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From Karen Saunders

Your Branding, Marketing & Self-Publishing Coach

How to Design Attractive and Compelling Marketing Materials

Have you ever wondered how to make your flyer, poster, ad, or postcard convert more prospects into customers? Do you want to know the secrets to grabbing more attention with compelling marketing materials? It all comes down grabbing attention, creating the right perceptions and using the proper messaging.

Recently my design team created direct mail postcards and posters for a biannual Potters’ Guild Pottery Sale that drew in more attendees than ever before. The attractive design and powerful, precise message may have made the difference in the higher number of attendees.

Here’s how we did it.

Attractively Showcase the Products

We made sure the photos of the pottery were the best they could possibly be, in high resolution with clean, consistent backgrounds. We used Photoshop to match all the backgrounds with the same neutral gray. The soft shadows to maximized the 3-dimensional nature of the images. The four photos are the same scale and organized in a simple layout to stand out on their own merits.

Front of Postcard

Aurora Potters Postcard Design compelling marketing materials

Create Compelling Marketing Materials with Clean, Easy-To-Read Fonts

We chose a sans serif font for all the important information (date, time, place, address, phone, etc.), and used a script font for the word “Spring” to tie into the look and feel of the white tendrils. The list of artists was long and the size was small, so to make them more legible, we used a clean sans serif font.

Back of Postcard

Aurora Potters Postcard Design Back side

Use Appropriate Colors and Textures to Attract Attention

We chose a bright, fresh spring green texture for the background and added white vine-like tendrils to enhance, but not distract from the main focus of the piece, which are the photos of the four ceramic pieces.

 Poster/Flyer

Aurora Potters Poster Design Compelling Marketing Materials

Edit Information to Just the Essentials and Write in Your Prospect’s Perspective

Too often, marketing pieces are crowded with too many words. The result is no one bothers to read ANY of them. Keep your message short, sweet and simple. Frame your message in your prospect’s perspective. She/he is thinking, “What’s in this for me?” so write your message with benefits your prospect’s need and want.