Booklets are very useful in promoting any kind of business, giving you the opportunity to introduce your products or services to potential customers in a detailed, clear and attractive way. In the same time, these informative materials represent the image of your business and, because of this, it’s important to use the proper content, a good quality printing service and an interesting design when you decide to create a booklet.
Establish the purpose of the booklet
The first step in creating the best printed booklet for your business is to decide how do you want to use it and what’s the message you want to send to your audience. All the other decisions are based on this and identifying the purpose of your booklet can help you channel all the available resources in the same direction. To make it easier, ask yourself some questions and decide the features of your booklet according to the answers:
- Do you want to include storytelling in your booklet?
- Are you marketing a product or a service?
- Who is your targeted audience – business partners, clients, a certain group of people?
- Is this a supportive material for your sales department or are you planning to use it just as an informative material?
- Will the booklet end up in the hands of existing or potential partners and customers?
- Will you hand other informative materials – flyers, leaflets, brochures – together with the booklet?
- Are you planning to keep the booklet for customers visiting your office or do you want to use it in exhibits and trade shows?
Once these details are clear, you can move to the next step and create the proper content and design that will help you reaching your goal.
The content of the booklet
The ideal content of a booklet is on point, simple, but not boring. It might be a good idea to ask a specialist to create the content. A freelance copywriter or content writer, an agency – the choice is yours and it mainly depends on the budget.
Make sure the content is catchy, informative and easy to read. Divide it in short paragraphs and use subtitles – nobody likes a huge text block. Use clear fonts and combine the text with different colours and graphics or pictograms to make it more interactive, but remember that less is more. Don’t overload the pages, because you will risk confusing the reader. You must focus the attention on the main point, so dosing the elements in the proper way is something important.
Image resolution and colours
Your booklet should look professional and for this to happen you must use high resolution pictures. If the images don’t have the proper quality, it will appear blurred or pixeled when printed, thus the booklet will look bad. Most of the times, the pictures you are seeing on your computer have a 72 dpi (dots per inch) resolution, enough for your laptop’s screen, but not enough for a printer, where the pictures should have a resolution of 300-400 dpi.
It goes without saying that your booklet should be coloured and not black-and-white, unless you choose the greyscale design to make a point – for vintage images or for an old school design. But this matter is not only about which colour palette you will use. It goes beyond the taste issue, getting a little bit technical: you have to know the difference between RGB and CMYK colour models. RGB (red, green and blue) is used for displaying images on electronic devices, while CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) is used in printing. In order to have control over the accuracy of the utilized colours, it is recommended to use a software like InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop or similar, that allows designing in a CMYK colour space.
Paper type and weight
You should choose the paper for printing according to the design of the booklet. Silk, uncoated, natural, gloss or recycled – these are all different types of paper in terms of looks, feel and quality. It goes the same for the cover, where you can choose from different types of finishings: matt, gloss or soft touch lamination, matt, gloss or spot UV and so on. Choose carefully, considering the purpose of the booklet and the targeted audience. A bad quality paper and finishing will look and feel cheap and all the efforts made for a flawless design and content will not matter anymore.
The paper weight is also something to be considered. For the inside pages, the weight can usually range between 90 gsm and 250 gsm, but if you’re not on a budget and you’re aiming for a durable product it is recommended to go higher than the minimum. As for the covers, the available options usually start from 170 gsm, but a high-quality booklet will have a cover paper with a weight of 300-350 gsm.
If you focus on quality when designing and printing your booklets, the chances to impress a potential customer and to determine him to work with you are higher. More customers or business partners means a higher revenue, and this should be enough reason for you to be interested in making the best booklet for your business!
