New text only page
Is print dead? Not at all, and it can be a great weapon in your marketing arsenal, especially if your customers and prospects are of a certain age.
Business-owner Tony Tucker wasn’t sure that his marketing brochure was doing the job it was supposed to. His company, AST Stairlifts, sells and rents stairlifts to (mostly) elderly people, and their customers are more likely to be women. Their existing brochure (shown below) was more like a technical specification – the facts, figures and illustrations were all there, along with the prices. While it was useful, it was neither appealing nor customer-centred. Tony didn’t think it was attracting new customers, so commissioned us to produce a new one for him.
The AST team pride themselves on their exceptional customer service; they score 4.9 out of 5 on the Which? Trusted Traders site and 100% of their customers recommend them. The company strapline is ‘The friendly stairlift company’; this was my starting point. I wanted to get the message across that they were a small, friendly, polite, caring and trustworthy team. They also do their job reliably and efficiently and the new brochure was to reflect that.
What we did
The size of the brochure was the first thing to change. The existing one was a 2-sided A4 fact-sheet, rather unwieldy for the engineers to carry around with them and easily creased when handed out. The new one was to be 4-page A5, a much handier size, printed on better stock. Having 4 pages was better in terms of dividing the content too – we put the technical information on the the centre spread and used the front and back pages to get their marketing message across.
I thought it was important to show people on the front cover so that the company would have a human face. Tony preferred to have a photo of himself and manager, Andrew, to a generic ‘happy customer’ image, and professional head shots were commissioned. I think these do a very good job of showing their personality and efficiency (they are both engineers as well as running the company).
We tweaked the copy so the emphasis shifted to show how AST could help the customer, and toned down the colours, making it look clean and fresh. The Which? recommendation logo gives the company credibility, so we featured it prominently.
The back cover includes lots of information that was missing from the original brochure: company background, authorisation, an impressive client list and a lovely testimonial from one of the many on the Which? website. This all helps to build trust.
Tony and his team are delighted with the new brochure, and more importantly potential customers seem to like it. Andrew, Tony’s manager, says:
“Annette was easy to work with, readily identifying what I was looking for in the new brochure and quickly producing a draft copy for review. The new brochure has been well received, by both customers and staff, while the smaller size has proved popular. We’ve been distributing the new brochure to our business contacts in a series of face to face meetings and we are already getting new business as a result.”