Digital Brochures: How to Make a Brochure That Generates Sales

Brochures are a staple for businesses, learn how to make a digital brochure that actually generates sales.

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Essential Tips For Making Your Digital Brochures

Brochures are a staple marketing tool for businesses to present information to their customers. They are normally created with two purposes in mind; to inform and to convert.

While hardcopy brochures are still widely used, the digital age has made it possible for businesses to reach a considerably wider audience with a digital version of their brochures.

Digital brochures are more cost-effective, and generally easier to create and distribute than their paper counterparts. Therefore, if done correctly, creating digital brochures for your business could prove a worthwhile investment.

By “correctly”, I’m referring to the planning, creation, and distribution of your brochures. All three stages need to be combined in order to make a seamless brochure campaign.

All you have to do is follow These Essential Tips For Making Your Digital Brochures:

1) Begin With A Solid Plan

As with any aspect of a marketing campaign, planning your digital brochure content is essential. Without a detailed plan, you lack the focus you need to hone in on your topic of choice and get all your intended information across.

2) Pinpoint Your Target Audience

Before you even begin writing, you need to articulate who your target audience is. This will help you develop a writing style that reflects your audience. Writing to those in their early 20s will require different terminology, tone of voice, and overall writing style to people in their 50s. Know your audience and write with them in mind. This way, your audience will feel like you are speaking directly to them and that what you have to say is relevant to them personally.

3) Determine The Point Of Your Brochure

Why are you writing a brochure?

It could be to showcase a new product or service, or talk about an exciting upcoming event you’re hosting. As you have limited space, it’s best to choose a single topic or category to focus on throughout the content.

By focusing on multiple topics, you risk leaving out important points that could be the deciding factor on a purchase. You don’t want your key messages to get lost in a sea of words and irrelevant points.

Not only do you need a topic, but you also need to decide on why you’re talking about that topic; you need an angle. For example, you could be launching a brand new service, or you could be celebrating 10 years in your industry and your brochure is highlighting the reasons behind your company’s success.

Additionally, decide what action you want your audience to perform. This could be signing up for a free trial, calling you for a quote, or browsing your website. The choice is ultimately yours but you need to make it specific.

4) Decide On a Layout

With digital brochures, you can move past the typical three-fold layout and choose from a multitude of layouts, templates and formats. Decide on your layout before you begin writing so you know what type of information to put where. As a general rule of thumb:

• The first section – Briefly introduce your company/product/services
• The second section – Go into much more depth with your information, fully communicating your core messages.
• The third section – Your call-to-action and contact information.

Your company logo, tagline and USP (Unique Selling Point) should also be included throughout the brochure for easy brand recognition.

5) Make Your Headline Powerful

Your headline is the thing that’s going to grab your audience’s attention. It is going to create intrigue and spark interest. To do this, you need to use powerful words, AKA, power words!

Power words are words that are considered to be exceptional at stirring emotions. Emotions are a key ingredient when it comes to purchasing decisions, and evoking emotions is a psychology hack that lots of businesses use in their marketing campaigns.

Using these words, you can manipulate your audience into feeling a certain way. Emotionally-charged content will not only grab your reader’s attention, but it will also make a longer-lasting, more memorable impression on them than a flat, boring piece of writing.

To put this into practice, firstly consider what kind of emotion to want to evoke, such as happiness, curiosity, or excitement. Then, strategically work associated power words into your headlines.

Power words include:

• Delight
• Courage
• Perfect
• Wondrous
• Secret
• Forbidden
• Behind-the-scenes
• Unveiled
• Breath-taking

This is just a very small list of the power words that will actively evoke emotion in your audience. Play around with them to find the perfect combination.

6) Break Up Your Text

Your audience will probably not want to read endless amounts of text. At first glance, lots of text can look daunting. The lazy brain takes over and your readers won’t think it’s worth their time or effort to read every. Single. Word.

You need to break it up into small chunks with subheadings, bullet points, images, graphs, etc. Make it easy for readers to gain the necessary information. Enlarge important points to make sure they’re seen and to add emphasis. In many cases, less is more.

All imagery should be relevant to the reader. A picture of your office block, for example, won’t be appealing because the reader doesn’t care what your office looks like! Reserve this precious space for images of your product, your logo, or photos of happy, smiling people. Images should always be adding something meaningful to your brochures.

7) Make It About Your Audience

Your customers’ main priority when they’re reading your digital brochure is how your business can benefit them. You may be incredibly proud of certain aspects of your company, but unless they prove to serve customer interest, leave those aspects out. For example, explaining in detail the reasons why you built your company would not be a good fit for a brochure. Details like that should be placed on your website. They will not advance your sales from brochures.

On the other hand, explaining what you’ve done for a well-known brand, for example, will act as social proof that may encourage more conversions or sales. Explain how you can help solve a problem that your customers may have and back it up with proof. You can even include a few testimonials from satisfied customers.

8) Combine and Distribute

Combine all these points and decide how and where you will distribute your digital brochure. You can send your PDF brochure via email, post it on social media, and enable access to it on your website. Almost half of internet searches are now done through mobile devices so ensure your brochure is mobile-friendly for optimum results.

Take the time to ensure all cogs in your digital machine are running smoothly. Search for any broken links and error pages. Another important consideration is to make sure your site can withstand an increase in traffic and won’t slow down or lag as a result. If you have a shared hosting plan, for example, it may be time to upgrade to VPS hosting for quicker page-loading times.

Measure, Repeat And Improve

All of your hard brochure work means nothing if you don’t measure its success/failure. Use every brochure campaign as an opportunity to learn what works for your business and what doesn’t. Keep close track of how much you’re spending vs your profits to ensure your campaign is financially viable.