Small Business Design Resources

Is Printed Marketing Material Still Important?

What we couldn’t have possibly imagined just a decade ago has become a reality: everything has moved online. We shop online, we do our banking online, we play online, and we even socialize online. In addition, research shows that when making buying decisions, the first place people go to for researching their options is the Internet.

Which brings up the question, if everything takes place online these days, and especially if you’re an online business, should you still use printed marketing materials such as brochures as part of your marketing strategy?

Why printed marketing materials are still valuable

The short answer is yes. Marketing is never about just one medium. It’s always a mistake to focus on just one aspect of marketing and to neglect the others. A good marketing campaign utilizes many different mediums to generate many different leads, then nurtures them until they are ready to become customers.

So, while “online” is really hot these days, the physical world still exists, and there are enough potential customers who, after the initial online research, expect to see printed material. These people typically find it difficult to trust a business if it’s completely virtual. They need to know that you have a physical address, a phone number, and that they can see a brochure or other types of printed material before they commit to you.

If you ignore these consumers, you have just lost a segment of the population that could have been interested in your solution.

No doubt, when you plan your marketing budget, you need to pay special attention to online components, including your Web site, your blog and your social media accounts. Ideally, you want to have a great logo, and you want your logo to appear on all online venues (main site, blog header, Twitter background etc.)

To keep your brand highly unique and identifiable, you should also have the same logo appear on your business cards and on any printed marketing materials such as brochures and flyers.

How to create an effective brochure

Now that we’ve established the importance of brochures and of other printed marketing materials, here are a few handy tips for writing and designing an effective brochure:

1. Make it visually appealing. Design is extremely important when it comes to brochures. If the design is boring or cluttered, people won’t bother to read your text. Look for a small business graphic designer who has a lot of experience and can show you samples of their previous work. Better yet, make sure they have positive testimonials on their site, or on a third party site.

2. Focus on benefits rather than on features. Prospects don’t care about your product’s features. They want you to answer the question, “what’s in it for me?” and your brochure needs to be able to answer that question, or it will be tossed!

3. Keep it short. Do you really need a 10-page brochure? Generally, short, catchy brochures with a large font and a clean design are better than long, tiresome, technical brochures.

4. Make it personal. Write your brochure in a direct, conversational tone – as if you are talking with a person face to face. The more personal and direct your tone is, the easier it will be for prospects to connect with your message.

5. Include a call for action. Every marketing material should include a call for action, and this is true for brochures as well. A call for action can be as simple as ending your brochure with the sentence “Need ____? Call today” and your phone number. The idea is to present the pain, your business as the solution, and to encourage the prospect to take immediate action by calling you.

Whether you have a physical location or fully operate online, your small business marketing strategy should include online marketing materials AND printed marketing materials. This combination will make sure you don’t neglect an important segment of your potential market.

Quick Tip: Create Videos to Demonstrate your Product or Services

Videos are a great way to show your customers a demo of your products or services when you’re not there in person. Create a short video demonstrating the benefits of your product/service and add it to your website for visitors to watch.

Promote Your Website With Article Marketing

Small business owners have been using article marketing for decades, but the Internet and new Web 2.0 sites have really increased its potential and popularity. The principle behind article marketing is pretty simple: the idea is to promote your business and website by writing articles to be published as free content on other Internet sites. These articles promote your business by including a link back to your website and a brief bio about you and your business. Writing quality articles and submitting them for publication on other sites is an investment of your time, but one that can have real benefits for your small business website.

Benefits of Article Marketing

• Publishing articles on other websites will help you reach a broader audience—the more information you have on the Internet, the more likely it is that your target audience will find you.
• Writing high-quality articles related to your business is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. People searching for information on the topic will read your articles and see that you know what you’re talking about, which will encourage them to check out your website for more information.
• Readers will come away from your articles with a positive impression of you and your business, since you’re providing them with useful and free information.
• Every article you write and publish will have a link back to your site, providing you with valuable backlinks that may improve your search engine ranking. Keep in mind that search engines like Google take into account the quality of the sites linking to yours; for this reason, try not to sacrifice quality for quantity. It’s probably to your advantage to focus on writing well-written and informative articles that high-quality sites will be happy to publish, even if this means you’ll end up with fewer articles overall.

Be Careful of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is large blocks of text from different webpages that are identical or extremely similar. Google can penalize you for providing duplicate content by lowering your search ranking or completely removing your site from the Google index. These duplicate content penalties are part of Google’s effort to provide useful search results—they don’t want every search result to have basically the same content.

Duplicate content only results in penalties if Google believes your intent was to manipulate search rankings or deceive users. Submitting the same article for publication on multiple sites in order to promote your own website can be seen by Google as deception and result in penalties. Article marketing can be very effective in boosting your search rankings and increasing traffic to your small business website, but make sure to avoid duplicate content to ensure that your efforts don’t backfire.

Quick Tip: Create a Call-to-Action on your Homepage

A website without a call-to-action leaves the visitor wondering what to do next when they arrive on your website. Create a call-to-action telling the visitor what you would like them to do after they arrive to your website. Don’t create a chance for the visitor to leave empty handed.

Choosing the Best Web Hosting Provider

In order to publish your small business website to the Internet, you’ll need to choose a web hosting provider. There are many web hosts to choose from, with prices ranging from free ad-based hosting to expensive monthly fees. Choosing a provider can seem a bit overwhelming, but if you start by figuring out what you need to run the website you want, you’ll be able to evaluate different web hosts much more easily. We use Startlogic.com, which offers us exactly what we need to host Design Leap.

Think of choosing a web hosting provider for your website as choosing a hotel to stay at on vacation. Your website has to stay somewhere in order to have access to the Internet, but some hotels will be a better fit than others. Do you really need a huge suite with a minibar and 24 hour room service? Or will a single room and a continental breakfast serve your needs just fine?

One of the most important factors to consider is web space–most web hosts provide you with a set amount of space on their server. You’ll want to be sure you get enough space for your business website as it is now, as well as consider whether you might need more space for future expansion. Keep in mind that things like images, video, and Flash take up a lot of space.

Bandwidth or data transfer is another factor to consider. Bandwidth refers to the amount of information your website sends across the network every month. Every time your site is viewed, it uses bandwidth. When choosing a web hosting provider, you’ll want to make sure they provide enough bandwidth to cover the number of visitors you expect. Also check whether the web host charges fees for going over your monthly bandwidth–some advertise “unlimited bandwidth” but actually do have restrictions. How much bandwidth you need varies depending on the amount of traffic you expect.

In addition to these basic factors, there are many additional things offered by web hosting providers that you may or may not want:

• Domain registration/setup–Does the web hosting package come with domain registration and setup included? Many offer it for free as part of choosing their services, which is a great freebie if you need it (you don’t if you’ve already registered your domain name somewhere else).
• Email accounts–You’ll probably want to be able to create an email account for every employee, but most small businesses won’t need the ability to create 100 different email accounts.
• FTP access–FTP is usually the easiest way to upload new pages to your website.
• Programs and scripts–Interactive websites often require databases and the ability to use scripts like PHP. As with emails, you probably won’t need a huge number of databases; you can do a lot with just one.
• SSL (secure server)–If you plan to have an online store, you’ll want to provide a secure server for your customers. If you don’t plan to collect credit card payments through your website, a secure server probably isn’t necessary.

As you’re trying to choose a web hosting provider, remember to look critically at the services they offer. A great hosting package for one small business website may not be the best choice for another–it all varies depending on factors like what you plan to do with your site, how much traffic you expect, and how large your business is. Don’t be swayed by the promise of “unlimited” amounts of things you only need 5 of, and make sure the provider offers the important things you need to run your site.