In order to attract more customers, your clients must promote their products and services. There are a number of marketing tools to attract new customers, but unless they’re used effectively, they won’t fulfil your business goals.
If your clients have a restricted budget for marketing, then you could recommend using brochures to promote their products and services. Brochures are quite affordable and help bridge the gap between your target audience more effectively. However, sometimes simple design mistakes can lead to the failure of a marketing campaign. So with that in mind here are some of the corporate brochure design mistakes you should never make.
While designing, some people can include too much information and confuse readers. Your target audience doesn’t want to read about your clients company history. You should give only the most important information about the company in order to retain the readers’ attention. If you’re promoting products, then highlight the benefits of the products and the services they provide, then tell your customers why they should use these service over a competitors. Give the website address, so that readers can visit the company website and learn more about your clients business.
You have to differentiate the headlines from body content, but don’t use too many fonts for that purpose. When you use too many fonts, it creates visual clutter and your brochure design looks unprofessional. You should use a maximum two different fonts. However, you can use different font styles such italic and bold to highlight the important parts of text content.
Nobody likes to read large chunks of text. You should break your content in small paragraphs and use headings to highlight each paragraph. People generally scan a leaflet and if you don’t give headlines, they may miss the most important points.
Before you start designing, draw a margin and make sure you don’t write anything outside the margin. If there is no white space in your brochure, readers will get tired. Give plenty of white space and maintain line spacing to offer better readability.
A colourful flyer always looks attractive, but a rainbow coloured design looks garish. You should stick to a pre-determined colour pallet that you know works – if the company your design for has company colours, think about using those to help create a sense of brand synergy
If you use low resolution images, your target audience will think that your products are not good. Think about it from a buyer’s perspective. Would you buy laptop from a company if you saw fuzzy laptop images in their marketing material? Sometimes companies use low resolution images to save on professional photographers and stock images, but believe me, if your consumers see low quality pictures of your products, they will never buy it. Therefore, instead of saving a few hundred dollars, you should use high resolution images and make more profit in the long run.
Your readers won’t tolerate any spelling or grammar mistakes. You (and your client) should thoroughly check the content before sending it to the printing press. Otherwise, all your hard work will be in vain and you have to reprint your brochure.
You need to pay special attention to folds in brochures as the fold can often clip sentences. If you want to design a folded brochure, then pay attention to text alignment and make sure that the fold does not include any text. Sentences must end before fold so that readers can read your message without any interruption.
When customers look at a brochure, they notice the headlines and images first. Make sure you don’t send any mixed messages to the audience. Your images and headlines must convey a very clear message to the audience. Give a straight forward call-to-action message, such as “contact us now”.
Your brochure is a company’s messenger and if the messenger looks poor, people think that the company is poor as well. Some companies will go to the trouble of hiring a professional like yourself, but when it comes to printing, they use their office printer. Once the design is complete, you should contact a reliable printing company and ask them to print your brochure using high quality and suitable paper.
You must avoid the aforementioned mistakes to design an effective brochure. A compact, information rich and high quality brochure design can make a brand look very professional within a very short time.
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