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A good marketing leaflet can be a real asset to a business, but a bad one isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. How can you make sure your leaflets do the job you need them to?
Business leaflets can be a cheap and powerful way to attract new customers. A well-crafted leaflet can have a substantial impact and lead to an impressive return on investment.
However, badly-designed leaflets are little more than an annoyance to customers and represent money wasted. Because it’s so easy to produce them, businesses often do not spend enough time and effort making sure their leaflets will have the desired impact.
Look at other companies’ leaflets
The first step to creating a successful marketing leaflet is to hunt around and collect leaflets that other companies have produced. That way, you will get a sense of what’s out there – and the competition. It’s also a good way of figuring out what makes some leaflets work, and which ones are going to go straight in the bin.
When you’re looking through these leaflets, you will probably find you decide whether you like them or not almost instantly. Generally, people take just a few seconds – and sometimes little more than a glance – before they pass judgment.
That’s all you’ve got to determine whether your leaflet will be kept for future reference, or thrown away. Once you’ve collected a few that you think to work well, try to decide what it is that makes them successful. You can use these principles for your own leaflets.
Don’t say too much
One thing you will probably find is that the best leaflets aren’t full of words. There are two reasons why this is important. One is that readers don’t want to wade through dense text – no one wants to read an essay. A leaflet that is crammed full of text from end to end is daunting and unattractive.
One of the real challenges of crafting a strong leaflet is finding a way of reducing your business to a few pithy words and phrases that encapsulate how it can help the reader. Resist the urge to tell your potential customer all about your business. Keep it short, and keep it relevant.
Beyond good design, readers want clear – and brief – reasons to use your business. This is the other reason not to overfill your leaflet with extraneous text. Counter-intuitively, your marketing leaflet isn’t really about your business at all. It’s about the customer, their needs and problems. Your business is only relevant in how it can meet these.
Start and end well
The first few lines of your leaflet are even more crucial. This is the bit on which people will base their decision to read on. Leaflets are often displayed on racks which show only the top half or third of the front, so these lines are all that might even be visible.
These few words, therefore, need to give people a reason to pick it up and keep reading. Don’t be tempted to make the most of the space by filling it with words, but don’t waste any of the few words you do use.
For example, it won’t help if readers know the name of your business, or even what you do if it doesn’t resonate with them. ‘Blocked gutters?’ makes a lot more sense than ‘John Smith, House and garden maintenance.’
Lastly, make sure your leaflet ends with a ‘call to action’ and includes all the details the reader needs to go further. Simply leaving contact details isn’t enough to convince people to contact you. A prompt at the end can have a disproportionate effect: ‘For a no-obligation quote, call…’
Needless to say, make sure your business is set up for the response. If you don’t have the employees to cover the phones, provide email or website details instead.
This is an article by Printed.com, suppliers of unbeatable quality digital printing, and an accredited member of the World Land Trust.
Photo by Yonghyun Lee on Unsplash