There is a saying “Man plans and God laughs”. I had planned to get together with some other professionals today to do some networking. This didn’t work out. I didn’t feel like wearing a tie today, and its almost Christmas. I still need to spend some time getting with other professionals, but with my new focus on the Spanish speaking market I decided that I should spend my day making a pamphlet to promote my services in Spanish.
Rabbit-holes everywhere
I don’t know if I was overthinking it, but I wanted to look into some theory about creating a trim-fold pamphlet before I got started. Since there are basically six useable spaces on a pamphlet, I wanted to know where to put the critical content. I really didn’t get any useful advice on that from any sources on the internet, but I just went with it.
Then, I decided I needed to look into marketing to the latino population. There is a whole lot of content on the internet about marketing to latinos, but I realized that everyone basically referenced the same playbook and gave pretty nebulous advice about “market to the culture”. I’m not sure what that means.
Then, I got sidetracked into a couple of Pew surveys talking about whether people of Latin-American decent prefer the term “latino” or “hispanic”. I like latino more, but since I don’t qualify, I guess I was wrong – sort of. According to Pew, people of Latin-American decent in Texas prefer the term Hispanic to Latino. Or, more accurately, of those that prefer one designation over the other, the majority prefer Hispanic to Latino. I’ll keep that in mind.
Then I looked into more pamphlet design theory, but really got no where. So I looked at Pamphlet design software. I have an Office 365 subscription, which includes MS Publisher for Windows, which would do a sufficient job for my purposes, but I don’t have a Windows machine. So I looked at an Adobe Cloud solution, which was nice, but a little much for my purposes. I ended up going for a Vistaprint pamphlet design template that allowed me to design the pamphlet online.
Writing “copy” is hard
I spent a significant part of the day trying to write catchy publicity copy that I could use for the pamphlet. I am pretty happy with what I got down. It took a lot longer than I was hoping for, but it looks pretty good and I am excited to get this going. Because of legal advertising rules, getting the right wording on the advertisement can be pretty tough. I had to go to the advertising rules a couple of times so that I could make sure I wasn’t violating anything.
Strict bar rules
Now that the pamphlets are done, it is just a matter of waiting to get them and then starting to hand them out. Well, not quite, I also have to translate them back to English and send copies to the State Bar for review. This rules seems to be Texas specific, and is probably there to protect the public. It isn’t that big of a deal, except the bar charges $100 for each advertisement they review. I think that once I get the ads reviewed, I’ll have to hold on to the design for a while to get my money’s worth out fo the review fee.