Brochures are great collateral for a building material manufacturer. They provide a visual promise of your products. They can be powerful reminders for getting customers over the hump and ready to invest in your solutions.
In Statista’s survey of small-to-medium-sized business owners, 79% of respondents said they use brochures as part of their marketing. While smaller businesses will need brochures that speak to local customers, large building materials brands can take advantage too.
It pays to take cues from the best brochures out there, and build on those ideas to make sure yours stands out.
Use them as inspiration for your own powerful, sales-boosting brochure messaging and design. Here are 9 premium, effective building materials brochures, along with our breakdown of why they work so well:
1. Sto Corp.
Sto Corp., the manufacturer of commercial wall systems and insulation, has a brochure with a strong visual appeal. The way it’s laid out powerfully influences customers to buy.
The brochure opens up to a clear visual of how the company’s wall panels are constructed, complete with descriptions of all the different layers. The image points out why these layers are important and useful.
Laying out a visual of the product’s composition in this way helps customers understand all the benefits, and allows them to visualize getting those benefits once the product is installed.
According to stats gathered by Digital Information World, 65% of consumers are visual learners, and infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than all-text content. Visual product breakdowns succeed because they’re more graspable than plain-text descriptions, and they’ll command the attention of a large portion of your audience.
2. Metrie
Metrie, the maker of interior doors and finishings, has a remarkable brochure design that helps customers appreciate their multifaceted product offerings.
This page of Metrie’s brochure features a “table of contents” at the bottom, pointing out everywhere their products are located within a home.
This is a great approach for building product manufacturers who have entire suites of products that work together or are featured in the same space. It gives consumers a chance to see how your product lines complement each other and contribute harmoniously to a finished project, while explaining features and benefits that might not be obvious at first glance.
3. Arktura
Arktura is a manufacturer of bespoke architectural systems for corporate and commercial applications. Their brochure shows off custom-tailored designs that will appeal to niche audiences.
Each page of Arktura’s brochure has large-format images and closeups of the intricate artistry that goes into their interior designs, as well as written detail about the particular client being featured.
The strong visual appeal of this kind of brochure, coupled with photos that reveal detail and quality, can be a great starting point for prospective commercial clients looking for a turnkey solution. By showing what’s possible, you can entice that type of prospect to reach out and learn more.
4. Brava Roof Tile
The Brava Roof Tile brand has many product offerings, and their brochure points out this strength.
Brava’s brochure leaves little guesswork on the customer’s part. It showcases all the colors and styles of their roofing shingles in a grid format.
By doing it this way, Brava makes it easy for customers to hone in on a style and color that’s closest to what they already had in mind, and most compatible with their home decor.
Revealing the choices customers have is another simple, yet powerful strategy a brochure lends itself to. Try showing customers most of the options available to them, and entice them to reach out for even more info.
5. TRUEGRID
Permeable paver manufacturer TRUEGRID addresses a key buyer concern beyond just the product itself: sustainability.
With a chart of the solids, chemical elements, and other pollutants that are removed by TRUEGRID pavers versus other solutions, TRUEGRID positions themselves as the #1 choice for contractors and end consumers who care about eco-friendly pavers. The information is easy to digest, and the comparisons leave little doubt in a prospect’s mind.
The emphasis on superior sustainability will be a deciding factor for many. The Havas Group’s 2021 Meaningful Brands survey reveals that 53% of consumers will pay more for brands that stand for important environmental and social issues, and 64% prefer to buy from companies with a reputation for putting purpose over profit.
Meet your customers where they are in terms of closely-held values, support your claims with numbers and facts, and your brochure will be much more successful at making sales.
6. Warmup
Today’s consumers want as much information as they can get upfront about what a more complex project will cost. Warmup, the prominent heated flooring brand, has a brochure that meets this need very well.
Warmup’s brochure presents a breakdown of the cost, along with square footage and key temperature and energy specs, for various types of projects. This helps customers decide at a glance whether a big purchase will align with their budget, and immediately gives them a ballpark figure they can work with when communicating with the brand and local installers.
According to stats quoted by Forbes, more than 90% of consumers say that transparency by a brand is important to their decision to buy. The kind of price transparency Warmup provides is deeply appreciated by customers with bigger projects to complete, limited decision-making time, and a desire to get the best value possible out of the deal.
Try providing estimates for larger projects in your brochure — it’s likely to lead to more inquiries and sales from cost-conscious buyers.
7. Alsco Metals
Alsco Metals, the manufacturer of aluminum building products, has a brochure that employs a number of simple, yet effective design principles to convey key information to readers.
As you flip through the brochure, you’ll find pages that are easy to read, yet packed with helpful information on Alsco’s products.
For example, the page that explains trim coil gives a brief written definition, along with helpful pictures. The right side explains the three options for trim coil that might appeal to customers — along with small icons and concise descriptions that hone in on the benefits.
This infographic-style layout is both easy on the eyes, and helps your audience grasp key points about a product line within seconds. Balance a clean design with brief, hard-hitting descriptions of what your products accomplish for a brochure that both engages readers and drives sales.
8. GAF Roofing
GAF Roofing, the leading maker of roofing materials, achieves something interesting by encouraging the consumer to go online and learn more.
GAF’s brochure has calls to action (CTAs) directing consumers to visit the website to learn more about their products. However, the website addresses (URLs) are what’s special: they are small, consistent, and unintimidating. They also make sense.
These factors are actually a big deal in terms of both conversion optimization and user experience.
In the digital form of the brochure, well-defined and sensible URLs are more inviting for consumers to click on than long strings of nonsense words, numbers, and symbols. For the print brochure, it’s easy for a consumer to read and type these web addresses into their web browsers by hand.
Either way, this way of presenting calls to action and URLs is very likely leading to higher conversions.
Making the experience of visiting your site and engaging with your brand feel better — while making the process quicker and more convenient — is always a win-win, and a key principle that your brochure should follow.
9. Indow Windows
Indow Windows, the manufacturer of window inserts, has a brochure that wins on style points due to one often-overlooked element: typography.
It might not seem very important, but design elements like font and text size really do grab customers’ attention. Not only do they help your brochure stand out from the tons of other marketing collateral your prospects have to deal with — they help direct the eye to key product benefits, differentiators, and calls to action.
Indow accomplishes all three with the bold benefit-driven headline “Enjoy Quiet and Savings,” a list of key benefits starting with a bold word or phrase in all caps, and a call to action to visit the website in an attractive cursive typeface. The words in the CTA are in a bright green with an underlined URL, no less!
Think about ways to draw attention to key parts of your brochure’s messaging through typography. Don’t be afraid to experiment with gripping visual elements to bring attention to your most impactful points.
Learn From the Best Building Materials Manufacturer Brochures to Create Your Own Winning Example
Your brochure can be a significant part of your marketing strategy. That said, it often takes a few tweaks or unusual ideas to truly bring them to life — and boost response and sales.
Take some of the elements from the above as inspiration for promoting your own products and services through this time-tested medium.
Don’t forget, however, that you’ll need to distribute brochures en masse and track their sales performance for this tactic to truly work for your business.
That’s where the right software can be immensely helpful…and a good reason to look into a top solution like the leading marketing asset management (MAM) platform RevBase.
RevBase is your solution for organizing, distributing, and tracking assets like brochures, enabling them to get into the hands of local dealers, contractors, and even end consumers faster. It creates an easy way for users to either download them from your website, or put them in a queue for print-on-demand services.
RevBase is also a great way to share secure access to brochures and other key collateral with sales reps, which enables them to have more productive conversations with leads and share helpful resources that convert leads to customers at a higher clip.
An excellent brochure, in conjunction with top tech tools like RevBase, can be a winner for your building materials brand. Learn how to make a highly effective marketing brochure today with the help of this extensive guide.