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Give your marketing personnel an assignment they must accomplish within the boundaries of one letter size piece of paper.  Tell them you want them to describe what your company does, sells, makes, services and promotes, all entirely and concisely on only one page. It must be on one page which helps to cause hard thinking and contemplation as to what is pertinent and what is not.  With one page, you must get to the point with memorable impact.

What you should cover in a one page marketing handout or mailout:

• Company logo, addresses and locations. If there are too many locations, write the cities. If there are too many cities, write “129 locations nationwide” or “34 manufacturing sites covering eight countries”.
• Company 800 number.
• Company website.
• Industries served.
• Number of customers (i.e. 2,000 customers over the four-state area, 150+ utility companies across Texas panhandle, 34,000 customers in Scott County, 2,350 trucking firms have used our services for 43 years).
• What does the company sell, make, process or distribute? For example, if your firm is a metal manufacturing, describe the types of processes performed and number and types of machines operated. If you own a toy company, how many and what types of toys do you make or sell, covering which age groups. If an insurance brokerage, what types of insurance coverage, dollar limitations, how much coverage currently in place (i.e. over $11.5B in place in 2015), how many insurance companies used, what certifications or grades (i.e. A- and above, B or above) and how many locations owned.
• Discuss the best and most impressive projects you have performed. As an example, for lawn care, “For over 10 years, we’ve cared for properties from only 600 square feet, all the way up to 1,750 acres with over 5,000 trees at the state fairgrounds.” Another example might discuss completed welding projects as large as 110 feet long with 2,700 weld joints containing fourteen different metals.

What you should do with a one page company handout:

• Receptionist: Give a copy to the receptionist so he or she knows the overall description of the company when answering general questions.  She is also to offer these to every visitor, vendor, sales person, buyer or member of the public that walks into your lobby.
• Visitors: Give out these flyers in the lobbies of all your facilities to all visitors.
• Sales personnel: Give out these handouts to help sales personnel. While they are introducing themselves, they can leave a well thought out summary description of the company’s capabilities when talking to a new potential customer (with an attached business card at the upper left top corner).
• Current customers: Make sure to give them to all your current customers. Sometimes they are the last to know your new capabilities since the sales representatives are telling primarily new prospects all of your new talents and abilities. Attach them with outgoing invoices. They will go through the mail free.
• Transportation personnel: Offer these flyers to visiting truckers and drivers in shipping when they ask, “What all do you guys do here?”
• Vendors: Purchasing agents should hand out these flyers to all the incoming vendors who want to bid on projects or do work for you.  They end up hiring you if you offer something they also purchase.
• Accounts payable payments: Put these one page handouts in vendors’ accounts payable checks (stick in the envelopes) to mail every week.
• Invoices: Slide these one page summaries in with all new invoices forwarded to your customers (stick in the envelopes).
• Attach to all emails: Scan this company summary to electronically attach to all outgoing corporate emails. Leave it to the customer to open it if they so desire. If they wish to know what your firm does and you are bad at remembering all the details, this will do the trick.
• Facilities visitors (buyers, customer representatives): Use this summary to give to any new visitor who arrives at your plant in order not to miss discussing everything you can do.
• Good cheap well written summary page: One page is nothing to add to mail, and cheap to reproduce.  Make plenty of copies, add a revision date at the bottom and continuously update your summary for new processes, products, capabilities, major projects, new services or products and numbers of locations, warehouses, store fronts and facilities.

Remember that you can get a lot on one page.  Alter the font, organize the data neatly and understandably.  Get to the point and make your concisely written copy have impact.  Allow the one page restriction to help make you stick to the point and emphasize what truly is important to convey with one page.

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