Introduction
Like all marketing techniques, leaflet distribution works well only when done correctly. When approached carelessly or by someone with no experience, it can easily become a painful waste of time and money.
There is more to leaflet distribution than just selecting an area and delivering a few thousand leaflets within it. In this article we will have a look at 10 practical leaflet distribution tips that will help you get the most out of your campaigns.
1. Selecting demographics on qualities other than only income
Good targeting is an absolutely crucial part of improving the chances of your flyer drop being successful.
Choosing the areas and demographics you want to focus on is likely going to be the first step in the planning of your campaign. Approximate household income is the obvious thing to select for. This can be helpful, but it’s not the only thing to consider.
As you can imagine, an older couple will likely respond to different types of advertising compared to a young family, even if they have a similar household income.
There is more to London than looking for the most affluent postcodes and executing a flyer drop after flyer drop. There are places with strong demographics of young city professionals. Other parts of London tend to have a high percentage of families and others of older couples. Some areas are full of homes with gardens.
All of these details are important and should be considered. (You can have a look at this article talking about some of the most affluent postcodes in London for context.)
2. Use more than one design
It might be a good idea to use a different leaflet design in different locations.
You can tailor your design to each demographic you are targeting or use different designs for each flyer drop in a multi-drop campaign.
By being more proactive with your design, you can keep your leaflets fresh and personal. You just need to make sure to keep your branding consistent.
To see more information on design and print see our page dedicated to this.
3. Use multi-drop campaigns
Using campaigns with multiple well spaced out drops in the same areas is one of the best brand building tools for any local business using leaflets.
We can demonstrate this technique on a potential campaign for a local Italian restaurant.
- The restaurant can deliver multiple rounds of pamphlet drops to the area around their location over the period of months.
- The frequency can vary but delivering one round of leaflets every 4 weeks might be a good plan for this particular business.
- Each of these drops can use a different image on their leaflet. One drop can use photos of their pizza, the next one of a nice pasta dish and another can use an image of a seafood dish.
- These drops can over time lead up to an invitation to a tasting event in the restaurant.
When done correctly, multi-drop campaigns can be one of the more impactful distribution techniques available.
4. Stick to the A5 format
It can be nice to get creative with the format of your leaflets. Gate fold DL size brochures can look fantastic. The same applies for Z-fold flyers or many other exotic formats.
The main goal of your pamphlet distribution campaigns, however, isn’t to simply offer an aesthetically rich experience to people around London.
The goal is to deliver a clear message and to promote your services and your business to potential customers.
An A5 leaflet with a classy design is what we recommend to most clients. This is due to many reasons. Cost, ease of transport, robustness, the amount of information that comfortably fits on an A5 leaflet and more.
There are many distribution techniques that can help make your flyer drop more successful. Using novelty formats is not one of them in most cases.
5. Think long term
Leaflet distribution campaigns can be used with the aim to generate sales and leads in a relatively short time span or at a particular time.
With that said, leaflet marketing is at its best when it is approached as a long-term brand building tool that leads to more business and sales over a longer period of time.
No matter how successful a single leaflet drop ends up being. A long term brand building strategy in your key areas will likely win in the end.
6. Define your goals
Saying that you should clearly define the goals of your leaflet marketing campaigns might sound like a trivial piece of advice.
However, from our experience it is not uncommon for companies to not have clear goals when they approach us.
Wanting more clients is a goal, but narrowing it down further will be helpful.
- Is the campaign meant to generate business as quickly as possible?
- Is the campaign a part of a longer term strategy to develop your customer base over a period of 12 months?
- Is the campaign meant to promote a specific product or your business in general?
Answers to these questions will change the way your pamphlets should look, how many you should print and which areas you should target.
There is a big difference between a flyer distribution campaign that is focusing on developing brand recognition in a local area to generate business over the next year and a campaign meant to bring in new customers at a specific time of year (gyms in January, Schools in September etc…).
7. Keep your message simple
In the previous point we talked about how important it is to define your goals before each flyer campaign.
It is also very important that your goals and the flyer itself remain simple and clear.
In most cases, you don’t want to be offering 8 different types of services on a single flyer. Unless you have a good reason not to, try to focus on a single goal and a single message.
If you run a business that offers a wide range of services and/or products you can run multiple campaigns.
Like we mentioned earlier. If you keep your leaflet format simple (A5), your design crisp and focus on advertising a single product or a service, you have a greater chance of success.
8. Consider B2B but carefully
Most leaflet marketing targets residential addresses. Door to door deliveries are the bread and butter of the leaflet marketing business.
There are special circumstances, however, under which targeting other businesses instead might be more appropriate for you.
If your business is mostly focused on B2B services, you can still take advantage of flyers. You just need to make sure to work with a company that has a system specifically designed for B2B deliveries.
Not every flyer distributor can do this reliably. When it comes to distributing pamphlets to businesses, different elements are at play compared to regular residential deliveries.
The distributors themselves need to be presentable and conduct themselves well when entering a business. The mapping of business addresses is more complicated compared to homes.
In London you can expect your B2B deliveries to be spread out into smaller clusters around various high streets. As such, you are mostly going to be able to get to customer facing brick and mortar businesses like restaurants, hairdressers and estate agents.
Your flyers shouldn’t be delivered to store locations of large multi-national chains.
If you are considering B2B flyer delivery make sure to consult your distribution company. Check how they got to the numbers of addresses they can deliver to and ask them about which types of businesses they are excluding.
We have a page dedicated to our B2B leaflet distribution services that you can read through.
9. Ask about the mapping system
When you are choosing the leaflet distribution company you will be working with, you want to make sure that their mapping system has been designed well.
Always ask to see the maps they use and ask about the methodology that guided their creation.
Some areas of London can be simply segmented into postal sectors. Others require more nuance. Your flyer delivery company might consider things like demographics in the creation of their maps.
Realistically the number of pamphlets needed to cover an area will also often be different to the official number of households mentioned on government websites.
Your flyer distributor’s mapping system should exclude business addresses, industrial areas and undeliverable residential addresses.
Your distributor should consider this in the planning of your campaign and map creation. Always ask about this when you are deciding on who you will be working with.
More details about our maps and tracking systems can be found on this page.
10. Focus on Door to door
Like we’ve mentioned a few times already, there are multiple ways to get your pamphlets into people’s hands.
Hand to hand deliveries focus on handing out flyers to people at strategic locations around London.
Other services can help you target businesses or local authority housing.
Door to door as a service focuses exclusively on delivering your flyers to privately owned residential addresses. For most companies looking to sell their products or services to individual customers, door to door is the way to go.
These deliveries can be efficiently organised and as such are very cost effective in comparison to other methods.
Delivering a 1,000 leaflets door to door will be considerably cheaper than handing a 1,000 leaflets out hand to hand in front of a shopping centre.
If you are interested, have a look at our Door to door focused page.
Unless you have very specific goals that focus on B2B or other specialised markets you should likely be delivering the absolute majority of your pamphlets using door to door services.
If you want to get a better idea about The Private Postman, have a look at our hompage.
