Watch This Episode of Mwah Tv about my new creative photography service
In this episode of Mwah TV, I’m sharing one of the most effective tools in delivering my creative photography service. That is my BROCHURE! I just got a new one made up and thought I’d give you a sneak peek inside too.
Using a branded touchpoint like a brochure in your marketing not only makes for a great lead magnet to get more people onto your mailing list, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity to showcase more of your branding in a deeply personal way. Are you ready?
Why Bother with a Brochure?
If you have always wondered what the point is in investing time money and energy into creating a really good quality brochure then by the end of this episode I hope to give you some fresh ideas on adopting this quite traditional resource in your product or service-based business.
What's New in this edition?
I’m so excited to share this new brochure with you. I’ve played around with the frequency of how much I update this from annual to quarterly to twice yearly. The first big change is this. Frequency.
Hitting the Pause Button
Last year I decided to hit pause on updating my prices. My brand photography services were indefinitely on hold as a result of COVID so this was a great time to develop my business and create some remote services. As you know if you are a regular watcher of the show, I ran with this and evolved my brand photography business into more of a boutique creative agency model. I now also have Brand Strategy Services and Creative Direction Services.
BTS Activity
With this significant change and all the behind-the-scenes work this triggered I decided to go easier on myself and dial back the frequency of this brochure to have this new brochure be valid for the next 2 years. These prices will stay the same and I’m interested to see how this affects demand and bookings.
This leads me on nicely to the addition of new services beyond brand photography. This time in the brochure we introduced these services: Creative Direction and Brand Strategy like this. This is designed as an e-brochure so you can see that links to these corresponding areas on my website have been embedded for ease of use.
An Effective Touch-Point
Having a brochure can be an effective touchpoint in any business.
The term touchpoint just means an opportunity where any stakeholder in your business can experience the feel of your branding.
Traditionally we associate this touchpoint with a product-based business. The car industry takes creating their brochures very seriously – they can be like works of art. When it comes to service-based businesses, adopting the way we learn about physical products to how someone interprets your services often brings an enormous amount of clarity about what you really deliver. It's learning but learning that is grounded in a window-shopping experience.
Subliminal Window Shopping Mindset
This reminds me of being a little kid and flicking through the Argos catalogue when writing my Christmas list to Santa Claus. Returning any lead into your business into this open way of digesting your brand is incredibly powerful.
Brochure Evolution
My most successful lead magnet to date has been sharing my prices and service breakdown. At first, I was utterly terrified that the only people who would take this freebie and sign up to my email list would be other photographers and creative professionals. This does happen, but of the 8% of people who fit this bill, the rest are all great leads into my business.
I’ve been running with this touchpoint for the last 9 years in my business. In that time of course my prices and services have evolved. Every time I’ve changed things, I’ve simply updated the brochure.
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100% Price Transparency
I also share my prices all across my website. You would think that this would make downloading my brochure redundant. In fact, it has increased downloads. People cannot be bothered to copy details of everything down by hand or in a whole new document. The brochure gives them everything they need for a lot less effort.
What A Brochure Does For Your Business & Brand
A brochure is a whole new way to articulate your brand.
It might be that going through the process of creating your first brochure will give you an immediate perspective on where the gaps are in your branding. This could be the first time you need to think about textures or design elements in addition to the components you already have.
A quality designer will not only create these elements for you to go into the brochure they create, but they will also supply you with a version of these elements that you can add to your website and social media designs. This will have the effect of bringing your brand together into a clearer more consistent articulation.
All the Inspo behind this edition of the Brochure
As well as car brochures being an inspiration behind how I use my brochure as a branding touchpoint, I take inspiration from:
- Fashion Magazines,
- Photography Coffee Table Books and
- Going to exhibitions.
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The September Issue - Vogue Documentary
If you haven’t seen The September Issue – this is a great place to start. This is a documentary from back in 2009. Looking behind the scenes at the work that went into the 2007 edition of The Vogue September Issue. If you didn’t know, the September issue in the magazine world is more important than others in the year because it marks the time when we all return to the normal routine after the summer holiday season.
In fashion, this is when we make big changes to our wardrobe for the rest of the year. This issue commands higher prices from advertisers and has more pages. I love the level of detail you pick up from this documentary. The debates and politics behind the flow of the pages that goes on really inspired the level of seriousness I took in this latest brochure re-design.
Exhibition Experiences
Thinking about heavy concepts leads me to source my experience in galleries at exhibitions over the years or kicking back and immersing myself in a photography coffee table book. The user experience that you feel because of seeing one lone word in a gorgeous font to set the tone of the imagery or art you are about to experience feels very powerful to me.
I love the differences in scale here too. It really excites the rebel in me. Standing outside an exhibition with one big word on the wall then walking really close to read the little cards describing each piece of art. That dance of zooming in and out feels fun to me. That feeling of fun with scale interlocks with the mood of my brand experience. So we really decided to play with that in this edition of the brochure.
De-Briefing Documentation
As well as explaining these lose inspirations to my designer Mel, I summed them up in this de-briefing document along with the materials she would need to create the brochure. I talked more about how to correctly de-brief a creative in the last episode, you can head back to see that next.
Correctly De-Briefing External Creatives Episode Replay
Creative Photography Service Get Your Copy of The Brochure Now
You can download your own copy of this new brochure here:
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You just need to type in your email address and I’ll send you a copy straight away.
When you open up this document on your desktop you will see that this has been made into a fully interactive experience. You can skip ahead to pages like this. Or click on prompts like this which will take you back to the right place on my website. Now I’d like you to meet Mel the amazing designer behind this edition of the brochure.
Meet Mel!
MEL - Hi, I’m Mel. Also known as the woman behind Oh! Agency which is based in Huddersfield in the North West of the UK.
Laura came to me with a little bit of bruising and baggage from previous graphic designers that had delivered a shoddy service. It was really important for me to understand exactly what had happened here so that I could adapt how we worked together to get Laura to trust me.
Creatives Love In
If you haven’t figured it out yet, Laura is pretty damn creative. For me as a fellow creative, putting two creatives together can either be immensely fun, or it ends up being a total disaster where nothing gets done! What put my mind at rest about this was the level of detail Laura had ready to go for me from the outset. Not only had she written out all the words and gathered all the pictures to go into this brochure but she gave me a mood board about how she wanted her brand colour palette to progress. Then she gave me a really detailed de-briefing document that explained exactly how this brochure was going to fit with the rest of her marketing.
Quality Feedback
Laura came back to me with her feelings and first reaction to each draft of the brochure in a loom video. So she recorded her voice going through the draft. This was MAJOR! I now want to get all of my clients to feedback to me in this way. A basic list of changes is good, but seeing how her eyes moved on the page and listening to her tone of voice in these videos gave me oh so much more information about what I could do to make the next draft of the brochure even better.
Plus it’s there to go back to if I needed to go back and double-check what she said.
Thanks for having me here on the show Laura – if you would like to connect with me, come to say hi over on Instagram.
Thanks for that Mel! It was so much fun working with you too.
I’ll see you next time! MWAH!
Timestamps for this Episode of #MwahTV
00:00 - Episode Begins
00:53 - Bloopers
02:00 - How frequency plays a role here
02:50 - When it's ok to give yourself a break
03:44 - Creative Direction & Brand Strategy pages
04:05 - Making an online brochure Interactive
04:37 - Effective Touchpoints
04:40 - The brochure as an experience
06:48 - A look at all my brochures over the years
07:40 - Making this work with your website
08:30 - How a brochure helps build your brand
09:33 - Geeking out over inspo
12:40 - How I explained this inspo to my designer
13:07 - How to get the brochure
13:27 - Meet Mel my designer
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