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Why read this article? It looks at how to overcome the tough challenges facing businesses today – especially when it comes to boosting their bottom line.
Regardless of how well designed your promotional material is written and designed, if it fails to gain attention it fails completely because few will open it to read what's inside. Conversely, if just 10% more prospects thumb through your piece, the number of leads you generate can increase dramatically.
Here are some tips to gain attention with your marketing efforts:
• "Trust" is the most important message you convey in marketing communication. So, don't sacrifice your trust message to gain attention. Don't over promise, or use lofty headlines that your prospects may scoff at in disbelief. Be careful when creating a design that implies a promised outcome or level of service if you are not prepared to deliver it to them. For instance you may design a "gold standard" theme to your material using high production values and printing techniques to increase your prospects expectation of your service, but the service you provide falls far short of their expectations. Using boastful headlines and flashy graphics may gain attention all right, but not the kind you were hoping for!
• Remember that different audiences react to to the same message in different ways. What may seem enticing to a small business owner may come off as 'hokey' to a corporate executive. A brochure that captures the attention of an IT manager may be of no interest to an accountant. The tip here is to write and design with the target market in mind. To do this effectively you need to know your target market intimately. Spend a large part of your efforts in getting into their 'headspace' and spend just as much time educating your marketing team about them. A good marketing team will ask a lot of questions in order to 'build' an optimum profile of the prospect with which to measure the creative criteria against.
• Explore designs that go outside the box. You can gain attention simply because the format of the brochure looks interesting. So experiment with sizes, shapes, cuts, folds, colours and paper stocks.
• Use a strong message to differentiate. Design can create attention by breaking the standard formats, but this doesn't mean you should discount the use of traditional formats. You don't always need to use expensive stocks, weird folds or high-end production values to gain attention.The right headline and visual can make a simply produced brochure work very well indeed.
• Go easy on large fonts and splashy graphics. Sometimes the best way to gain attention is with a whisper. Well designed marketing uses good design principles of placement, hierarchy, and contrast to get more impact. A small strategically placed sentence can have a greater impact and longer lasting impact than if it was designed with extra large type to fill the entire page.
• Study how your compeition is gaining attention. Use that information to create a different unique message of your own. If they zig, you zag.
• Prospects are looking for solutions. Often the best way to gain attention is to call attention to a problem, then offer your solution. This one-two punch often works extremely well. In a world filled with clever headlines, the most effective ones begin with ?How to?? (For example: How to save a bundle on your imports. And save yourself a lot of time.)
• Gain with pain. Often, emphasizing the prospect's pain points of not having your product or service will jump-start the reader's interest. Just be sure to follow up quickly with your solution.
• Consider offering a sample. Paint manufacturers often include swatches with their brochures. We recently received a brochure from an insulation company that had the two center pages joined with insulation. It got our attention!
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