How to Make Your Advertising Postcards Stand Out

Businesses and individuals spend a lot of money on advertising their goods and services. One of the proven promotional printcollateral has always been the good old postcards. They want their content to stand out and to be compelling enough that it encourages prospect customers to keep their cards and pay attention to the products, or services offered. That’s the goal of any advertising campaign, but how can you accomplish that?

Below are a few suggestions for people who want their postcards or other advertising material stand out and do the job it was intended to do:

Make the content scannable: People who receive a printed advertisement don’t read the full content initially. They just simply glance at the content and if there is something that grabs their attention, they continue on. This is why creating scannable content is essential in getting people to take notice of your postcard. How do you make your content scannable?

• Use bullet points for your services and products
• Use bold and italics to highlight the buzzwords they’re familiar with
• Use both large fonts to emphasize, and smaller fonts to describe the topics
• Write short, precise sentences about your company, product, or service
• Use pictures and descriptions
• Definitely use Call-to-Action in your postcards

Put your call-to-action to work for you: If people are just scanning your content, then sticking a call-to-action at a place they can immediately see is imperative. Make sure a call-to-action is in your prospect customer’s benefit and surely distinguishes you from other competitors. After all, your call-to-action is the thing that’s going to get your prospect customers do what you want them to do. If there is an expiration date for your call-to-action, make sure it is emphasized as well.

Make it readable: Many use content to attempt to ‘impress’ their audience with big words, industry jargon and other incomprehension technical words. Lose all that. Instead, write your content as if you’re talking to the customer standing right in front of you. How would you explain what your business does for them? Find those words and put them on your promotional material. Use the words they would be most likely familiar with.

Make it available and easy to get to: Talking about your company, product or service is easy, but make sure that it’s clear to the prospect customers how easy it is to acquire your product or service. Provide all contact information and instructions on how easily they can become your customer. People don’t like to waste time and look for things, just make it available to them in an easiest possible way. It makes a big impact.

Don’t overcrowd: Although you might have some empty spaces, do not provide a lot of content and overcrowd the postcard. You’re far better off creating precise, easy to read content that will capture a customer’s attention. After all, the goal isn’t to inform them of all your services or products, but just the one that they might be interested in and encourage them to take the first initiative, which is your predefined call-to-action. An overcrowded postcard will surely get tossed before it is seriously considered.

Make it visually appealing: Last, but not least, if your postcard isn’t appealing to the eye, customers aren’t going to glance at it, let alone keeping it. It’s best to have a graphic designer design the background and choose a color scheme which will work for you. You are not advertising the design and it should not take anything away from your message, but it should complement it and make people interested to spend their time looking at it. Use images relevant to your message to draw people’s attention, and also add a little description under each image as it relays to your offerings. People notice the image and even more, they like to read the description and see what you have to say about it. When someone looks at your postcard, they should feel confident about you, your company, products or services you offer, that is why it is imperative to invest in quality postcards and not the flimsy ones. After all, that little piece of paper is the only means that represents you and your company to a prospect customer.

Stefan Astaneh is a graphic designer in southern California with years of experience in printing industry. His formal education and training in graphic design mated with his vast working knowledge of printing technology gives him an excellent foundation on the main aspects of advertising in print media.