In today’s competitive industries, it’s critical that emerging companies make a success of their marketing campaigns.

If you’re a start-up business on a budget that needs something professional and effective to promote a brand, why not consider a lookbook? Once believed to be limited to advertising the fashion sector, the lookbook is now making waves in a range of other professional industries.

Check out this step-by-step guide to promoting your Start-up Business with a Lookbook and get helpful pointers for designing, creating and printing your own cost-effective lookbook to drive customers to your new brand.

Key features of a successful lookbook

A lookbook is a set of images placed together for marketing purposes. However, there’s much more to a lookbook than just displaying attractive photos. Here are the key lookbook features you need to consider:

• Imagery.
• Cover.
• Brand contact details.
• Navigation.
• Descriptions.

Front cover features

Like a newspaper or magazine, the most attention-grabbing info and images should be on the cover for maximum readership. The objective of the front cover is to entice readers, which means you need to think about including attractive photos, great use of color, and an appealing title to compel the reader to pick up your lookbook. Cover pages typically detail the month and year and, if it’s not in the title, you need to have your brand name and logo somewhere here, too.

How to write for your lookbook

Since you’re most likely advertising your range of products or services, a copy is a key to conveying exactly what you can offer a customer. Essentially, a lookbook will feature product/service descriptions and — if you’re a start-up — perhaps a brief brand description. Quality lookbook copy must be: to the point, informative, interesting, and enticing.

You can also take advantage of the content aspect of your lookbook to engage with your potential customer and forge a relationship. To do this, use professional language to convey your reliability, but try and adopt a chatty tone to come across as approachable. Try to avoid using very long words and sentences — these sound stuffy and clumsy — and keep your product descriptions between 30 and 60 words in length to avoid taking focus from your lookbook’s images.

How to order the pages of your lookbook

Getting the correct flow in a lookbook is crucial to your reader’s overall experience. The better it comes together, the more enjoyable it will be for your prospective customer to read it. If you offer both goods and services, keep these separate, and try to section off connected articles into clear categories to deliver consistency and avoid making your lookbook appear disjointed. We also recommend placing all relatable products together, so the reader doesn’t have to thumb through the book to find items that might interest them.

What details should you include?

Of course, contact details are another vital part of a good lookbook. What’s the point of advertising your range if nobody can find you? Make sure you include:

• Phone number.
• Shop address.
• Email address.
• Social media addresses.

What to consider when gathering images

As we mentioned earlier, the lookbook is primarily a catalog of striking images. So, making sure your photos are perfect is essential to creating a professional-looking final product. If you’re taking your own to save cash, don’t forget to consider: props, lighting, color, setting, and image resolution for each shot and make sure you have exclusive rights to all images you use.However, we’d highly recommend hiring a professional photographer.

Remember, photos don’t have to be border-to-border. Whitespace is a modern photography technique used to create a focal point and highlights a particular part of the page —but use it sparingly.

Printing and checking

As soon as your lookbook is designed and you’re happy with the overall aesthetic, talk to your printing specialist about the type of paper stock and finishes that might look good. The worst scenario would be to put so much time, money and effort into designing the perfect lookbook, only to have it ruined by opting for a cheap paper or poor finish.

Just before submitting your carefully created design for printing; proofread your copy and images to make sure everything is perfect. After it’s printed, get your lookbook out to as many potential customers as you can!

This article was researched and created by Precision Printing — suppliers of high-quality business stationery for clients across the UK.

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