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Brochures, Pamphlets and Flyers

 

Printed Brochures, Pamphlets and Flyers are designed to convey large amounts of information quickly and precisely before you lose the reader's interest. If done correctly, they can be excellent tool for communicating your product or service and its benefits. If done incorrectly, it becomes another piece of paper that goes into the trash. There are various forms of pamphlets and brochures from the standard tri fold, single folds, accordion folds and more. The flyer is one page with your message on the front, or front and back, done on standard paper in mass quantities. Do not expect the return on flyers that you do with brochures and pamphlets. If you get 3-5 percent of those receiving your flyers making contact with your business, you are doing well.

We will go into the best use of these three types of printed media shortly, but in summary you should be selective on who gets your brochures and pamphlets but not so selective when it comes to flyers.

Dimensions and Paper- There are variations, but the standard dimension are typically 8.5" x 11", 8.5" x 14" and 8.5" x 5.5". As we said earlier, brochures and pamphlets are folded in a variety of ways and the flyer is a single page (although some flyers are folded in half). Printers generally charge extra for folding brochures and pamphlets, but in this economy, several offer folding as a free service to get your business. Folding is typically done by machine in the same process as printing so the extra charge is a plus up to recover the cost of the equipment. Flyers are printed on standard stock paper or cheaper grade papers because of the mass distribution objective. Brochures and pamphlets are printed on 100lb Gloss Book paper and in some instances 14pt paper with UV coating.

Design/Message - The design and message for the flyer are less precise than the brochures and pamphlets because of the cost differential and the expected return. The rules of thumb follows:

- Flyer - It is acceptable to do flyers in black and white. It is acceptable to use a lightly colored paper with one color of ink to attract attention. Don't pay for a lot of graphic artist time to do a flyer. There are a lot of free templates on the web for flyers that you can do in standard word processing pr presentation software. Then you can have them printed locally or sent of f to a printer based on the least cost.

- Brochures and Pamphlets - Always put them on high quality paper and get a graphic designer involved in the design. The brochure and pamphlet are going to provide a long lasting impression of you and your business. Most will get tired of hearing it in this series of articles, but ensure that any brochures and pamphlets your business uses are branded to your other promotional items in terms of same fonts, colors, themes, tag lines, logos, and etc. The text in brochures and pamphlets needs to be well thought out and logically flow but still remain simple and to the point. If not you lose your reader quickly.

Uses - Following are suggested uses for flyers, brochures and pamphlets.

- Flyer - You are planning a onetime blow-out sale on selected retail items to coincide with the holidays. Design a one page flyer on light green paper with red lettering describing who is doing the sale, what is being sold, when the sale will happen, where the sale will happen and why they should come. Do it yourself, or pay a high school kid to the flyers to businesses around yours that will accept them, and leave a pile where people enter and leave. If legal, you can also have the high school kid put them behind wind shield wipers on cars behind office buildings in your area. I recommend not mailing flyers because of the cost.

- Brochure and Pamphlets - These printed media are ideal for shows and conventions. If your city is large enough to host shows and conventions, get involved in them. The cost for a booth in this economy is running about 50% of what it was two or three years ago. If your city does not have shows and conventions have a show in your place of business. Invite all of your current customers and ask them to invite friends and family. Offer a worthwhile prize for a drawing at the end of the show. Have a brochure or pamphlet designed and printed, that conveys your business and what it does in a classy way.....using same fonts, logos, colors, etc. etc. Pass them out as they come in the door. If you can afford providing refreshments or free products all the better. That gets your message out in a positive way. Provide some demonstrations of the products or services you sell.

These above are common sense approaches with printed promotional media that most have done in the past. The point is, do it now because the price is right and it will help obtain our goal of retaining existing customers and acquiring new.

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