If you are creating a general leaflet to market your services and products to a wide audience then it is fairly easy to create one, with little expertise. Essentially you will be aiming to be informative so people know a little more about you and who you are. If you are trying to increase custom though, and you want to gain business from a very particular segment of your potential consumer base then you should think about how to put your information together and how you will appeal to people.
Your target audience
The first thing you should do is decide who the group is that you want to target so that you know who you are aiming at. Who is most likely to want to work with you and how will you grab their attention. Do you know as much as possible about the audience? Do you know how old they are, what they might work as, what they watch on the television, when they are most likely to find out about you? There are ways and means of gleaning this information, but before you begin, you should know your audience inside out so that you can create a brochure or leaflet that will appeal to their interests as fully as possible.
Learning about your target audience
You may want to familiarise yourself with the kind of lifestyle that your audience may lead. It is easy to make assumptions sometimes, but some market research could really prove useful here and get you some specific details that you can use to your own advantage. For instance, you may have thought about who your audience is but when you find out more about them you may realise that another segment of the population may be better suited.
Designing your leaflet to appeal to your audience
The more information you have about your audience the more you will be able to use images, logos, colours and designs that will appeal to them. Graffiti won’t pull in business from the more senior members of our societies for instance. Whilst this might be an over generalisation, this is essentially what marketing is. You can’t know each individual as well as you would want to so you need to make general assumptions based on whatever information you have access to.
What to include in your leaflet
Once you have established your target audience, learned what you can about them and decided on the imagery you will use in your brochure, you are ready to start designing it. You can think about the content and the wording and the way that you will phrase certain things. Is your leaflet going to be informative or is it going to be flooded with calls to action to encourage people to get in touch with you for a service or product that they cannot do without?
The aim of your leaflet
You need to decide the aim of your leaflet, but you should also consider the value of information. People don’t want to feel that they have spent some time reading something that is of little consequence to them and that they have not learnt from. Include some helpful hints or tips maybe so that their experience of reading about you will have been positive.