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4 Stupid Mistakes with Brochures

Collateral Materials

4 Stupid Mistakes with Brochures

Written by Ashwin Satyanarayana for Gaebler Ventures

Too many businesses focus on making brochures that barely fetch any returns for the investment poured in. Why does that happen? Where are small business owners going wrong with brochures? Let's explore:

Brochures are an important part of the marketing collateral a company decides to create for marketing and branding purposes. However, not all businesses get it right and they end up doing fatal mistakes while designing the brochures.

Here is a set of stupid things most small business owners do especially with brochures:

Mistake #1: Designing, creating and distributing brochures

The biggest mistake small businesses do is the very act of creating brochures - the whole act of designing, creating and distributing brochures is a vain one. With the Internet creating seamless distribution channels and possibility of reaching a global audience, don't you think brochures are an outdated way of marketing your business? In some situations, there might be a necessity to have a few brochures, and that's when we pay heed to further points below.

Mistake# 2: Copy pasted from somewhere else

It's amazing how so many entrepreneurs don't bother to either write copy for their brochures or at least have it written by professionals. Instead, they just swipe copy off other business collateral and paste it back on their own brochures with minor edits. Don't you think that the very essence of creating brochures is lost while going at it this way? Why even make a brochure in the first place if the main element within the brochure is shoddy work?

Mistake # 3: Pathetic images, graphics and design

The next element that takes the beating after copy is the visual part of the brochure - the design, colors, graphics, images, etc. These elements actually form the first impressions and yet the quality of these elements is compromised by many small business owners because it's expensive. Without the visual appeal to a brochure, you can't pray that the brochure will be in your customers' hands for even a little while.

Mistake #4: No sense of urgency, no call to action

Finally, as in most of the other conventional media vehicles, this element is usually forgotten while it's the crucial one that finally triggers a positive action -- profitable to you in one way or the other. If there is no sense of urgency in the copy and there is no call to action, consumers won't take any action, whatsoever. Inactive target customers won't fetch you profits; only the active, highly-targeted and interested ones will.

Ash has an undergraduate degree in engineering and an MBA from Ohio University. Today he is a corporate trainer, business coach and a freelance writer.