Booklets are convenient, concise, printed pieces of content that usually tell a short story or pass along a brief message. When used properly, they can be excellent tools for promoting your brand and selling your products and services. But what steps can you take to push the return on investment (ROI) of your booklets even higher?
Strategic Direction
Everything starts with your high-level strategic direction. The booklet is going to be much more effective if it’s designed, written, and distributed with a specific plan in mind. You’re not creating a booklet just for the sake of creating a booklet; you want to accomplish something.
So what are you trying to accomplish?
- Focus on a specific target audience. Countless entrepreneurs and marketers have developed booklets for a general audience, in an attempt to reach as many people as possible. This is usually a mistake, as focusing on a specific target audience allows you to develop more focused messaging and ultimately become more persuasive. Choosing and catering to a specific target audience means reducing your number of competitors and increasing the relevance and appeal of your messaging at the same time.
- Understand the goal of the piece. What are you hoping to achieve with this peace? There are many viable, worthwhile goals you can have here. For example, you may be interested in simply promoting brand awareness, or you may be interested in selling a specific product. You may also be interested in educating people or entertaining them on a given topic.
- Develop a concise message. Next, try to develop a concise message (or a few concise messages that work together). What are you trying to say and what’s the most effective way you can say it? You can use this as the foundation to develop the rest of your piece.
Printing Choices
Printing booklets isn’t especially expensive, but you’ll still need to work proactively to ensure you get the full value for your money.
- Choose high-quality materials. Choosing a thicker cover and thicker, sturdier pages may increase the total cost of your print job, but it’s often worth the investment. Higher quality, more professional materials will make a better impression on most people reading your booklet, increasing its persuasive power and improving your brand reputation in the process.
- Order a proof and inspect closely. When you find a well-reviewed printing company to work with, you can usually feel confident in the quality of the finished job. But it’s important to avoid taking this for granted. Before issuing the full run of your booklets, order a proof copy and review it very carefully. If you notice any mistakes, errors, or problems that could hold your booklet back, now is the time to correct them.
- Print high volumes. There are some types of booklets that are only relevant for a short time. But if your booklet is likely to remain relevant indefinitely, print the highest volume you can afford. Generally, the more copies you order, the lower the price per copy will be.
Design
When it comes to design, these elements are most likely to boost your ROI.
- Keep it minimal. There’s only so much space on a booklet, so marketers are sometimes incentivized to cram as much information as possible into that space. This isn’t necessarily a good thing, and sometimes, it can detract from the overall value of your piece. Instead, use minimalism to emphasize only a handful of key points.
- Use a balanced mix of images and words. If your booklet is mostly words, people are going to lose interest. If it’s all images, people won’t have context. You need a mix of both if you want your booklet to be successful in achieving its goals.
- Stand out. Finally, make it a point to stand out. Most people have seen thousands of booklets in their life, and they aren’t going to care about something they’ve seen a thousand times already. You need to incorporate original elements into your design.
Testing and Improvement
Focus groups and surveys can tell you much more about the success probability of your booklet than you can discern through intuition alone. Before you finalize your booklet and send it off to the printers, spend some time testing, evaluating, and iterating on it. Depending on the feedback you receive, it may be necessary to tweak the design, add more content, cut sections, or rearrange things.
If you can follow all of these strategies, and create a piece that’s both coherent and persuasive, you’ll be in a strong position to make all your money back and then some. Booklets remain one of the best print marketing options available to any business, but they can only be successful if you’re willing to optimize them.