients enjoying your services. Use charts that communicate client cost savings over the years or how your IT solution works. Since pictures communicate ideas faster than words and increase retention rates, using graphics is the best way to attract and keep your audience’s attention and clearly communicate your solution.

4. Be consistent.
The brochure is a reflection of your company image as well as an information tool. Fonts, colors, logos, graphic styles, and paper choice should be consistent with your other marketing collateral. Consistency breeds trust in your clients. If a potential client receives your brochure then goes to your website for more information, they will be confused if the look and feel doesn’t match the company perception they received from your brochure.

5. Include a call to action.
Give your target audience a reason to call you: “Contact us today and receive a FREE estimate.” Or maybe you’d like to reiterate your client mission: “Call today and begin saving time and money with your new Pragmatron 3700.” Whatever is most important to your audience (and will most likely entice them to contact you) reiterate in your final sentence.

These five tips will put you on the road to brochure success. If you have any questions or need input, do not hesitate to email us at info@billiondollargraphics or call 703-608-9568. We are happy to help you make your next visual communication project the best it can be.

In Part One of this article, I discussed the importance of templates, especially when working with proposals and presentations. Templates help to keep the graphics and the overall look of a proposal/presentation consistent.

And why is consistency important? Because, it breeds trust in your audience.

If the information is presented in a consistent form then potential clients will see you as a professional, an expert in your field. They will not wonder why the president’s box in an org chart is blue in one version and green in another. They will not feel a sense of imbalance at seeing arrows in different sizes for the same type of flowchart. They will concentrate on the information and what the graphic has to say and not be distracted by inconsistencies.

Remember that templates also save time when designing new graphics and in spinning up new people who have joined your team or marketing department. Templates keep files from becoming corrupted and help other teammates when they conceptualize and render new graphics.
There are many template types. Every business should use templates even for something as basic as a company letter. You may have a preprinted letterhead, but what size and type of font should you employ for the body of the letter?

The following are suggestions and examples of how to set up templates for graphics:

• Start with a blank document in the program being used to generate the graphics. (Hint: You can use this document as a starting point for other projects. Change the color scheme when starting a new one.)
• Choose your primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. (For most proposals, presentations, and marketing materials, the colors are taken from your corporate logo or the colors of your potential client’s logo.)
• Determine your font and text style choices. Here are some tips:
  • If you have a choice, choose a ubiquitous font like Times or Arial to avoid the chances that font substitution may occur.
  • Font size goals: printed documents no lower than 8 pt. and for presentations no lower than 14 pt.
  • Provide examples of the font within your template using “dummy” (or placeholder) text.
  • Define every variable you can think of: font colors, bullet styles, capitalization, textual hierarchy (for titles, headings, subheadings, body text, quotes, etc.)
• Create graphical styles for anything that you may encounter during your project: icons, organizational and flowchart boxes, diagrams, step-by-step graphics, bulleted boxes, arrows, lines, etc. Add these to the template as you produce new graphic types within your project. (Tip: Label each box style as to their use and stay consistent. All of your arrows should remain the same throughout your document.
• Determine graphic dimensions and resolutions. For example, if your Microsoft Word proposal uses 1 inch margins and will be printed, use 6.5 inch, 200 dpi graphics throughout. (Tip: For professional printing, 300+ dpi is great. For in-house printing, 200 dpi looks great without bloating file size.)
• Place your company logo, team logos, and any client logos you use into the template. This step will ensure that your team uses the correct logos.
• Place often used graphic icons and visual elements in your template for reference and fast retrieval for new graphics. As the project progresses, then more icons can be added. Remember to label each element correctly to avoid inconsistencies or misuse.
• Add a few key graphics into your template for reference. The likelihood that future graphics more tightly resemble the early graphics will rise significantly.

This process may seem like a lot of work in the beginning of a project, but it will save time later in the process. Most importantly, when you have the basic template set up, show it to your team or organization. Make sure that everyone agrees to the colors and styles chosen. If you can fix these details during the early template development stage then you won’t have to worry about a time consuming formatting pass late in your projects life cycle.

In the next article, I’ll discuss how to create templates for PowerPoint and Word.

You are fractured. Your attention span is finite. Your time is limited so you are forced to pick and choose what you focus on. You are pulled in several directions at once. You switch focus from home to work to kids to friends to acquaintances. One second you are concentrating on driving, the next you are looking for your ringing cell phone, and a minute later you are listening attentively to the breaking news on your radio. At work you are typing a report, then answering the phone, surfing the Internet, solving another problem, looking for your pen, chatting with a coworker, attending meetings, and thinking about how tired you are. Everywhere you go, you are presented with an increasing amount of stimuli—friends, family, coworkers, sales people, telemarketers, television advertisements, and shows, news, movies, magazines, billboards, radio spots, and web sites all competing to get your attention. It is amazing that we accomplish anything at all!

Evaluators and your audience are no different. Just like you, they make quick decisions based upon what they see. Studies show that we often ignore formal decision-making models because of time constraints, incomplete information, the inability to calculate consequences, and other variables. Intuitive judgment is the process for most decisions. For this reason, evaluators, your audience, and you should love graphics.

Using visuals in your proposals...
...improves learning 200%—University of Wisconsin
...takes 40% less time to explain complex ideas—Wharton School
...improves retention 38%—Harvard University

Graphics make it much easier for your audience to understand and remember your solution. Professional, visually appealing graphics increase your likelihood of success by 43% (3M-sponsored study at the University of Minnesota School of Management).

Joan Miller (name changed), a proposal manager, taught a proposal writing course for over 10 years. The class began with students forming source selection teams to evaluate two proposals and choose a winner based on the established evaluation criteria. Proposal A was attractive, well written, and contained a large number of professionally rendered, visually appealing graphics, but the proposal was not compliant with the evaluation criteria. Proposal B was not well written and used a smaller number of dense, difficult-to-read graphics, but it was compliant. If the source selection teams had taken the extra time needed to understand Proposal B’s graphics, they would have realized that the graphics suitably showed the system to be built. Not surprisingly, Miller often found that Proposal A (the easy-to-read, graphically appealing proposal) received the highest grades. When asked, the students said that they had been so caught up in the presentation that they had failed to realize the proposal was not compliant.

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Mike Parkinson recently presented Getting Graphics Right the First Time at the G-CON Fort Belvoir Procurement Forum. Learn more about our free Fast Class Seminars.

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