Marketing Materials

Every company needs “literature,” printed pieces that do acareful and well thought-out job of presenting its products andservices: catalogs, newsletters, product sheets and brochures,letterhead, business cards, presentation folders, specificationsheets, case histories or application sheets, special eventbrochures, annual reports, manuals, technical bulletins, posters,product insert sheets, labeling, recruitment materials and soon.

With the increased availability of powerful desktop publishingsystems and software, many companies decide to meet these needsinternally. Resist this impulse. Your homegrown materials willbetray their off-the-cuff origin to most of the people who readthem. Appearance is reality in marketing, and you have to look asprofessional as you are. And no matter how creative you are, acommercial copywriter or graphic designer can vastly improve almostany materials created by an entrepreneur.

Here are some tips in dealing with the literature needs you’llface as your company expands and grows:

Get a logo and stationery package designedprofessionally. Do this, and don’t change it for at least 10years. Either hire an advertising agency to create it or a designstudio/graphic artist. Don’t try this yourself, no matter howartistic you consider yourself. A professional artist will makesure your stationery materials reflect your corporate personality,while maintaining a clean and professional look. They will lookgood in color and in black and white; they’ll reproduce well insmaller sizes; they’ll fax clearly; and they’ll simply be moreattractive than what you can expect to do yourself.

Learn the principles of solid graphic design.Understanding graphic design is a lifetime’s work, of course, butsome reading and a sensitive eye can teach you a lot. Get hold ofsome graphic design books at a local bookstore and educateyourself. All your printed materials should follow fundamentaldesign principles:

• Keep the look clean and simple. Don’t overload the readervisually. Use a graphic grid to align the different elements in anorderly fashion.
• Use heads and subheads to lead the reader. When the readerturns the page, where will he or she look? Use heads and subheadsto provide scanning points to keep the reader moving along.
• Avoid too much type. Pages filled with writing are notappealing to the reader. Break up the copy with photos,illustrations, cartoons, charts and so on.
• Use white space. Avoid a crowded look, despite the temptationto make use of every inch of paper you are paying for. White spaceserves as a visual frame for the rest of the content on thepage.
• Stay with standard formats unless you have a good reason notto. All of us have grown accustomed to the standard 8-1/2″ x 11″format for print materials. Even our filing systems are made forthings that size. If you go with an unusual size, your pieces maynot lend themselves to being filed easily for reference.
• Put a caption with each photo. We all want to know what we arelooking at. And a caption gives you the chance not just to identifyyour product but to remind the reader of the benefit.
• Use charts and graphs rather than tables. A brochure is avisual document. Use graphics to boost visual interest and makenumbers meaningful.

Be sure your materials have a “family look.” Every pieceof literature doesn’t have to look identical, but they should alllook planned as a compatible unit. Imagine your literature laid outin front of you on a conference table. Does it all look like itcomes from the same company? It should.

Invest in good photography. Small companies sometimesscrimp on getting good photos of their equipment, their job sites,their equipment in use or their accessories and supplies. Strong,professionally done photography will set you apart from other smallcompanies. Your customers want to be reassured of the quality ofyour product. Amateur snapshots give a very damaging impression ofyour professionalism. Good photography is an investment in yourfuture.

Appoint one person as lit boss. Your literature needswill be ever changing, with trade shows, with new products andmarkets and with normal growth. You must have one personresponsible for anticipating future needs, handling literatureproduction and maintaining inventory. Untended literature growsincreasingly less useful and more frustrating. Every new pieceshould have a written rationale, audience description and contentoutline, not unlike the rationale you develop for a piece ofadvertising copy.