Spruce Up Your Marketing Materials

No matter what your marketing materials entail, from a boring listing of a house for sale to a brochure for an exciting new product, there’s always a way to make your marketing materials look more glamorous. Check out this great example from the national real estate magazine blog: http://agentgenius.com/?p=4448. Lani Anglin-Rosales spruced up a boring MLS listing to something with much more pizzazz.

I’m going to use the makeover of that house’s flyer as a jumping off point for this post of how to spruce up marketing materials.

First, get great photos. The house’s first flyer had a boring picture of the front of the house. Yawn. No other photos were offered so you couldn’t see the inside of the house. The inside is just as important as the outside. The photos Lani chose for the makeover flyer are so much better (professionally taken) and show the inside of the house.

So, no matter what your marketing materials are selling, be sure you include great, crisp, non-blurry photos of every angle of your product that is important. A dishwasher, for instance, needs to have its inside and outside shown. Not only do I want to see the inside, I want to see the inside with the racks pulled open. The outside might seem boring to some, but I’d like to see what the buttons or levers look like. Take your audience’s preferences into consideration – will your audience want to see the aesthetics?

Add some cool design elements. This could be anything from a modern-looking font to recurring shapes like circles or squares in the corners of the marketing piece. You’ll also want to add your logo, and whether the logo is a main element is up to you. If you have a funky, modern logo that goes with the design theme for a certain marketing piece, use it as much as possible. If your logo is a classic style that goes with a classic design with more traditional fonts and photos, use it. Just make sure you don’t overuse your logo with designs that don’t match the design or feel of the logo.

Use Photoshop effects. Photoshop has lots of great graphics effects like blurring, fading and diffusing that can give old photos a new look. Photoshop also has some good bordering effects that can give your marketing photos a whole new look.

Use colors that pop. You should ideally only use two or three main colors, so make one of those colors pop. Using gray, black and red can produce some eye-catching and interesting designs with the pop of the red against the darker background colors. Just be sure to use complementary colors, not contrasting colors that will have people squinting and looking away.