Delicious Ideas for Your Wedding Catering Business

No matter how professional a staff you may have hired or how special the foods you prepare may be, your catering business will always need appealing promotional pieces to attract new customers. In most cases your menu or brochure is a customer’s first opportunity to meet you. MagCloud makes it easy to publish a variety of publications for your catering business, and with low-minimum print runs (in most cases as few as 1), digital distribution options and direct mailing features, it doesn’t matter if you’ve catered 2 events or 200, you’ll wow your clients with beautiful publications that leave their mouths watering.

So why not try some of these delicious ideas to promote your business:

Flyers to Promote Your Brand

Our double-sided, single sheet Flyer product is ideal for brief messages or content that changes often such as sales promotions, or seasonal offerings. It’s available in four size options: 8 x 8”, 5.5 x 8.5”, 8.5 x 5.5″ or 8.5 x 11” so you can be sure to pick something that really makes your brand shine.

Glossy Brochures to Highlight Your Services, Team & Experience

A brochure will help you showcase your catering business and help the customer get a detailed account of your company. Our 4-page Pamphlet product is the perfect way to quickly capture your audience’s attention and whether you use a standard 8.5 x 11″, a unique square 8 x 8″ size or a pocket-sized 5.5 x 8.5″ you can rest assured that it will be affordable and beautifully-printed. With an easy one-click option to opt-in for digital distribution, you can also offer your brochure as a free digital-download for potential clients to peruse on their PC or mobile device.

Print and Digital Price Sheets

Once a client is interested in booking you, you’ll want to make it as easy for them as possible. Price sheets that double as order forms make for a tidy way to create a menu together. With MagCloud’s combo of high-quality print-on-demand and easy-to-use digital distribution options, you can make your price sheets available as print copies that you keep on hand as well as digital versions so potential clients can view them on any PC or mobile device.

Sample Menus

MagCloud’s new flyer sizes are perfect for reprinting menus from past events to give your customers an idea of how a beautifully planned menu comes together. You could even go so far as to create a proposed menu for their event and present it to them at their tasting.

Wine Lists

With distributor prices and product availability constantly changing, MagCloud makes it easy to have an up-to-date wine list and still look professional. Whenever you need to change a price or add a new wine to your list, simply upload a new PDF and order as few or as many copies as you need.

Special & Seasonal Menus

If you offer a variety of cuisines, or even if you want to break up your menus by season or meal-type, you can easily create a standard menu template that you can change up to create more specialized menus.

Full-Service Catalogs

Many catering businesses are full service, and can provide chairs, tables, china, glassware, silverware, tents and umbrellas, and even arrange centerpieces, place cards, and party favors. If your business offers a wide range of services like this, be sure to present them to your client in your brochure, and offer more in-depth information through a specialized catalog.

Partner Publications

Partnering with venue coordinators, event planners and other service professionals like wedding photographers is a great way to get your brand out there to more clients. Try collaborating with the other pros working with you on events and see if you can work out a way to help promote one another with unique pieces that highlight both of your services. For example a collaboration with a photographer could result in mouth-watering photos of your food and presentation that you can use to promote your business, and referrals for future events.

A One-Stop Shop for Your Business

With publisher pages that can be personalized, and the ability to group similar publications into tidy categories, MagCloud is a great platform to keep all of your business materials in one place and make them easily accessible in both print and digital formats. It’s easy to direct your customers to your personalized and branded page where they can find your menus, catalogs and wine lists all in one place, making them handy to select and download.

Have you used MagCloud to promote your catering or event business? Have another great idea that we missed? Share it below in the comments section!

Expanded Flyer Options

Our Flyer product family is growing.  We have expanded the size options for Flyer to now include 8 x 8”, 5.5 x 8.5”, 8.5 x 5.5″ in addition to the existing 8.5 x 11” size.

The new sizes provide more creative flexibility for things like menus, promotional handouts, resumes and more.

Flyer publications consist of a single sheet with front and back color printing.  We’ve also added the option for UV coating on all Flyer products. Ultra Violet (UV) coating adds a protective layer to the printed page giving it an eye-catching sheen and also making it more resilient to normal wear and tear.

Flyer products range from $.32 a sheet for 5.5 x 8.5”, 8.5 x 5.5 size publications to $.40 a sheet for 8 x 8″ and 8.5 x 11″ publications.  Flyers have a minimum print order of 8 copies in multiples of 4 (i.e. 8, 12 or 16 copies), which will be bundled into one shipment.  UV coating adds an additional $.06 to each sheet.  So an 8 pack of 8 x 8 Flyers with UV coating is just $4.16.

Learn more about Flyer on the MagCloud website.

Let’s Get Creative

While portfolios and business brochures are relatively common publication types on MagCloud these days, there are a number of other unique use cases we see where publishers take advantage of MagCloud’s high quality print and digital distribution to serve their business needs. Today we’d like to share a few of these with you, and hopefully spark your creativity for your own MagCloud publication.

Calendars
As discussed in our post earlier this week, we usually see an uptick in the number of calendars published on the site around this time of year. These calendars show off everything from family portraits to product imagery, and with the MagCloud storefront and print on demand capability we’ve seen some successful calendar fundraising efforts. Plus, now that we have our smaller digest format, MagCloud calendars can be ultra-portable or even expanded into daily planners. If you’ve been looking for a place to get started on your own calendar, check out our 2012 calendar templates.

Annual Reports
Another timely publication type we see on the MagCloud site is the annual report. These run the gamut from smaller startups who just want to print up a handful of copies for investors to larger companies that want an easy way to make their report available online with both print and digital options. Our standard-sized perfect bound publication is particularly well-suited to this use case, since its heavier cover stock and square binding offers a more professional look and feel.

Holiday Greetings
MagCloud also offers a great way to get in the holiday spirit with a pro-quality print and digital family newsletter that gets published and distributed just in time for the holidays. Combine your Holiday Newsletter publication with our Ship to Group feature making it easy to send one copy of your publication to a group of addresses. If you’re looking for tips to make your own holiday greetings through MagCloud, check our blog post from last year for templates and instructions.

Cookbooks
Recipe collections are another popular MagCloud publication type, serving the purpose of business promotions, community fundraisers, and wedding favors. With options for ordering print copies and downloading onto mobile devices like the iPad, MagCloud cookbooks are easy to keep close at hand in the kitchen. To help you get started on your own cookbook, check out our prior blog posts with templates and instructions for Adobe InDesign, iWork Pages, and Microsoft Word.

Workbooks, Manuals, and Guides
A number of publishers have used MagCloud to print field guides, camp workbooks, how-to guides, training manuals, educational workbooks, and operations manuals to complement a variety of business needs. In some cases these are printed ahead of time for use during a workshop or class, while other times they are simply made available online for attendees to purchase as supplementary or stand-alone training materials.

Programs
We see programs of all kinds published on the MagCloud site for events like weddings, plays, memorial services, conferences and music festivals. Our new digest product is particularly well-suited for this use case, since its smaller size is less obtrusive and fits more easily into bags and purses.

Menus
Another great business use case for MagCloud is a menu. Our full color printing helps show off vibrant food photography, while the on-demand printing makes it easy to order copies in small batches as they are needed and make changes between print runs.

Knitting Patterns
There are a number of publishers on MagCloud creating knitting pattern publications. We’ve seen patterns for hats, mittens, scarves, leg warmers, sweaters, and even a wine bottle cozy.  Get a first hand account from MagCloud publisher Alexandra Tinsley.

Real Estate Materials
We’ve also had real estate brokers printing 4-page factsheets for their listed homes through MagCloud, as well as more extensive photo pamphlets for both homes and yachts.  We also included a more extensive listing catalog as one of our templates for Microsoft Publisher.

Blog-Based Publications
A number of publishers on MagCloud are bloggers who use MagCloud to publish their content in an alternate way. Sometimes these are published as collections of posts that might fit a theme, or were voted on by the community, or are simply from a period of time. In other instances, these publications contain additional information that expands upon what was originally posted on the blog, such as fresh content about a profiled individual or the backstory of an image.

These are just a sampling of the diverse publication types that we’ve seen published to the site, with more being uploaded everyday. What have you created through MagCloud? Have you been inspired to create any of the publications types listed above? Tell us in the comments below!