Does your business need a brochure?

4 ways in which a great brochure can support your business

No matter what you might have heard, print is not dead when it comes to modern marketing. You’d be forgiven for thinking so, given the ease – and prevalence – of digital advertising in the twenty-first century, but if you’re wondering whether your business ought to invest some of its marketing budget into producing a sales brochure, the answer is probably yes. Here’s why.

1. Brochures support face-to-face sales

It’s no secret that online retail is booming. The pandemic accelerated the process, but it was well underway before 2020 and it’s showing no signs of slowing down: in the US alone, e-commerce sales rose by 32% from 2019 to the end of 2020 (from $156.39 billion to $206.66 billion). But that does not mean that brick and mortar sales are on the decline. Though they might not be growing at the same breathless speed as their e-commerce cousins, global physical retail sales are expected to be worth $22 trillion by 2025. That’s… a big chunk of cash. ​

​Face-to-face sales, especially for big-ticket items and service-based industries, are subject to the same customer hesitations as online sales, in that just because you’ve got a customer through the door doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. With e-commerce, you’d be trying to keep your product upfront in a potential client’s memory with a newsletter or other permission to stay in touch. For face-to-face, a brochure does exactly the same thing. In fact, it’s even better than that, because…

2. A brochure establishes authority

Because print is not dead, it occupies a special place in the hearts and minds of customers, and a business that supplies print materials as part of its advertising strategy presents itself more authoritatively than a competitor that doesn’t. But this comes with a huge caveat: any print materials your company produces must be top notch, with thoughtful layout and excellent copy, and the information they contain must fulfil the customer’s needs – or else your brochure will have the opposite effect. That means investing a little time and energy into establishing why a customer might pick up your brochure, and what pathway your brochure needs to lead them down in order to maximise your chances of a sale. For example, if your conservatory installation business is attending a trade fair, potential customers you engage with there will be at a different point in the sales funnel than if you encounter them for the first time in your showroom. In both instances, a well-crafted brochure will be an integral part of warming up the lead, but the information it contains will have to answer both (slightly different) sets of questions and potential objections. That’s why it’s worth making sure that you give your brochure the care and attention it needs, and why it’s worth investing in the services of a professional designer and copywriter to make sure the brochure you produce earns its keep.

With that said, however…

3. Brochures can generate better return on investment than digital marketing

There’s a persistent myth doing the rounds that print advertising is prohibitively expensive for small businesses and that digital adverts are the best and cheapest way to build brand awareness. And, okay, that’s not untrue – you could, theoretically, choose to spend £7.50 on a 7-day Facebook ad campaign and that would, indeed, be advertising spend. But your conversion rates for that ad campaign are going to be… well… small to non-existent, meaning that you’ve spent £7.50 for, very likely, no return. By contrast, though your initial cost threshold for brochure printing is unlikely to be under three figures (at the very least), you’re going to see way more bang for your buck. According to B2B and SaaS market analyst Louie Andre, almost 80% of consumers will take action in response to print marketing, versus 45% who respond to digital adverts. In fact, he says, one study shows that print advertising generates responses at around 9 times the rate of digital marketing. And the demographics responding to print aren’t, as you might expect, skewed towards older markets: “92% of 18- to 23-year-olds,” says Andre, “find it easier to read print over digital content” (Andre, 2022). Consider also that your brochure will typically hold your customer’s attention for 20 minutes – while your average marketing email gets only 51 seconds of their time – and the pennies saved start to look like a false economy over the lost conversion potential that you could have a achieved with a beautifully designed, compellingly written brochure for your customers to flick through at their leisure and remember just how much they love what you're selling.

4. For service-based businesses, a brochure offers something tangible to potential customers

One of the first brochures I wrote was for CinePunked, a service-based organisation local to where I live. CinePunked is a fantastic company with a fantastic product – film literacy upskilling for people who love films, via interactive discussion events – but they faced a problem in driving brand awareness due to the intangible nature of the service they provide. How do you encapsulate the value-add of the service CinePunked is providing outside of one of their events? A brochure, that’s how. Finding the deep benefit of a product or service in which the problem solved is largely tied up with an emotional or intellectual moment is always an exciting challenge for a copywriter and, as an erstwhile film theorist, I had a lot of fun writing copy for CinePunked. You can see what I put together for them here.

If you’re a service-based company, you don’t have a physical product that your customer can hold and take with them from your premises, reminding them of your brand and also generating brand awareness among all those potential consumers that interact with the item that you’ve just sold. That’s where a brochure comes in. When you want takeaway food, which service are you most likely to call: the restaurant with the menu you’ve kept in your tea towel drawer or one you have to search for online? When you’re shopping around for a new kitchen and you’ve met with designers in four different stores but only two of them have given you a brochure to take away with you, which sales pitches are you going to remember best? And if one of those brochures takes you through the process, anticipating the questions and objections that you might have and answering them one by one, creating an image for you of what life will be like with your shiny new silent-close cabinets and your 1.5 stainless steel sink – while the other has a picture of the showroom, a couple of different worktop surfaces and a LinkedIn profile for the boss – which one are you more likely to trust with the investment you’re about to make in your home?

Exactly.

So if you’re wondering whether or not you need a brochure, chances are that you suspect that you do need a brochure, and if you suspect that you do, well, that’s most likely because you’re right. Brochures do not necessarily represent a large financial commitment, and, as we’ve seen, the return you can achieve in terms of sales for a relatively small output can be very attractive. But, as ever, it’s worth making sure that your money is well spent. Just as that £7.50 Facebook ad technically costs less than a £750 Facebook ad campaign, if the latter generates £1300 worth of sales (versus the very likely £0 of the former), it’s earning its keep and then some – unlike the £7.50 that you just kind of… spent for no reason. And the same is true for the initial outlay on a brochure: budgeting for professional brochure design and – crucially – copy designed and tailored to drive the action you want your potential customers to take will be money well spent when it comes to return on your investment. You may save on cost by having the sales intern write you a few sentences for free, but it’ll be at the expense of getting your brochure to do what you want it to do. And what’s the point in spending money on printing a brochure that won’t perform?

If you’re ready to up your brochure game, or get started on the journey to brochure greatness, give me a shout. Brochure writing is storytelling, after all. Let’s tell your story together.

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References:
Andre, Louie: “26 Relevant Print Marketing Statistics: 2022 Ad Spending & Impact”. www.financesonline.com (no date given)