Tips for Better Catalogs

I’ve picked up catalogs before where it seemed like the company who made it didn’t really care about marketing with it. This is a list of products and little else. The words they used in the product descriptions and the way they formatted the catalog suggests they had no interest in trying to sell anything.

This is something I have trouble understanding. The mere fact that a company would take all that time to design and implement a catalog, pay for the mass commercial printing, and yet send a finished product that fails to capitalize on a prime opportunity for marketing.

Every catalog needs to have the descriptions of the products written in such a way as to encourage people to buy. This isn’t just about describing what the product is, something a lot of companies seem to like to focus on. I need to feel some excitement in the product description. I need to be told that this is a great product, and guess what else, I should buy it now.

Tell people to act now. Say put in an order today, or give us a call as soon as possible. If the catalog has no sense of urgency than neither will I, and that means I might just forget all about the product before ever acting on it. But if the writing sounds important, sounds like you need to act now, people will understand and act quickly.

Next comes the layout. I’ve seen too many catalogs with nothing but a grid of boxes with products stuffed inside of them. It’s boring and does nothing to get my interest in anything being advertised. I often think that the companies have decided that they’re going to already be spending money on the commercial printing so they won’t spend as much on the design.

Put the best selling items first and give them some room to work. Fill up half a page with an item if you need to. If you know a product is popular than don’t try to reduce it down on the page to the same size as everything else. This is going to be one of the reasons why people will be looking through your catalog, so don’t hide away the popular items.

The same goes for the order information. So many times I see the contact information buried somewhere no one could possibly find, and all it does is lead to smaller sales. If I need to spend ten minutes searching through the catalog to figure out how to order something, I’m much more likely to just put the catalog down and stop wasting my time.

The catalog is meant to market your material. If you aren’t using it for that than you aren’t recognizing the full potential that the catalog has. Start turning your catalogs into a marketing engine and you’ll see those sales go up.

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of the developments in commercial printing industry and its benefits for small to medium-scale businesses.

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