You have solved a significant problem in the market with your innovative product that you have worked on for a long time and finally completed. I also know that there was a lot of sweat, tears, disappointment and even a few drops of blood in the stages before the product was put on the shelves.
One of the most difficult stages of the job is behind us and it is time to introduce this wonderful product to the world.
There are hundreds of different methods of product promotion that are known or waiting to be discovered, and perhaps the simplest, most effective and most widely used of these is to create a catalog for the product.
Today, catalogs can be prepared in many different formats; whether it is a printed product in a classic format, an interactive digital version or even an AR/VR version produced only with video content. Whichever method you use, creating a catalog is a low-cost but high-impact material compared to other marketing tools.
Product catalogs allow you to present the features of your products, explain the benefits and simply tell your customers what you have and simply gain the trust of your target audience.
You should know that the stages a catalog you hold in your hand goes through until it reaches its final form are a bit tedious and complicated.
Many different parameters, from the information that will be included in the document to the accuracy of this information, from the photographs to the data in the tables, are among the elements that need to be checked and checked carefully for accuracy before moving on to the design phase in order for a catalog to be prepared correctly.
3 things to consider before you start preparing your catalog.
1. Verify your product information.
2. Separate the product categories.
3. Prepare high-quality visuals.
What should be in your product catalog?
Table of contents
The table of contents is an important section that explains what goes into the catalog. You shape the content here based on the information you put in the rest of the catalog.
This can be in a layout that only shows your main categories and the pages they are placed in, or it can be more comprehensive, listing every product you put in the catalog.
My suggestion is to list a main category and a subcategory if there is one under it, and to keep the contents page no longer than two pages, depending on the density of the products.
Product categories
Let's say you are a company that produces thermoses in certain segments. You have a stainless water bottle that can be used for drinking water, an insulated thermos for drinking coffee, and a large-capacity and multi-purpose product for outdoor activities.
The category table you are expected to create is expected to be as follows;
- Stainless water bottles
- Coffee and tea thermoses
- Outdoor thermoses
Creating categories allows you to present products with similar features to those who want to examine them in the shortest possible way. It prevents clutter and allows you to conduct marketing activities for the entire product group rather than individually.
Product pages
After the necessary directions and categorization, the most comprehensive information about your products will be provided on your product pages.
Before placing data on the page, it would be appropriate to conduct a comprehensive study on the form and format of the content.
- Product pages usually include paragraph-style descriptions, technical tables, scales where we show product varieties if any, and, more commonly, color alternatives for the products.
- Making the data you have uniform is very important for a consistent design. When your customer examines your catalog, they will move more easily through the document if they see similarly formatted content on similarly organized pages for similar products.
- The page layout should be in line with the overall corporate identity, and the company logo, slogan, and web address should be placed more strikingly than the products themselves when first viewed within the pages.
If you do not sell products that are very large, very complicated, and require extensive information, limit your product introduction texts to a maximum of four sentences.
Technical tables are types of data that can be easily produced for each product you purchase. Some priorities should also be determined for the technical tables to be added to the product pages.
The simplest and most effective question you can ask when determining the priority of the data you will write in the tables is, what is the most important feature that distinguishes my product from its competitors?
When producing product descriptions, consider the period of time the catalog you have prepared will be in use. We usually have printed catalogs produced in large quantities and at long intervals. Therefore, a product in this format is not considered a very dynamic content. It must be admitted that some information on the catalog will become old, out of date, and the technical data provided for certain products will not be valid after a while.
Printed materials are permanent products and are a product that will remain in the hands of your customers even if you do not keep them. Therefore, avoid including a specific date, result, or information that may change in the future and is binding for your company in the descriptions you print in the catalogs. This includes date indicators and prices that specify a definite time. Instead, you can draw attention to the benefits of its reputation, its purpose of use, and what benefits the customer will gain when using this product.
Adding interaction to product pages
Our products may have features that vary depending on time, the region they are offered or many other variables, and we may even want to show our target audience many things that we cannot print on paper, such as videos, motion graphics and promotional films that we have prepared.
Interactive catalogs are a communication method preferred by many sectors recently, and if the products have advanced reading or technical data such as usage videos, assembly diagrams, connection circuits, and tables with frequently changing values, an interaction mechanism can be built using methods such as barcodes, QR codes or even NFT tags.
Social media companies use special-looking QR code designs that go directly to content, profiles or even audio recordings when read with smartphone cameras. Depending on the advanced content you want to present, you can add movement to your catalog view by using the QR code specific to the social media platform where you upload the content.
Why is consistency important in catalog design?
Everything from your brand logo to the products you offer is connected to your corporate identity and carries the elements that show your brand from the other side. Your product catalog is also included in this and this should not be ignored when preparing a document of this type.
Whether you work in-house or outsource, the person preparing the catalog should understand your corporate identity and be able to reflect the corporate language in the document.
Since catalog pages are documents with a limited amount of content written into them and have physical limitations by nature, they are products that should be meticulously planned in their layout, space management should be well planned and therefore should not look complicated.
Get away from clutter.
If the content of the pages is dense, you can base the main structure of the document on a Condenser font to optimize the content balance.
Colors are an important element to consider when preparing a catalog document. Apart from universal elements such as attracting attention, directing, and determining risky and safe areas, a simple guide on how to use corporate colors in the catalog can be found with a brief or by trial and error. There is no traditionally accepted method or written rules for this. Just try to be open in communication, it will work.
Consistency, which is recommended everywhere in brand communication, is also important in catalog design and determines the way and tone your brand communicates as an extension of your brand.
Storytelling and building connections using catalogs
Storytelling has become an important part of marketing activities that differentiate brands from their competitors and make them different in the sectors they operate in.
Stories are now for everyone; we can write stories for a small business that produces fourteen pairs of men's shoes every week in a small workshop, or for a clothing brand that supplies products to fourteen different countries in the world.
The best example of the reflection of story creation for a brand in a catalog is the section called the about us page, where the brand that owns the catalog says something about itself, its history, vision and mission.
Regardless of its size, pages where the brand talks about itself are an effective way to establish an emotional connection with the customer. If the person who founded the company is alive, a company story written from the mouth of the person who founded the company, or from the mouth of the current management, will allow people in the target audience to empathize with you.
Company stories are not emotional and romantic texts. In this section, you can talk about the purpose and motivation of your brand, the benefits your products provide and, most importantly, which problem they solve for which segment of society.
Why is it important to define product names clearly, distinctly and in line with the brand?
How you call a product is as important as the product itself, its function and the problem it solves. In today's business world, unless you are synthesizing a mineral that has never been named before and comes from another planet, the product you are producing has probably been named by someone else before. Similarly, different phoneticized expressions have been adopted by different brands and we may know some products by these names.
Let's look at the iPhone example. When we say iPhone 12, we understand a standard model; when we add mini, we mean a smaller model with optimized functions, when we say plus, we mean a model with an expanded screen, and when we say pro, we mean a phone with a camera and more functions.
We name our products to quickly introduce them to our customers, and these namings increase the memorability of the brand. When naming products, we should choose short, understandable and easy-to-pronounce words that focus on basic functions, features and even versions. When naming, attention should be paid to the brand's communication tone and the names of the products should be compatible with the brand.
Producing the right product photos, white space balance and making customers desire lifestyle products with lifestyle photos
The basic component that strengthens the impression your catalog will leave on your customers is the photos of your products.
When you start preparing the document, you can place the photos first or start preparing the written parts first. In both cases, you should go over the placement of the information on the pages more than once, edit their positions and even revise the photos.
Product photos prepared with a method called decoupage, which separates them from their surroundings and makes it easier to focus on the product itself, have a more flexible positioning capacity on the page. It can be safely positioned even in risky areas of the page with a shadow that will be placed under it and used together with the product itself.
This is also defined as the use of white space in some sources.
Do not forget to leave enough space around the photos you use on the catalog pages.
The product photos you use in your catalog should look the same on the document as they do in reality. You may not be able to put every product in a studio environment due to valid reasons such as size and budget. To obtain natural looking photos, you can shoot in daylight and without direct sunlight hitting the product.
It is a necessity today not only for printing techniques but also as digital assets to keep your product photos as high quality as possible, in high resolution and in a format that can be processed with desktop image processing programs. It should not be forgotten that there will be problems in processing images that are low resolution, taken in low light and kept in formats other than the popular extensions such as JPG, PNG and TIFF that are currently accepted, and in using them on materials for different media.
It should be noted that the GIF format, which is distinguished from others in the form of short and animated animation on digital screens, is not a suitable format for printing.
It is important to prepare product photos not only for printing in catalogs but also for use in other printed and digital media. For this reason, take care to take as many detailed photos of the product as possible from as many angles in a single tour. If possible, you can rotate the product on a rotating platform and shoot a high resolution video and use the desired angle by extracting it from the video if necessary.
The photographs in a catalogue that includes products for the end consumer should be prepared by taking into account the white balance, and should also be supported by lifestyle photographs that show the place of the product in the daily life of the consumer in the target audience. Returning to the thermos salesman example I mentioned in the previous sections of this guide, a water bottle next to a person doing sports, a coffee thermos in the hands of people in a large group of friends, and a large thermos visible from the trunk of a large family's car will make it easier for the customer to establish a connection with the product offered, strengthen this connection, and make the product an object of desire in the eyes of the customer.
Why is it important to create stock codes (SKUs) correctly and include them in catalogs?
Stock codes are also useful when invoicing products and show which product leaves the warehouse or enters the warehouse.
The same structure and format should be used when determining SKUs for all products. 5-digit numbers are a good start to creating a simple stock code structure, and each product with different features should be determined as a different SKU, more than one SKU should not be assigned to a product, and a SKU should not represent more than one product. If you have a lot of products to work on and need to create an SKU for each of them, you can get help from macros in computer programs, SaaS software or more comprehensive stock management programs.
When creating an SKU, it is important to think not only about today but also about your future product range. Planning new colors or special patterns for certain product groups, either generally or periodically, requires creating a more flexible stock code width.
Avoid using characters such as l, O, 1 and 0 to prevent physical errors that may occur during manual data entry and when producing printed materials.
Stock codes are not identifiers that only become functional when read by you. When your customers see your product on any platform, whether printed or digital, they will read the stock codes to convey this product to you correctly in writing or by phone. Therefore, creating planned SKUs that are easily evocative when read will make everyone's life easier in every medium.
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If you have read this article from beginning to end, you are now aware of what you will need to pay attention to when preparing a product catalog. A document based on these strategies, which form the basis of a product catalog, will strengthen your brand's marketing communication efforts and enable you to communicate with your target audience more easily.
This content may have been generated with the help of artificial intelligence and productivity tools.
