Have you been looking into advertising in your local area and came across the idea of door drop marketing? Are you questioning how you could use this technique and what makes it effective? Let’s talk about everything that goes into it.
The basic idea of putting flyers through the letterboxes of your potential clients is not complex at its core. Each campaign however can be affected by many details that will decide whether your leaflet drops are effective or not.
What is Door Drop Marketing?
Door Drop marketing is all about delivering your flyers through the letterboxes of homes in a geographic area your business is focusing on.
It is different to what we would call Hand to Hand pamphleting which relies on the handing out of flyers in busy areas (for example outside of tube stations, supermarkets or office buildings and others).
By targeting the relevant households and their letterboxes directly you have a considerably better control over the choice of demographic groups you are advertising to compared to Hand to Hand pamphleting.
On the other hand you can also make sure that every single household in your selected area will receive your leaflets. This is something that is unique to this offline marketing technique as most other advertising channels tend to have a demographic skew.
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- – Facebook ads – Gen Z and the 60+ are not represented
- – Instagram ads – The 50+ demographic is not very present
- – YouTube ads – Women are underrepresented
- – Print ads – Skewing towards older demographics
Having the ability to reach every single household in the area you are focusing on in with a single campaign is a great advantage. This is especially true if the goal of your campaign is to develop local brand-awareness and mind-share.
What are you advertising
Before you get to thinking about design, printing or the size of your campaign you want to decide exactly what you want to advertise first.
As a general rule you can use a flyer to deliver a single message effectively. When you try to include too many different types of services or products on a single pamphlet the effectiveness of your campaign will go down.
You should decide exactly what you want to achieve with your leaflets before you take any further steps in the process.
Do you want to
- – Drive sales to a specific service you are offering?
- – Develop local brand awareness ?
- – Side step your competition on trade-specific apps and drive traffic to your app profile?
- – Get people to sign up to an upcoming event at your location?
Each of these goals will change the way you will be approaching every step in the planning of your door drop campaign.
Demographics
Targeting specific demographics with leaflets is really possible only if you are working with a professional company. Much of the data that is widely available on the internet comes from government sources that are not very accurate.
A good professional company that focuses on offline marketing will have a deep real-world understanding of what each area of your town or city looks like demographically.
This is especially true in large cities where a neighbourhood can change drastically in character in a few years. As you can imagine only someone who regularly works in these areas would notice these changes as they are happening.
Where to focus
Deciding where your leaflet campaigns should be done with the help of a proprietary mapping system supplied by the company you’ve chosen.
Different companies will have different approaches to mapping their areas but every single one will have a mapping system of some kind.
You might want to look for companies that are not relying solely on the system of postal sectors but use some of their own research in deciding how they break down the map selection for each area.
Postal sectors can be a good guide but sometimes do not have consistent demographics or can largely consist of addresses that are not accessible.
This is where the know-how of an experienced distributor comes in and where you can see how much effort has been put into the mapping system you are presented with.
You as a client can only benefit from a well designed mapping system as you will
Be able to select areas to target easily
Avoid local authority housing and other inaccessible addresses if you wish
Exclude business addresses in order to focus all of your efforts on residential privately owned households
Save money and minimise waste by only having real deliverable addresses included on the mapping system you are using to plan your campaigns
Design and Print
The way your leaflets look is very important. Good photography has become an absolute must in the world of door drop marketing.
You might want to find a professional photographer to take high quality bespoke photographs of your products. If this is not an option for you visiting one of the many well-curated stock photo websites is a good idea.
Some website worth considering are
- – Unsplash
- – Shutterstock
- – Pexels
You will find that having a simple flyer, with a simple message and high quality photography makes all the difference when it comes to making an impact locally with your offline marketing.
You also want to focus on keeping your colour scheme and branding consistent across different media.
If the menus in your local restaurant are yellow, your leaflets should feature this colour in a significant way.
If your estate agent brochures are blue and use the TRAJAN font – your pamphlets should use at least the same family of fonts and similar colours.
You might say that this is obvious and not worth mentioning. However when you are thinking about
- – creating a campaign
- – deciding your budget and areas of focus
- – planning the timing of your deliveries
- – finding out which company to work with
- – designing, choosing who to print with
- – ensuring there is storage for your printed stock
You will appreciate that repeating the most basic elements that make up a successful campaign can be very helpful.
How to deliver
We’ve already discussed the fact that using a professional company to handle the delivery itself is generally a good idea.
You already understand that a good company that delivers hundreds of thousands to millions of leaflets every month will have a good understanding of local demographic in your area
A company of this size and experience will also have operational capabilities and know-how that goes far beyond what an amateur can hope to have.
The deliveries themselves can be very physically demanding. As you can imagine this is especially true when it comes to larger quantities being delivered in a short time span.
This is why using a professional distributor can be very important. Consistency is a crucial element in the success of your campaign no matter the physical demands of the job.
Shared delivery
You might also want to consider whether the professional company you hope to be using runs a shared delivery system.
This means that your flyers would be delivered together with those of other companies.
This is in contrast to Solus deliveries which guarantee that it’s only your pamphlet that is being delivered.
Most people intuitively feel like Solus is a better way to get their offline marketing materials to clients. We tend to disagree with this.
At the Private Postman we’ve run many tests through the years focusing on differences in response rates between Shared and Solus campaigns.
The results are clear. Shared campaigns where we deliver up to three flyers at the same time show no difference in response rates to Solus campaigns in the same areas.
This is only true when we choose high quality, non-competing clients for each delivery. We do this every time.
The ultimate benefit of this system is that it gives us the ability to keep the cost of each delivery considerably lower for you. You can use this idea to run larger campaigns, plan repeat drops or save some of your marketing budget.
Repeated drops
Repeated door drops are a new technique that developed in sophistication over the last few years.
Most offline and online marketing methods rely on some form of repeated exposure. This means that you as a customer should see each ad more than once.
As you might imagine this is also the case with door drops. However the logistics of delivering your flyers to the same households repeatedly with carefully crafted rest periods in between each delivery are complex.
Now that we have the systems in place to both execute and track deliveries with a high level of accuracy we can use repeated drops to their full potential.
We can develop new designs for your flyers for each delivery in order to minimise exposure fatigue. We can plan rest periods and rotate multiple versions of your leaflets in different areas.
On top of this we can control the number of impressions your flyers get. This is something that is very difficult to control with other methods of advertising.
We all know the feeling of seeing the same TV ad over and over again, the same YouTube ad interrupting our day or the identical Facebook ad popping up every few minutes on our feed.
Repeated drops do not suffer from this as you are fully in control of the number of deliveries that are made and the exact timings of when they happen.
This way we can take advantage of repeated exposure and everything positive that comes with it without the danger of insensitively bombarding your potential clients and turning them away.
The benefits
We’ve summarised much of what makes door drop advertising effective in the text above.
The benefits of having your leaflets reliably delivered to relevant households in your area at crucial times during the year and repeatedly reminding everyone close to your business of your existence can’t be overstated.
When done correctly you can develop mind share in a way that is not really possible with other methods.
If you run an Italian restaurant you can get to a point where everyone in your local area thinks of your branding first everytime they think of Italian food. This can apply to estate agents, hairdressers, gyms, personal trainers, yoga studios, delivery apps, handymen and others.
Unique power
This is the unique power of door drops. This kind of impact on your local area is something that is very difficult to achieve with anything but leaflets.
The offline advertising world is thriving and you should not miss the opportunity to combine your online efforts with reaching out to your potential customers using some form of tangible physical advertising as well.
Especially with the level of control offered by door drops.
