Be Relevant, Be Meaningful

We touched on this briefly; to be interesting you need to be relevant and give meaningful information. Readers will follow what you have to say, but to be sure you are not simply sending tomorrow’s trash complement the promotional, sales orientated aspects of the newsletter with practical tips and advice or Q&A’s.

Use Templates

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel and there is no need to have journalistic or editorial experience. There are plenty of newsletter templates already designed and freely available for you to use – save time and energy, not to mention money, and select a template for you to populate with your content.

Write for Your Audience

Address the reader directly – we know you can’t call them by their name, but you can refer to them as “You” or “Your”, avoid using “Their’s” or “Them” because you are talking about someone else and be ruthless with using “I” or “Us” because you are now just talking about yourself. You can also include items which the audience can use such as calendars of trade events or deadlines, coupons and special pricing promotions as well as including your contact information in a handy format.

Use Your Customers

Everyone likes to see their names and faces in print, and your newsletter is no exception. Use your existing customers as case studies in your newsletter so they see how you solved their problems – this is a great testimonial for your business.

You need to have a logo which is unique and the reasons for this are two-fold.

First, a unique logo will satisfy the desire of many people to have a visual representation of your business. Visual imagery is powerful and especially when the visual imagery (your logo) becomes associated with your business directly. If your logo is not unique or is too similar to another logo, then people will become confused and you will experience a dilution in your brand identity.

The second reason your logo must be unique is because if it is too similar or borrowed from someone else, you are likely to find yourself infringing a string of laws to protect “intellectual property”, i.e. the logo you have taken from someone else’s design.

You company logo does not need to be complicated – a simple design will suffice, but it is essential that it is sufficiently unique to separate it from any other. A simple design will also lend itself to more easily embedding itself in the minds of those who see it and it will become more quickly associated with your business.

It is important that the logo you decide upon will properly reflect your business image. You wouldn’t use a toilet seat for a law firm, and you wouldn’t use some representation of the scales of justice for a plumbing company. The two images or concepts may make a good basis for a logo but only if they are more obviously associated with what your business does.

Using a logo is one of the most effective and powerful ways to create a brand identity and increase your business impact on the consciousness of your markets.

First of all, don’t try to make your ads do everything – decide on what the objective is and focus on creating the ad which will serve its purpose. Advertizing appeals to people on many different levels – emotional, psychological, values and beliefs, rationality and experience. This means that one ad or technique cannot satisfy all of your goals and objectives – you need to carefully craft your ad so it becomes the right tool for the job you have in mind.

Advertizing is not about educating people, it is not about raising awareness, it is not about building brand recognition – advertizing is about SELLING! While you may wish to have a stunning piece of art which will win awards at the “Ad Man Convention Awards in Whereversville”, the primary objective is to sell. Create an attention grabbing piece, use good, simple English to create interest and facilitate the reader making a decision and finally, always have a call to action, i.e. buy the product or service!

Make sure you have identified who is in your target market – you must use this information to create the path for them to take from initial attraction to the ad and the path they follow through to making the order or other call to action. Who you are pitching the ad at will determine the approach you take in selling to them – selling to women, you will language and imagery which appeals to them, selling to the elderly, you will not place the ad in a youth magazine. This will also affect the tone of the ad pitch as to whether it is an emotional sell or one based more on rational appeal to someone with prior experience.

In a nutshell – identify the target audience – decide on the objective of the ad – use AIDA (Attention, Interest, Decision and Action).

Text Size

The most important aspect of the visual impact is the size of the text – too small, and the reader will not be able to use it easily, too large and it looks ungainly and clumsy as it clashes with other visual elements on the card.

Use the following text sizes as you design the initial draft of your business card:

Address and Contact Information – use 7 or 8 point text size (but never less than 6 points)
Name – this should be 1 point larger than then address and contact information text size
Title – use one point less than the address information
Business name – use a minimum of 12 point

If you include a tag line or logo, try to aim for a text size which complements the text you have already entered (try the address text size and see how that works).

Some professions will use a set template or style; for instance doctors and lawyers will use much smaller text sizes for their address information.

Typeface or Typography

Look at your existing business stationery for the typefaces used in their production, because it will help create a brand identity and uniformity of message if you keep everything standardized. There is a “but” – some typefaces do not maintain their appearance and style when you reduce the font size while some typeface styles are not suitable for the type of printing methods used in producing business cards.

Content Checklist

Make sure you have everything you need included on your business card – it is a common mistake to forget something!

Here’s a handy checklist for you to use:

Company name
Company logo or tagline
Name
Title
Address
Telephone number (office and cell)
Fax number
Email address
Website address

The first thing to do when designing a leaflet is to roughly draft out the layout by first folding the paper into the format you are looking for. Once you have made the paper folds, lay the leaflet draft out flat and number the sections as follows:

When folded, the pages will now follow within the leaflet if you follow this scheme.

Next, sketch out the rough layout; place boxes where you will be putting in graphics and images; do you want a border?

You should also think about the color scheme for the paper and text.

Grab Attention!

Target your audience with a real headline grabbing statement – remember your product or service is not what the audience are interested in – it is what your product or service does to solve a problem the prospect audience has which will motivate them to read more.

Use Motivating Words and Phrases

Words such as the following:

These are known as “Power Words” because they are emotive and play to needs of readers.

KISS

Keep It Simple Stupid – use clean lines and avoid clutter within the leaflet. Focus on the text because that is where the message for the reader will be, not the images.

Use Good Quality Materials

You need to have a superior print finish for a calendar to be used by a customer. They are not going to hang something on the wall if it made from poor quality paper or has a poor print finish. Do not skimp on the cost of the materials and work with your print partner to deliver the best result for your budget. It is better to reduce the print run and be more selective in handing the calendars out to people than have a larger print run of poor quality (as many will never be used).

Include an Appointment Book

Making sure there is adequate space to include appointments and key dates is a good tip – make sure you include all the key dates that you can think of. For instance, if you have a company golf day, have that included but don’t forget the key holidays and celebrations.

Leave Lined Space at the Bottom

Leave an area at the bottom of the calendar so users can make notes to themselves – you can even have a separate section which has a simplified “to-do” list. You are making the calendar something that people will see has utility for themselves and this will make them more inclined to use it.

Pick a Theme and Stick with It

Target a theme which is associated with your business, however if you are in a business which is not “glamorous”, you may choose something such as sports, seasons, models or shots from around town. Many successful amateur calendars have gone on to be world bestsellers simply because they have struck a theme which has universal appeal.

Company Branding & Contact Information

Don’t forget why you are engaging in this project – to get your brand, your business and your contact information in front of customers and prospects in an ever-ready format which they use everyday.

Make sure that every page has your brand logo and company contact information included on it – you will be surprised at how many draft designs omit this information!

Print design has a tangible substance – you print it and that’s the finished product. You can see the finished design, handle it and take in the physical, sensual design elements, however this is not so for a web based design. Web based design work is not produced with a physical rendition on paper – it is designed for viewing on a computer screen, using a web browser and both of these factors will affect how the imagery and finished work are rendered to the individual viewer. In this sense, web design is transitory, it has no permanence in that what you see is what you get every single time, and you certainly cannot handle the finished product (even printing it out is not a true rendition).

For a client looking for help, there is a great deal of difference between a web designer and a print designer. Many web designers come to the art with a background in print design, however you as the client must be aware of the difference in the medium they are using if you are to get the most out of your budget.

When you look at a print design company, you should be assessing their physical portfolio of products in order top ascertain the print quality, design standards and quality of the finished work. With a web designer you should not be looking at printed renditions of their portfolio at all, but use a computer and web browser – in fact, look at the websites they have produced using different computers and web browsers to see how their finished product actually looks in real life to the end-user.

Web designers may have a browser they prefer to work with – Safari is the Apple Mac’s default web browser and many designers prefer to use a MacIntosh for their graphical work because it possesses superior graphic capabilities and applications. The “but” is that your customers may be like the 98% of the rest of the world who run Microsoft machines, where the default browser is Internet Explorer. Make sure the web designer is rendering your finished product so it looks good in the web browsers you target or expect your clients to be using.

The 40-20-40 Rule

This is a rule from the catalog industry, which believes that successful design comprises 40% good product and service offerings, 40% is preparing the right product list and the final 20% is creativity.

This may seem to belittle creativity and lead you to think you need to find products which “sell themselves”, but actually this is not the case. Being creative involves understanding and being daring enough to leave out design and product aspects rather than just trying to stuff everything onto the space available.

Do not over face your reader – give them enough to provide a taste of what is on offer – you serve the full course when you have the client ready to make a buying decision!

Always Be Selling!

Advertising is ultimately about selling and the point of your piece is to grab attention and generate interest. This actually follows form one of the salesman’s acronyms – AIDA – this stands for:

• ATTENTION
• Interest?
• Decision
• ACTION

In fact, your ad will have to satisfy all four of these conditions because you still need the prospect to make a decision to contact you, and take the conversation you have initiated further down the buying path.

Be Concise and Clear

You never know who is going to read your piece nor what frame of mind they will be in when they first encounter it. First impressions do count because, it is unlikely that a reader will look at the ad once and then come back to it, unless they have already been stirred by the contents. Most of what we create is destined for the trash, so maximize the opportunity to get your message across in one instant.

Be brief and to the point.

No clichés or puns and get straight to the point.

Know Your Audience

The more you can find out about your target audience, the more likely you are to tap into trends and fashions which they are more interested in. As a basic minimum, find out the following about your target audience:

• Simple demographics such as age, sex, employment status, specific common interests;
• What type of buyer are they – considered or impulse buyers?
• What application do they have for your product or service –i.e. identify their problem and show you have what they need to solve it;
• What are their basic needs, desires and fears – in bare terms, human behaviour can be boiled down to response to one of two motivators – greed and fear – simple, crude but very effective; and
• How do they behave as a group e.g all vote Republican, all go to church, all are active.