Introduction
Thanks to their size and physical nature, leaflets are great at communicating information. With the use of QR codes, they can also be effective at driving traffic to relevant landing pages on your website which can include videos or other media.
Targeting very specific geographical areas with flyers is also easy. As is reaching every household and all demographics within these areas.
The combination of all of these factors makes leaflets and flyers particularly useful for election and political campaigns.
It’s hard to compete with the leaflet’s ability to effectively and efficiently inform every household in your local area about a given issue or candidate.
Political leaflets and rules
Different rules can apply to political advertising compared to a simple commercial campaign. You want to make sure to educate yourself on these rules before you start planning your leaflet drops.
Some information can be found in the ICO’s guide on political campaigning or here on the Electoral Commission’s website.
There is additional information you will need to include on a political leaflet related to transparency.
Rules might also vary based on the areas you are targeting.
Before you plan your campaign, do as much research as you can and speak to an established leaflet distribution company about the specifics of what you want to do with your leaflet drops.
Benefits of leaflets for political campaigns
– As your leaflets can be delivered to every household in your selected area, you can reach all demographics.
– You are in full control of what your leaflets look like. You can decide how much information/text you want to include and how large your images should be. You can choose to make your flyer stand out with bright colours and large images or make it more visually subdued depending on your goals.
– It’s easy to target your campaigns geographically. You can select very specific areas that are relevant to you.
– People tend to remember and keep leaflets they find interesting for a future reference. This is something that digital advertising methods struggle to compete with. You can have a look at some of the statistics around people’s interaction with leaflets they receive here.
– As targeting local areas is easily done with leaflets, you can use them to efficiently inform people about local issues.
Political vs Commercial flyer
There are some important differences between political and commercial leaflets in terms of structure and design.
1. Political leaflets include more information
Commercial leaflets tend to be very light on text and copy. If there is more detailed information that needs to be communicated via a commercial leaflet, the approach tends to be to send people to a website via a QR code. Only very rarely will you see a commercial leaflet with more than 10 sentences on it.
Political flyers can on the other hand use considerably more text, as sharing information tends to be a big part of these campaigns.
This will obviously affect the structure of these flyers. Common elements you will see on a political leaflet are
– lists of issues your candidate is focusing on
– lists of failures of one’s political opponent
– long quotes from candidates
– paragraphs of text informing on a particular issue (you will almost never see this on a commercial leaflet advertising a service or a product)
2. Types of images can vary
Political and election flyers should still include a high quality image and a catchy headline. These elements are still important. However your image can be smaller compared to a traditional flyer.
For an election leaflet, an image of the candidate “in action”, speaking to people in the local area will often be the best choice.
You can get more creative with your image selection if you’re making a political leaflet focused on a particular local issue rather than promoting a candidate.
3. QR codes are always good
It is still a good idea to include a QR code or a URL on your flyer. These can take people to a landing page which can expand on the issue at hand. You can do this with videos or other interactive elements. This way you combine the best of the physical nature of the flyer and the interactive nature of online content.
Timing your campaign
When it comes to timing your flyer deliveries for an election campaign, the techniques are very similar to marketing an event.
You want to make sure to have your designs and campaign plans done at least a few months ahead of time. Ideally you also want to deliver more than one leaflet.
If the election is taking place in April you might want to be delivering your flyers once in February, once in March and finish with a last drop on the week of the election. You would be targeting the same households with each drop.
This way, you can keep your candidate in people’s mind without pushing too hard. Repeated drops are an integral part of advertising with leaflets. You can read up more on the topic in our article on repetition and flyer campaigns.
As you can imagine, in order to be able to do this and have your flyers ready, printed and in the hands of your distribution company, you want to be planning months ahead.
Under no circumstances should you be scrambling a month or a few weeks before the election, trying to plan a strategy and design your leaflets at the last minute.
Selecting your area
Selecting an area for your leaflet drops should be relatively easy. Our TPP mapping system allows us to target areas with a high level of granularity.
As such we don’t have to rely on delivering to whole postcodes. Instead, we can help target only the areas you care about. For more information about electoral wards and targeting have a look at our page dedicated to the topic. If you are interested in how political campaigns as described above compare to examples of other flyer delivery campaigns have a look here.
