Beaded Flower French I

5. Thou shalt not use Blue Peter style cut and paste techniques for flyers.

As a child I wondered at the skill of Peter Duncan, Caron Keating and Yvette Fielding, learnt how to grow sun flowers, cook pancakes and built a Tracy Island out of sticky back plastic, loo rolls and empty washing up bottles. But unfortunately these skills do not help me in my current marketing career. Much to my dismay when I started working in the sector I soon realised clients and prospective customers alike were not particularly impressed with my glitter glue and laminating skills!

When creating effective marketing materials you must remember the audience will not be quite as forgiving as your mum! If you follow a few simple rules your collateral will get people talking, and hopefully acting in the way you want them to.

When you are creating your material, you must remember you have a limited amount of time to capture someone's attention. The average amount of attention your flyer will be given is five seconds, unless you instantly engage with the reader. It has also been discovered, after some research with a natty bit of camera kit, that the human eye never looks at the top of a page first - it always jumps down two thirds so make sure your strongest message is there.

Any correspondence sent out from your company should be as professional looking as possible. I know this sounds like a given but unfortunately many people feel it is more important to send something out than it is to spend the time the literature deserves. A good piece of marketing material will follow your company's brand guidelines, style guide, include relevant images which reflect the business' activities and provide succinct important information. The literature should give enough information to make the prospective client want to request further information, provide user-friendly contact details, and a call to action. A call to action is an instruction for the reader, it should motivate them to call you, email, or go to your website for further information.

When deciding on the look and feel of your flyer you need to ensure it ties in with any other literature your company has to give a cohesive feel, and also make sure that there are no elements which distracts the reader away from the key message, such as a gaudy colour scheme or inappropriate picture. You need to remember who you are targeting - if you wish to speak to professional bodies your literature must have a corporate feel, and if you wish to speak to students, you need to make sure you don't come across too stuffy!

I must go now as I am at a crucial stage in the building of my Tardis Birdbox, the PVA glue seems to have just dried, but hopefully that should have been some help.

Rebecca

Rebecca Stockdale Incisive Marketing 08448 733 651