Filed under: Printing Help | Tags: advertising, brochure printing, four color printing, marketing
Brochures have the important job of marketing your company, providing information, and selling your products or services. Although the design of a brochure is crucial to its effectiveness, the printing step is equally as important. You might have the most brilliant design out there, but if the printing quality is poor, then your brochures will not make a positive impression on clients. Therefore, choosing the right brochure printing company for your needs requires careful consideration.
Need #1:
Being able to trust the quality that your printer puts out is a top priority. For excellent color, a printer should use the full or four color method of printing. Offset lithography insures a smoother transfer of the ink to the paper, so be sure that your printer uses this technique. You may also want to request samples so that you can see the quality yourself.
Need #2:
More than one extra brochure printing service should be provided by your printer. What if you need help designing or proofing your brochure? Or what if you decide you want to save time and have your brochures mailed directly from the printer to the client? Along with design and mailing services, a printer might also provide proofs, templates, and instant quotes.
Need #3:
Brochures can come in a variety of sizes, paper types, and folding, which is why a brochure printing company should offer lots of options. A standard size for brochures is 11×8.5, but what if you want a 33×17? You might also want to be able to choose from aqueous or glossy coatings. Or maybe you want a more unique fold, such as the Z-fold, gate fold, and roll folding.
Don’t limit your creativity and quality by choosing a brochure printing company that does not fulfill your needs. A small amount of time researching a printer will make all the difference in your printing satisfaction and brochure results.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: copywriting, postcard printing, postcards
When it comes to copywriting for marketing materials, you can find plenty of tips out there geared toward brochures and catalogs. You can also find general copywriting tips that work for just about any marketing material. There’s not much out there specifically geared toward postcard copywriting though, so here are some copywriting tips to help you make your postcard printing as effective as possible.
Start by thinking about the response
Many copywriters think about postcards as a blank slate. They wonder what the headline should say and what benefits should be pointed out. Many copywriters work in a top-down approach when it comes to postcards.
But, postcards can be more effective if you write from a down-top approach, if you will, by starting with what response you would like the postcard to generate.
Don’t expect too much from your postcard
Whatever response you expect from your postcard, make sure it’s one that’s rooted in reality. You shouldn’t expect your postcards to sell your product for you by giving consumers all the needed info and then also close the sale. You have time and space constraints that you must deal with when it comes to postcards. People don’t expect to sit down and read a postcard, so you need to keep your message short. If you clutter your postcard, no one is going to read one word of it.
Let’s say you are sending out postcards to let people know about a new digital camera you’re putting on the market. The digital camera can hold many more pictures and you can print directly from the camera, saving time and energy by not having to plug the camera into a computer to print pictures. You can also edit the photos in the camera among other great features. But how much of this information needs to go on my postcards? It depends on my reader and my desired response.
Work from the response backward
Back it up from your desired response to your marketing campaign as a whole. Let’s say your marketing campaign’s goal is for people to buy 1,000 cameras in the first quarter. To do this, you say you need to get people out to your store or whatever stores carry your camera and see it for themselves. You know that when people play with it, they’ll want to buy it.
Okay, so there’s your desired response of your postcards – to get people into the stores to play with the camera. That’s something your postcard has the ability to do and it isn’t overreaching.
Write your message
Now that you know your desired response is, you can write your message to focus on getting people to do your desired response. The camera has a bunch of great features, so you can focus on a few of the most desired features, like editing operations, and tout those on the postcard. You don’t have to let people know everything else about the camera. You can do that in a brochure or other type of marketing material at the store. Remember your postcard is just aimed to get people in the store to play with the camera.
Writing postcard copy from the response backward helps to focus your message and keeps it short because you have a narrow goal in mind to help you reach your overall marketing goal. Try it and I’m sure you’ll have an effective postcard that gets you results.
Filed under: Printing Help | Tags: booklets, catalog printing, commercial printing, printing company
Few things could threaten to overwhelm a business team more than the development and production of a catalog. The process of catalog printing is tedious at best. But there are few better ways to connect with your customers than with a catalog that they can have at their fingertips.
So, here are a few secrets to success for catalog printing. There’s no way around it, this is a daunting task. But with some careful planning anyone can produce a professional, successful catalog.
l Use a team – unless your catalog will only be a few pages, you will more than likely need the help of the team. Consider at least one expert on your team who has experience in catalog design and printing.
l Plan, plan, plan – before you even begin amassing all of your products and services for the catalog, sit down and decide on your purpose and format. What is your budget? Is this catalog for businesses or consumers? How much information do you really need? These questions and more will guide you and your team as you begin collecting all your information.
l Categories – consider grouping your information in your catalog into categories. Of course, this completely depends on the content of your catalog. Most businesses can break their products and services into smaller, logical categories so that consumers can quickly reference what they need. This also helps you pull all of your information together.
l Images – this is one of the few places you should consider cutting costs. Product images are the first thing that consumers look at, according to design theory. So make sure you have stunning images that represent your products accurately.
l Printing – use an experienced catalog printing company. The last thing you want to have happen is to get back a poorly printed catalog. Not only is this incredibly inconvenient, this can be a big morale buster as well. The costs you may save using a discounted printer are usually not worth the potential problems.
I was looking for cool samples of brochures and found this blog post: “Best of Brochure design – Cool Samples and Examples of Brochures” http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/graphicsblog/2007/12/06/best-of-brochure-design-cool-samples-and-examples-of-brochures/.
What’s interesting in most of these full color brochures is that they don’t fit the typical brochure mold. Most are odd shapes – not the rectangle you would expect to find in a brochure. Of course, that’s probably why they made it on to the list!
There’s one brochure for something called Elevate and the brochure unfolds, or elevates, into its unfolded form. I like that. I’m big about using words literally. I’m the kind of person who, when a song on the radio says something about “my sistas on the left,” I’ll look or point to the left. That’s why I like that particular brochure.
I also like the leaf-shaped brochure that looks like it’s in another language. Even though I can’t read it, I think it’s an innovative company for using a leaf for their brochure shape and using a green background for their pages. They also repeat the leaf shape as cutouts for images inside the brochure. Repetition is one of the keys to good and effective brand design. Repetition keeps things uniform and keeps the design focused. It also creates consistency, which makes design look more professional.
There’s also a brochure that looks like it’s being unzipped on the inside. I like that idea and the way it makes the brochure look like it’s bigger at the top. But, I would have like to have seen something behind the opened zipper – something that would intrigue me to want to figure out what this company is about. As it is, it just looks like a customer would be unzipping into a company full of nothing.
There’s one brochure that is pretty close to the normal rectangular, tri-fold shape. But the corners are slightly curved and the typography and graphics remind me of something from the early ’80s. It looks like a brochure kids would have gotten when they got to watch the puberty video! The drawings are all pencil and there’s a lady on the back with a speech bubble to the side of her head. I can’t tell what she’s saying, but she looks like a teacher lecturing about puberty in a polite, I-hate-doing-this demeanor.
There’s one square brochure for something called “dialog” that I really like because of its simplicity. The photos used look like they’re from the ’50s (maybe it’s the pale colors, I don’t know), but the photos are all square and line up in a nice grid that evokes the design of the brochure itself. The simple italicized font looks modern to me, maybe because it doesn’t use a capital letter.
These are all great-looking brochures that I think most companies would be afraid to use because they are so different. But I think these brochures could bring in more sales leads and customers than a traditional brochure any day!
Filed under: Printing Help | Tags: brochure printing, folding, layout, scoring
For the business about to engage in brochure printing there are many options available for controlling when and what the customer will see. While you could put all of your sales presentation on a single page, consider that a folded brochure gives you the opportunity to tell a story one page at a time. Here are some of the different fold styles and ideas for how to use the folds to tell your product’s story:
Brochure Folding Types
• Tri-Fold – Typically this is an 8.5 x 11 folded first from the right and then from the left, so the customer opens the brochure like a book. The last page unfolds to reveal a large inner presentation. This folding style lets you tell a little bit at a time and then gives an opportunity for a big presentation.
• Z-Fold – Also called an accordion-fold, this format creates three panels on the front and three panels on the back. The customer opens the first page and has two panels visible with a third that can be opened. This fold style can be used to guide the customer through the first three panels and then turn the brochure around for the next three panels.
• Double Parallel-Fold – This style is created by first folding the sheet of paper in half and then in half again. Eight separate panels are created giving a great deal of segregated sections of information. Use this fold style to present several different products or services as the customer could open the brochure in any number of ways. It is difficult to direct the customer with this fold unless you use page numbers or other methods for telling the customer where to look next. This fold is very compact so it can be mailed in a smaller envelope.
• Half-Fold – Also known as a book-fold, this style is simply paper folded in half once. The customer intuitively opens the brochure like a book, so you can predict what the customer will perceive to be the front of the brochure. Only four panels are available, but these are large and can be sub-divided using careful layout techniques. Use this fold to catch the customer’s eye with the front cover and then give them the rest of the story with the inside two panels.
