Brochures for Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is basically bootstrapping marketing activities to achieve maximum impact.
The use of brochures in guerrilla marketing for retails is common, and as long as people still walk on sidewalks, brochure marketing will always be important to bootstrap your marketing.
What should be included in the brochure?
Obviously, you may want to have your contact info in it - don’t forget to put a simple map, too.
You also want to get your message across in bigger font and in lesser word counts. Passer-bys have limited attention span, and might only look at your brochure for 1 or 2 seconds and then throw it away. Be attention grabbing in less wording.
For example - “For limited time only - you can have a 20% discount on selected items in our store” can be written, in big and bold, “20% OFF TODAY - ACT NOW”
Colour or Black-and-White?
Colour or black-and-white printing? Simple question, supposedly simple answer, but tricky to decide.
To command quality, colour brochure printing should be your choice over the B/W counterpart. However, B/W brochure printing is definitely cheaper.
In my opinion, whenever your budget allows, choose colour brochure printing.
However, if your budget is limited, choosing B/W printing can achieve similar effectiveness if you know how.
Bootstrapping Tips
I have a simple trick though - consider using a B/W texts (and images) printed on coloured paper. This way, your printing cost is lower, either you outsource your printing needs or do it yourself.
Also consider the size of your brochures - if you can get your message across on A5, don’t use A4.
Another bootstrapping tip - if you use brochure marketing to spread out words about your promo program, ask passer-bys to bring the brochures back to your retail store in good condition to redeem whatever you decide on promotion. This way you can save your printing cost, and reuse the brochure to be handed out again later.
Any other tips you can share in your brochure copywriting and printing experience? Please comment on this post :)
Ivan Widjaya
Brochure printing
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About the Author
Ivan Widjaya is the Owner/Editor of Noobpreneur.com. He is a web property investor, blogger and web property maker, and currently managing and running websites and blogs on various topics under the brand name of My Web Estate.
Visit Noobpreneur's profile and other posts.
Published on: October 7th, 2008Categories: business tips
Tags: bootstrap, brochure, guerrilla marketing, printing
comments (4) | Leave a Reply
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Business Partners
October 11, 2008
Something I’ve found handy to make people keep the brochure is to include a coupon as part of the brochure. Make the coupon the back panel, or part of the back panel, and people tend to keep the whole thing and bring it back in. You can also use brochures for a referral service: just include a space for the original customer’s name and then when the friend brings in the brochure for a discount, the original customer also gets a discount.
October 11, 2008
Hi,
Excellent ideas!
I particularly keen on the referral part of your idea by including a space for the original customer name. This can be viral, to certain extent.
Cheers!
February 24, 2009
Nice article, Noob! I also like to use folds (Z-folds, gates, etc) to give the brochure a “story line.” I use PrintPlace.com for printing and they have a ton of fold options for next to nothing.
In my experience, the “call to action” is going to be the most important piece of the included info. Sure, you have to get their attention. But a lot of my clients fail to craft a clever, compelling call to action. If the customer doesn’t visit the site or pick up the phone, then it was a wasted effort…
February 27, 2009
Hi Justyn,
I agree - call to action is probably the most important part of the brochures.
I’ve wasted enough money on brochure printing, knowing that conversion is very, very low - it’s not the brochures to blame, but my poor call to action is the one to blame!
Thanks for sharing :)