Tips on brochure writing

Have just been helping a new client with their brochure copy. They had already written the text, but recognised that it wasn't quite there. Two things stood out to me as needing attention:
- it was very wordy
- it was about the client, not about their customers

It's very easy to write too much. If you've ever had to write an essay of at least x number of words, you know how easy it is to pad your story with repetition and deviation. When you're writing to sell, you need to go the other way. Pare your words down to the minimum and keep your sentences short. It's the fastest way to get your message across.

It's equally common to start a brochure from the wrong point of view. You're writing about what you do, so you start with a description of your business and what you offer. But if you want to attract custom, you need to turn that on your head, and write from the buyer's perspective. What do they need or want, and how do you meet that need? Then you can start talking about the unique aspects of your proposition that make you a better supplier than anyone else. Anything about corporate vision, company mission, organisational strategy - save it for your web site.

Putting together a creative brief

If you've decided to manage your own content creation projects, chances are you'll be bringing together skilled partners such as copywriters, web designers and SEO firms.

You'll need to brief all these suppliers on what your project is about, and a great place to start is with a creative brief. This is a document that tells your suppliers essentially what they need to know to get started on your project. It helps to ensure that everyone is working to the same guidelines. And because you have to create the document in the first place, it helps to clarify within your business exactly what you want to achieve.

Here are the basic questions that you should ask yourselves and document into a creative brief for the copywriting agency, designers and other suppliers that you are going to employ.

• Why are we doing this? What are we trying to sell and why now?
• Who is our target audience?
• What is the goal of the project?
  
• What is the key message we want to get across?
• Why should the target audience believe this? (Supporting evidence/messages)
• What tone of voice should we adopt?
• Which media and channels are we going to use?
• What do we want our audience to do as a result of seeing this?
• Any corporate branding/style issues?
• Deadline?