A Quality MSP Brochure Has These 4 Things

We hope brochures are a part of your MSP marketing strategy - they are one of the best, most versatile pieces of marketing collateral that you could have...if they are designed and utilized correctly.

Let’s say you currently have a collection of brochures, or are currently looking to start writing and designing some. You might be asking:

• What should my brochures look like?
• What information are my prospects going to be looking for?
• What is going to get my IT Company the greatest return on our investment?

The best way for us to answer these questions for you is to tell you the four things that every quality MSP brochure has.

1. A Print AND Digital Presence

When you think of brochures, you may think of those brochure display racks that you come across in the lobbies of hotels and other businesses that contain multiple printed brochures of various things to do surrounding the area you are currently located. Your brochures can take a form similar to what you typically see here - a printed tri-fold with text and images on the front and back of a single sheet of paper in landscape form. But, they don’t have to.

We actually suggest not having all of your brochures designed in this way.

Sure, brochures designed this way are great to hand out in person when you’re at a live event or to send in the mail. But on a computer, they’re a bit harder to read, which brings us to the point we are trying to make in this section: your brochures need to be in digital form too.

On each of your services pages, you should have a brochure to accompany the particular service that is available for download. These brochures should be in a digital-friendly format:

• Convert each of your brochures into a PDF. This is a standard format that makes the content uneditable by the person who downloads it, and PDFs can be accessed on most - if not all - devices.
• Feel free to stick with a general three column format if you desire, but we suggest designing these brochures in portrait instead of landscape so they’re more readable if a person is viewing it from a mobile device.
• Don’t design them as if the person is going to be printing them out and folding them - not everyone will. The content should read left-to-right, first-to-second page.
• Be conscious of your color use. If people decide to print out one of your brochures, you don’t want to drain all of their ink with a single brochure print!
  You want your text to be readable when printed out and when viewed digitally. Consider font style, size, and color.
• Design each service brochure to fit on one side of a 8.5 x 11 inch piece of paper. Some of your prospects may want to print out a brochure they are interested in, and may only have the capabilities of printing single sided on standard pieces of paper.

2. Proper Branding and Consistency

Brochures exist to help your company promote your service offerings. Like the rest of your marketing materials, they need to be branded to your company. This means that they should contain your logo, and the general color scheme should match your company colors. It helps to have a branding guide on hand for the person originally creating your brochures.

Going along with branding, your brochures should also be consistent in appearance. It’s best to have a handful of standard formats at most that you use for all of your brochures - maybe only one design for your tri-fold brochures and one design for your digital single-sided brochures. This consistency helps your company erase any confusion or misconceptions about your brand, and can strengthen your brand recognition and reputation.

We suggest creating a master template that can then be applied to most - if not all - of your brochures.

3. A Narrow Focus

Each brochure that you have should focus on covering a singular topic. If you try to include information about each and every one of your service offerings in a single brochure, you’re either going to have too much text or not be including enough information (or both!).

To make sure that you are narrowing your content and focus enough, consider doing the following:

• Use bulleted and/or numbered lists when applicable
• Use section headers and text boxes to split up your written content
• Add an image or two to split up content and/or fill in extra white space

If you are looking for a single piece of marketing collateral that you can distribute to businesses in your area that summarizes everything you do, go with booklets (like our IT Playbooks) instead of brochures.

4. The Right Information

Each of your brochures should contain the information that your prospects want to know about your company, as well as information specific to the brochure topic.

What information are your prospects going to be looking for?

• What is that service, if it’s not something commonly known (e.g., managed services)
• General information about why and how you offer that service
• How fit you are to provide that service
• The features of your service
• The benefits that your service will bring to their business
• Information about your company (address, phone number, website, and an email)

Make sure this information is included on every one of your brochures.

Do Your Brochures Meet This Criteria?

If they do, you’re probably in pretty good shape to market your company with your brochures, provided that the design that you chose and the content on them represents your company and the service offering in a positive way.

It’s also okay to admit that your brochures are a bit...lacking. You certainly wouldn’t be the first. Fortunately, this can be remedied.

Our MSP Brochure Kit can help get your brochures to where they should be. Based on the content from your Ultimate MSP Website, we give you 75+ brochures in digital format packed with the information your prospects want to know - all branded to your company. In addition, we set up downloadable versions on 20 service pages of your choice, provide you with a managed IT tri-fold brochure, and so much more!

Please reach out to us if you are interested in learning more.