Making a brochure is an excellent strategy for marketing an event or business promotion. Compared with online marketing, which we’re all accustomed to scrolling past, an attractive brochure design is likely to be read by a good proportion of those receiving it.
Nevertheless, it involves an outlay to design, print and distribute your brochure. What’s the best way of ensuring you get a good ROI?
Budgeting Your Brochure
The costs of your brochure will, of course, come out of your marketing budget, and you’ll need to decide how much of that should be assigned to the campaign in question. For this, it’s essential to know both the total costs involved in a brochure campaign, the average amount you’d expect from each customer you gain and the expected success rate.
Costs are likely to include design and copywriting, printing and mailing costs. The formula for calculating ROI will be the percentage of total number of brochures distributed expected to generate custom, multiplied by the average income per customer. You then subtract the costs to get your projected profit.
Keeping the Design and Content Costs Down
The two main components of your brochure will be the design and the copy. Both can be produced on a budget by doing it yourself, but you need to balance keeping costs down with producing a high-quality product.
If you feel confident writing your own copy, that costs nothing but your time, but there’s a risk it may come over as unprofessional. Hiring a professional copywriter might be expensive, but you can keep the expense down by just having them polish your own copy, rather than writing it from scratch.
As far as the design goes, you can do it yourself by downloading templates from one of the many sites available, sometimes free. These will help you get some of the technical aspects right, such as bleeds and cut lines, but you’ll still need to produce the graphics themselves. Unless you’re confident about this, it may be better in the long run for your ROI to hire a professional designer.
Keeping Print Costs Down
The most obvious ways of keeping the print costs for your brochure down are reducing the paper quality and using a cheap, low-quality printing method, such as the printer attached to your computer. As with the content creation, however, these may be false economies.
This is because your readers are likely to judge you on the quality of your product, even when they’re not consciously aware of the elements that make this up. A brochure printed on lightweight paper with colours that are less vivid as you intended is far more likely to go straight into the bin than one that shows quality.
The best way of delivering the printing within your budget is to find a quality printer and discuss what can be achieved for the amount you’re able to spend. If you’ve made the right choice, rather than just going for the printer with cheapest quote, they may well be able to suggest a viable compromise.
If you need to discuss any aspect of the cost of making a brochure, you’re very welcome to get in touch with us.