A brochure to accompany a presentation may be as simple as a six-panel pocket piece or as detailed as a glossy, color, multi-page portfolio. When your brochure supports your presentation points and offers information and illustrations to generate interest among your prospects, your presentation and the subsequent question-and-answer period become more effective. After a presentation, you can use your brochures with purchasing departments, which often require product and company literature before approving purchase orders.

Builds Credibility and Confidence

When professionally designed, organized and written, a presentation brochure will build your credibility as a competent professional in the eyes of your audience. This is especially important when your audience is unfamiliar with you and your firm and may be making first-impression assessments of you and your products or services. In a presentation brochure, you have the opportunity to introduce not only yourself, but also present the credentials of others in your firm in their most favorable light. A well-prepared brochure gives your professional presentation twice the impact of a solo presentation. Advertising professional Robert Bly, in an undated article on the "Marketing Today" website, reports that a brochure can expedite buying decisions, while its absence can lock your firm out of some potential customers’ offices.

Provides Staying Power

An effective brochure will reinforce the points you made in your oral presentation and should cause your audience to have further interest in your business, products and services. While your words may be forgotten and your visual aids misunderstood, a brochure has staying power. Potential customers will take the brochure home and read it again when they’re making a buying decision. They may pass the brochure along to others, increasing your outreach with no added cost to you. When written clearly and visualized effectively, your presentation brochure keeps the conversation going long after you’ve left the podium.

Visualizes Your Presentation Points

Brochures lend themselves to the kind of creative, memorable visualization that readers enjoy and that oral presentations typically lack. If you’re selling products, brochures accommodate full-color photography or illustrations. Selling services? You can describe the results your efforts have produced for other clients in striking charts and graphs that your prospects can analyze and share. Brochure graphics also support the sales and marketing effort by helping businesses overcome a growing disinclination among prospects to read “long copy” while still providing the full story in art and captions.

Encourages Audience Q &A

In a good presentation brochure, you’ve anticipated your audience’s questions, as well as their concerns, and addressed both succinctly while emphasizing specific important presentation points. A brochure can trigger audience interaction with interesting information snippets on which you can expand when questioned. Serious prospects will likely be interested in learning more about your company’s history, personnel, customers, products, prices and common practices. Use your brochure to provoke discussion, provide testimonials and also to direct your audience to sites online where they can obtain more information.