What can you do to evaluate your brochures' success properly
Their biggest problem usually is that they do not really know how to evaluate. However, a few tricks can be used to determine if your brochures indeed have some kind of beneficial effect in business. Let me teach you a few of these tricks in brochure printing evaluation.
Below is a list of five of the common techniques that most experts use to evaluate. See if you can do them yourself.
1. Initial pre-distribution testing – One of the best tricks in evaluating the success is an initial pre-distribution test. This means that before you actually deploy, give them first to several focus groups to get a sense of how they are received. This helps you gauge quite well how typical audiences will react. Just make sure that you get a good sample of different demographics in your focus groups to make sure that the whole spectrum of the market is represented in your study.
The best thing about this kind of evaluation is that you can still try to alter your designs even if you discover that your particular custom layout sucks. This makes this evaluation trick one of the most common practices experts do in their evaluative process.
2. Marketing time isolation testing – Now, a more complex evaluative process for color brochures is isolation testing. This basically means that you isolate the effect of brochure promotions in a certain time period by simply using only color brochures for a set number of days. This trick is quite effective for small business owners with a local market reach.
Therefore, as an example, a local gift shop may cancel all its other promotions such as flyers and posters for a month or so, while brochures are the only ones given out. That set time of isolating the effect should give some idea of how much they bring in to the business. Take note though that there are still a lot of factors that determine the arrival of customers, but using this trick in smaller local settings can give you some good figures on the performance.
3. Customer marketing surveys – One evaluative trick that is simpler to do are customer marketing surveys. In this method, you simply need to give a survey to every customer willing to answer it. In that survey, besides presenting the typical market research questions, you also of course should include a question about where they heard about your business first. You include your marketing materials as an option to see if they are the primary medium by which people hear about you.
The more sample points you get, the more accurate your results should be. The good thing about this evaluative method is that you get to see how they also compare with other promotional mediums that you are using. That is why a lot of experts also use this to evaluate.
4. Coupon/Raffle Stub Tracking – Another good trick to track the performance of custom brochures is to add in a coupon or a raffle stub. By having something in there that readers have to give back to you, you can easily track the number of people who read them by simply counting the returns of those coupons and stubs. Of course, this has the added benefit of getting more people to go to your business because of your coupons and stubs. If you do have time to do a raffle or create coupons, try this out as an evaluative tool.
5. Observation at distribution points – Finally, you can just simply place an observer at the distribution points. By having a person stay with your racks for a few days, they can try to observe how different people react. Sometimes, they might actually discover why certain people a veering away while others are attracted. This is a more direct method, but if you have some time, or you have a person that can do the job, then you can try this trick out.
Do these things to evaluate your custom brochures. You do not have to do this all, but a combination of these studies should give you some idea of performance.
