For all the attention paid to digital marketing, the printed brochure remains one of the most useful and versatile marketing tools available.
Brochures help a company establish its corporate identity. Companies spend money to project an identity. Brochures play an important role in this effort. Brochures also list the company’s contact information—name, address, telephone number, fax number, web site URL, and other appropriate contact information.
Brochures describe products and services. A company may choose to have one brochure cover an entire product line, or a portion of its product line, or individual products or services. The choice depends on the audience the company hopes to reach.
Brochures differentiate a company from its competition. They play a role in content marketing, the process in which a company positions itself as the go-to market leader. Brochures can provide background information on a particular business practice, offer best practice tips, or similar information.
Some have suggested that, because of the growing use on digital marketing and videos, brochures are becoming obsolete. In fact, the opposite is true, because printed documentation is “push” literature. With “push” literature, a prospective customer has the information right there, in his or her hand. Because they are printed, they can easily be reproduced and distributed as needed.
“Pull” literature, by contrast, requires the prospective customer to be “pulled” to the content source, such as a web site. With “pull” literature, however, the prospective customer must take an additional step—entering a web site, for example—that he would not need to do with a printed brochure. In addition, with “pull” literature a prospective customer might not be able to immediately access a web site, for whatever reason.
Brochures are worth the money because they continue to play a key, albeit unflashy, role in helping companies get the word about what they do, how they do it, and for whom those companies serve.
