Create brochures: Tips for the construction
When creating a brochure, you should not be guided primarily by traditional schemes – for example, foreword, company history, product range, contact data. This structure is familiar to most readers, but does not necessarily correspond to their interests and needs.
It is better to derive the order of the individual chapters from the type and aim of the brochure.
Here are some considerations:
Tips
Specific brochures.
Experience shows: The more specific a brochure designing is – such as product brochures – the sooner it is read intensively and from the first to the last chapter. The reader has a linear approach because he knows that he will only get the most benefit and the most information for himself if he devotes himself intensively to the brochure.
This means for you: Take the customer’s perspective and consider: What interests the customer most? What’s the first thing he wants to know? Which information is less important?
When defining the chapter order, you can orientate yourself here on the order of customer questions, as they occur, for example, in sales talks. Write down these questions, put them in a logical order and arrange your brochure chapters designing according to this “question funnel”.
General brochures.
The situation is somewhat different for general brochures such as image or company brochures design. These are usually not read linearly from front to back, but are first scrolled through randomly and scanned for interesting images and headlines.
This means for you: You do not necessarily have to design the brochure in a logical, sequential order. The individual chapters do not have to build on each other, but stand for themselves. Consequently, they are round and complete in themselves and – if possible – do not refer to previous pages, because you must not assume that the reader knows the front chapters.
Conclusion
There are no rigid guidelines for the structure of brochures. It is best to put yourself in the perspective of your potential customers and try to reflect their reading behaviour and sequence of questions in the design of the brochure.
Special Tip
The American copywriter Casey Demchak recommends the following structure for general business product brochure designing:
The beginning:
- Sales-boosting headline
- Colored product photo
- Meaningful advertising text (approx. three lines)
- Enumeration of the most important benefit arguments
Center:
- complete product description
- more detailed benefit arguments
- Functioning of the product
- Production of the product
- Customer Opinions / Case Studies
- test results
The end:
- product specifications
- Sample invoices for savings
- price information
- guarantee
- call to action
- order information