Are Brochures Best for a Service-Based Business?

When a customer or prospect calls your customer service department to get some information, is your first gut instinct to say “Thanks for the call. Let me send you our brochure for more information.”?

But is a brochure really the best answer for a service-based business? Not always and here’s why.

When a prospect contacts you, this is a great chance to show your knowledge and understanding of your industry and your services. By speaking with the customer directly, you can help your customer make a more informed decision about your services. With service-based businesses, developing trust with your customers is crucial to the success of your business. Customers must feel as though you know what you’re talking about. Customers don’t want to get service from a Joe-Schmoe who doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about.

Brochures are often about the “why” and “what” of a product or service. A brochure does not invoke trust.

Brochures are also too hard to fill with targeted info. If people just want prices and not detailed product descriptions, is pretty hard to fill an entire brochure with just prices.

What can you use instead of brochures?

Marketing a service-based business requires more thought than a product-based business. You don’t have a product to show, but you can show before-and-after results of your service, and you could give out handy info that customers are most likely looking for. Also, by giving customers info they’re looking for, you become a trusted expert, which helps bump that trust level up more.

So instead of a brochure, or in conjunction with a brochure, give your customers:

• A fact sheet: a 1-page sheet on why a certain problem occurs and how you can fix it.
• An informational sheet: a 1- or 2-page sheet that gives facts about your company, including success stories, history, testimonials and maybe even case studies. Only include info that the customer will want, not facts that will simply toot your own horn.
• A checklist: a list of all of your services, broken out into categories of when which service is needed to help customers determine which services they really need now.
• A folder or postcard with important info related to your business jotted on it. (An accountant could put tax rates or important tax dates on a postcard for customers to keep handy.)

All of these alternatives to brochures are less expensive than printing brochures and you can customize all of these for each customer easily. By creating a fact sheet for each type of problem you can help with, you send out only those fact sheets that people need.

By using these informative alternatives to brochures, you’ll be trusted by your customers and seen as an expert. Brochures have their place, but in service-oriented businesses, brochures can’t be your only marketing piece. When someone needs more info on a specific problem, you can impress that prospect by sending her just the specific information she was looking for.

Comments

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Brochures in combination with other print materials like business cards, postcards, posters, etc are best