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After you’ve made your business card, the next likely marketing piece that you’ll need to create will be a brochure. A brochure is a useful information tool that you can mail to customers or leave behind after meeting with the client. Note that a brochure is only useful as an icebreaker. It won’t close the sale for you, but it will help you towards that goal.

Sometimes called “tear sheets”, “white papers”, or “one-pagers”, these are typically your standard sized 8.5” X 11” (or approx. an A4 for my non-North American friends) piece of paper double-sided. These are great for tradeshows because it gives you enough room to talk about a certain product and are still fairly cost effective to print. One mistake people tend to make is that they think they have all the room to cram a bunch of information on there. Yes, you have more room than a postcard, but you don’t want to overwhelm your customer. Give them enough info to want to call you afterwards.

3. 2-fold brochures

This is useful for splitting up information and reducing the size of the finished piece. These are great because you have the same about of space as a Flat Sheet, but are a little easier to take away for your customer. These are ideal for personalized mailing campaigns or takeaways available at your location. Try to keep the cover nice and clean with something that encourages the customer to open and read on.

4. 3-panel brochures 

This is the typical standard brochure. Again, you have the same real estate as the Flat Sheet, but you can section them off for various different products and services. Don’t get tempted to cram everything you want to say in there, but you do have a bit more room for content. If your brochure will be put in an area with a lot of competition, say at a tourist information centre, make sure that your logo and important messaging is on the top quarter of your cover because you won’t be able to choose where you will be positioned in the brochure rack. The top quarter of your cover will always be visible, so that’s the only real estate that you’ll have to attract a customer in picking up your brochure vs a competitors.

With all brochures, please remember to keep your colours, fonts and pics consistent with your company colours unless it’s a very specific and different promotion. Please consult with your graphic design professional about this prior to starting. Always remember to put some kind of contact info or “call to action” to encourage customers to find out more information.

These above examples are standard-sized brochures. You can always customize some of the cutting, varnishing, and sizing of your brochure. Here are some pros of having a standard-sized brochure and the pros of having a customized brochure.

Advantages of creating a standard-sized brochure:

• Typically less printing cost than a customized brochure
• Less cumbersome for your customer to store your information

Advantages of creating custom-sized brochure:

• It will be a little different to your customer, so the aesthetic can be more appealing
• You have greater options and can have your brochure look however you and your designer choose it to look.

If you’re ready to create a well-designed brochure for your company, feel free to contact me.

Next week, I’ll talk about larger booklet style brochures.

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