Developing Quality Marketing Materials on a Budget (pt. 2)
Posted by: Barbara Duran on: 06/01/2010
Have A Materials Strategy
Now you have done all the homework it’s time to consider which advertising channel, or medium, is best for your type of business or for the particular promotion you have in mind. For example, classified ads fuel some businesses while others use flyer distribution effectively.
For restaurants, local newspaper ads are effective because most restaurant patrons live within a three to five mile radius. Local shops find success with coupon advertising in community mail packs or on the back of supermarket receipts. And there’s no need to send out expensive brochures if a flyer will serve the purpose instead. You may find that keeping persistent, low-key contact with your customers, using inexpensive materials, will give you just as good a result as a single campaign that features a glossy brochure. A clear promotional and materials strategy will help you avoid making false economies. For example, advertising luxury goods on cheap materials could send the wrong message.
Choose Your Materials
Once you have your overall strategy worked out, you can think about ways to cut costs on specific materials. Lets consider for the remainder of this article some of the range of low-cost materials that could be used in your business, such as flyers, hand-outs, business cards, faxes, emails, postcards, and giveaways such as mugs, buttons, pens, or ornaments, and how you can use them most effectively.
The Versatile Flyer
A flyer can be a very effective and versatile low-cost marketing tool.
You can include them with orders and invoices, pop them into bags at the cash register, hand them out in shopping malls or include them in correspondence to other parts of your supply chain, such as your distributors.
You do not have to hand them all out yourself, as you can enter into barter agreements with other businesses, where you agree to hand out flyers for each other.
Creating A Flyer
When creating a flyer, use a page-sized piece of paper. One colour may do, as nobody expects a flyer to have high design quality. But you should try to feature a picture or graphic that grabs attention and match it with a catchy headline that offers something to the customer.
Many flyers advertise special offers, but you can also design a flyer to give a standard snapshot of your business. This type of flyer could include a checklist of your services and main selling points.
Design For Content
Remember that nobody is going to sit down and study it, so your main message should be included in the headline, which can shout out the most attractive benefit of your product or service.
The headline can be followed by captions or tags that signal other benefits. You may include some detailed text for customers really interested in reading on. You might also consider including some customer testimonials.
If you do not have a communications specialist on your team, you may also want to get a professional copywriter to cast an eye over your copy. They should be able to find more direct and effective ways of getting your message across.
Don’t rely only on your own judgment when creating flyers or any other marketing publications. Brainstorm issues with your team at two or three stages during development and seek comments on ‘prototype’ publications before commissioning a print run.
Design For Appearance
Pay attention to the look of the flyer.
It shouldn’t look cramped, so include plenty of space around your text. The text of the flyer should not look too ‘busy’. It should use no more than a couple of font styles, for example, and they should generally be of the plain variety.
Be sparing in your use of bold type and don’t use whole lines or words in italics or upper case, as this is hard to read. It’s generally better to address readers as ‘you’ and use simple, direct language, keeping sentences to an average of no more than 15 words.
Illustrations add a huge visual attractiveness to marketing materials but the costs involved in a special photo shoot are likely to put this option out of consideration. Fortunately these days it is relatively easy and inexpensive to create graphics of good quality.
If you can take a reasonable photo upload digital images from your digital camera. Lower quality images may be fine for a flyer, which is likely to be printed on lower quality paper, which shows limited detail.
Or, if you do want a more high-end image you could consider using a stock photo. These are obtainable from many agencies these days, often as easily obtained as downloading over the Internet from the supplier.
You may be able to use your own computer to make a high resolution master copy that a printer can work from. If you can afford to pay a graphic designer, you can supply them with a digital document and let them generate layout options.
(Stay tuned for part 3)
