Last 2.5 Steps to Boosting the Impact of Your Printed Materials

This week, we wrap up our series of tips for helping you maximize the effectiveness of your marketing materials:

6) Use Simple Words and a Simple Style

Use short simple words to express your meaning.  Educated readers understand simple words while uneducated people do not understand long high-brow words.  Even if you have to substitute three or four words for one difficult one, you will be much better off.  Write at an educational level just under the lowest one in your target market.

Better to invoke a complex emotion from the audience than to create complex sentences that mean nothing to them.

7) Include a Call to Action

Include a call to action in your advertisements.  Offer a free booklet or report—something of perceived value to the intended audience.  Then provide an easy way to request it.  Include a direct response mail card, a toll-free number—whatever will make it easiest and least threatening for your prospect to request.  Include an e-mail address rather than a Web address for your prospects to respond electronically.  This allows you to start electronic conversations with prospects and not just count hits on your Web page.

7.5) Always Have a Plan to Maximize Benefit

Whatever you do, make sure that you have a well-designed set of processes in place to handle the responses generated by the marketing campaign.  Unless you convert these responses into new business, then you will have wasted your investment in the campaign.

Who will answer the phone when it rings?  How will the inquiry be handled?  What are your goals for number of leads and conversion ratios?  How will the follow-up be handled?  These are some of the questions that you must have answered before running the marketing campaign.

How you track the source of the inquiries will tell you how effective your marketing campaign has been.  If you have multiple marketing initiatives ongoing at the same time, you must know which are pulling the best results.  This is achieved by asking the caller how they heard about the agency and then recording this information for every inquiry received.  Over time you will see where your best return on marketing investment is generated.  To develop the best and most useful data, track the conversion ratio and value of each customer for each of your marketing campaigns separately.  That way you will be able to compare the actual impact of each initiative in bottom line dollars and cents.

Whenever you are creating a new print piece, follow these seven simple steps and you will see the performance of your brochure or print ad skyrocket.  This will allow you to see the maximum return on your marketing investment.  Good luck and good marketing.