How To Produce Brochures To Advertise A Business
For any organized business, the brochure is one of the most vital tools for promotion, public relations as well as a number of other interactions that the business might engage in. A brochure is basically the profile of an organization engaged in business and in many ways, it is the mirror image of the company in the market or niche
where it operates. Any business that is interested in advertising and reaching out to its target market, should first, invest in a brochure. Are brochures good advertisements for business? Well, a brochure, really, is what an organization begins its marketing communication with.
One look at the brochure of a reputed organization is enough to give you an idea of how seriously it is looked upon as a marketing communication tool. That’s because the brochure is the only medium where the organization can afford to be both descriptive and creative about what it wants to tell the target audience.
For all practical purposes, the structure of a brochure has essentially remained the same as it still follows like a booklet with front and back covers and inside pages set in a particular order. This standard hard copy format has been adapted even into the soft copy or e-brochure format that is available for downloading in the websites of most companies these days.
So, what exactly does a standard organizational or corporate brochure contain and how exactly are brochures good advertisements for business? Most businesses like to communicate their vision or mission through a positioning line which invariably figures in the front cover of its brochure. The back cover usually has the organization’s contact details like, registered or head office address, telephone or fax numbers and toll free number if any, along with email and website addresses. There are no hard and fast rules for the inside pages of a corporate brochure to follow in any particular order. However, if you randomly check out a few corporate brochures you would find a definite pattern emerging.
Generally, the first inside page covers the corporate history of the organization, such as, date of establishment, a little background of the founder, some important milestones, some remarkable statistics and past growth strategy among others. This section is followed by a message either from the chairman or managing director of the company and details of the company’s human capital.
Thereafter, you would find some information about the organization’s present market rank, some vital statistics and future growth strategy. Next, there will be details of the company’s assets and infrastructure such as plant and machinery and products and services that the company has been specializing in along with those that have been newly launched.
Those asking – are brochures good advertisements for business, just have to consider the scope and dimension of this low profile but highly effective medium. To simplify it to a layman’s language, the brochure is an organization’s Curriculum Vitae and every professional knows what that means. Again, it depends on how one looks at advertising to really gauge where a brochure fits into the company’s communication strategy.
Technically, brochures come under what is known as BTL or Below The Line advertising which includes other mediums like fliers, leaflets, stickers, posters, give-aways and so on. The constant evolution and addition of newer media has certainly changed the dynamics of advertising but the importance of a brochure for an organization hasn’t been affected by this.
Why are brochures good advertisements for business, is a question that perhaps arises when certain critics compare the overflow of creativity in advertisements and TV commercials in the mainline print and electronic media with the academic flow of a brochure’s content. However, every media has its own limitations to live with and in this context, print media ads or TV commercials are no exceptions.
The essence of a brochure has sustained and evolved over time and today, we find electronic versions of printable brochures in the form of downloadable PDF files on the websites of companies. On the other hand, there are corporate audio visual presentations or corporate films that are developed on the lines of the content of corporate brochures covering a maximum of 3 minutes. Brochures are there to stay as long as there are businesses that care about their markets.