Brochures may be perceived as outdated marketing tools that fill up the space at shops or inside mailboxes. Regardless of your feelings towards brochures, they remain a viable choice for your marketing strategy. If used correctly, brochures can help spearhead your print marketing plan as a way to build branding and familiarise the marketing with your products and services.
If you have your social media covered, then you could try covering another marketing avenue with these advertising materials. Below are some of the smartest ways in which you could boost your leads and sales using brochures.
Direct mail
This marketing strategy has taken a reputation hit over the years due to the spam it sends to households. However, direct mail has been experiencing a resurgence. According to the 2012 Channel Preference Survey Report # 14 conducted by ExactTarget, 65% of people have been heeding the calls to action as indicated on the direct mail, only a percent lower than response to e-mail (66%).
This may prove nothing if your business is based online, but for brick-and-mortar businesses that rely on building organic relationships with their target market, direct mail is a viable marketing channel to tackle. Unlike other marketing tactics, the brochure goes straight to people in your mailing list, making it difficult for them to ignore your message.
However, what separates direct mail from junk mail is the quality of your mailing list and your brochures. Buy a list from vendors or run a lead generation campaign to get highly targeted people interested in your business to receive your mail. Once they have your brochure in hand, your persuasive copy over a well-designed brochure layout should compel your recipients to actually read the content of your brochure and ultimately become customers, if not brand advocates.
Display advertisement
This strategy may be as traditional as it can get, but showing off your brochures for people to take is another way of getting people’s attention to your business. This works when you display the brochures on a rack at points of purchase, i.e. cashiers and counters, so people can get a copy of your brochure while waiting for the transaction to be processed. This could work even better when you display your brochures at places with high foot traffic. It can be at a sidewalk on a busy street where lots of your target audience pass by.
Do some research at places where you can set up a display rack with your brochures on it to entice people to getting a copy and spreading the word out about your business.
Integrated marketing
Although web-based businesses may have little need for brochures, it doesn’t mean that they should exempt it from their choices of marketing tactics! There is a way as to how you, as an online marketer, can use brochures to increase your clients and customers, and that is it to print out your website address on the print material.
Although including the URL of your website on your brochure is far from ground breaking, you can track and observe the performance of using brochures as a marketing channel with the help of URL shorteners. I have detailed how you can use these online tools on this post titled “Merge Your Print And Online Marketing Campaigns Using URL Shorteners.”
You input your website’s address through a shortener to receive a customized URL. Print this out on your brochure to view how many referral visitors your site has received. This will you determine whether using brochures is an effective marketing medium for your business.
Have you incorporated these brochure tips in your marketing strategy? What other ideas do you have with using brochures that could help increase your branding and sales? Let us know by commenting below!
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Images: ”Bundled Brochures / Shutterstock.com“
