by Anna Cruz

Created on: February 25, 2009

When you want people to consider your products or services but you don't want to be too pushy about it, a brochure is a great solution. People are more willing to take brochures and keep walking rather than stand around and hear a sales pitch. When time is important, people like to have the ability to take a brochure home and peruse it at their leisure.

You can design the best looking brochure in the world, but if you don't get it into people's hands a look at the following brochure distribution ideas for some inspiration.

1. Slip a brochure into a customer's shipped order. When you ship an order to someone, include a brochure along with your invoice or receipt. Include a brochure that highlights products similar to what was ordered, or include a general brochure if you want to try to get this customer interested in your other wares.

2. If you have a store where people browse, keep brochure stands at the ends of aisles and by the registers and exits. This way there's no pressure for people to pick up the brochures, but they know that they are available. This is also a way for you to get brochures into customers hands without doing much work yourself!

3. Mail out brochures in a direct mail campaign. Use your existing mailing list to mail out a brochure that highlights a new product or service. You can also use brochures to announce an upcoming event or sale. If you are planning on mailing out a sales letter, include a brochure in the envelope. A touch of color and a nice glossy photo-filled brochure will be more powerful than your sales letter alone.

4. Hand out brochures at a trade show, seminar or other industry event. Wherever you have a chance to do some word-of-mouth marketing, take a brochure. Staple a business card to your brochure and whenever someone asks for a business card, you can hand him a brochure as well.

5. Create a PDF version of your brochure on your Web site. To reach people all over the world, scan your brochure into a PDF document and allow people to download it on their computers. This option saves you postage from mailing your brochure and lets your Web site do double duty for you.

6. Ask a complementary business to display your brochures at its store. Of course, you would need to do the same for the other business. This is a great way to create a cross-marketing partnership that benefits both parties. A landscaping business and a florist would do well to tap into each other's customer base. There's no competition between the two, but the customer bases of each would be similar but not identical.

Brochure printing is definitely a flexible way to promote your business, as you can see from the suggestions here. Hopefully one of these distribution tactics has helped you think of other tactics that would work best for your business. It doesn't matter how you get your brochures to customers, as long as you get them out there! Try all avenues and repeat the ones that work and dump the ones that don't work. Advertising is partly trial and error, so don't be afraid to try new advertising methods you don't have much to lose. Even something that doesn't work will teach you a valuable lesson about what does and doesn't work for your business.

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