Writing Effective Brochures

Writing Effective Brochures

A brochure is a one to four page piece that describes in brief, a product, solution or architecture.

Brochures are intended to provide customers with additional information on corporate offerings, and are used by sales personnel to persuade customers to purchase a product. The brochure – also called a data sheet, product brief or solution brief – describes the main features of the product, any specifications for its use and is usually accompanied by either a picture of the product or an architectural design, illustrating the solution. Other brochures resemble more of an advertising piece.

Writing effective brochures is an art as well as a science. It requires a combination of competent writing skills, knowledge of the market for which the brochure is intended and the ability to creatively combine and integrate information about a product into a coherent and convincing piece. This article is intended for the novice marketing writer or the technical writer who is interested in writing corporate brochures.

Understanding Your Customer

Your brochure needs to be targeted specifically to the market for which it is intended. Before starting to write, you should identify the potential customers and familiarize yourself with their needs and requirements.

Here are some strategies that you can use to gather information about the market and your customer:

• Identify, together with your marketing team, the potential markets for the brochure and agree to focus on a specific market segment for the brochure (see below).

• Visit the web sites of the customers you are selling to and the web sites of your competitors. You should be able to gather information on the type of products that are being sold and how these are presented.

• Analyst reports provide in-depth and useful information about the current state and future development of the market. You can use these to clarify or even to quote in your brochure, to give weight to the benefits of the solution or product that you are describing.

• Determine who are the decision makers in the targeted customer company and what type of information they are looking for in the brochure. For example, are technical data or figures going to convince them, or are they looking for a more high-level, descriptive explanation of the benefits of the service/product to their company?

• If possible, visit the sites of potential customers and talk to them about their needs and what they are looking for in a solution (either informally, or through a structured questionnaire). If this is not possible, then ask a member of your sales or marketing team to provide you with this information.

3 B) Business Benefits The bottom line for most corporate customers is “how will this product or solution benefit my business?”

• What are the unique selling points of the product? No other supplier in the market has these features. The brochure should emphasize these features as the relative advantage of the product over its competitors.

• What are the major selling points? These features are essential to the customer, but may also be offered by your competitors. The brochure should emphasize these features as an integral part of the product.

• What are the nice to have features? These features may provide added value to the customer, but are not essential to his/her needs. If there is space to mention some of these features, they should be referred to as “value-added” features, towards the end of the brochure or on the back page.

D) Product Categories When organizing information in the brochure, it helps to break it down into standard categories, under key word titles, such as the following:

• Openness – can the product be integrated into an existing platform or with third party equipment? Are there APIs or SDKs available for integrating and customizing the product?

• Standards support – will the product work with the systems of other vendors? Is it based on proprietary technology or on a standards-based solution?

• Security – does the product provide security measures, to prevent fraudulent use or abuse? Are corporations and end-users protected when using your product?

• Reliability – how reliable is the product? Have any reliability measures been attained? Are customers satisfied with the reliability of the product?

• Redundancy – are mechanisms in place for redundancy and failover, in the event that one element in the system fails?

Brochures must be written neatly, crisply, giving the information in a nutshell.