How to Organize Your Content
charen smith
When someone picks up a catalog or booklet made by your company, you arent going to be there to explain anything to them. Theyll need to be able to understand exactly what youre trying to say, and be enticed enough to buy your products, based purely off of what you have written.
Think of what its like to send a company your resume and cover letter. Theyll be judging you entirely on those two forms of writing. How much did you worry about the quality of them the first time you sent them out? Well, this is what you should be thinking about your catalogs and booklets.
But a lot of companies dont think this way when they use catalog printing. All they care about is getting as many products into it as possible with little interest for the actual text. The same is true for booklet printing where the company seems to be writing more for themselves than for the general public.
You need to remember that your goal will always be to satisfy the customer as much as you can, and to do that you need to understand exactly how theyre going to be looking at your work.
When people pick up anything from a company, they arent likely to read through from the first page to the last. Theyll flip through looking for things that catch their interest. Because of this you need to understand which things to emphasize.
With color catalog printing make sure to have certain pictures larger than others in order to better grab a persons attention. Give them detailed, concise paragraphs describing what each product is. The picture may be what initially gets them looking, but you need to have good follow through with your text if you want them to have any interesting in making a purchase.
For booklet printing you want to use a similar style except with different key points emphasized. A company booklet is more likely to attempt to follow a standard from beginning to end mentality that just wont do. When a person is randomly flipping through you want them to be able to easily follow what youre trying to say.
Make sure that each key point youre making is able to be read on its own, yet still apply to the message as a whole. A person should be able to stop on any given page and understand what that page is saying without having to read anything else in your booklet.
The more you write catalogs or booklets for yourself rather than the general public the less effective theyre going to be. Dont assume that a person plans to read through every page youve written and dont assume that all they want is a catalog filled with description-less products.
If they walk away with any questions, you arent there to answer them, so you have to make sure that every question will be answered by the time theyre done reading. It isnt always easy, but the stronger your writing and organization is, the better informed your customers will be.
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