Introduction
Like many marketing techniques, leaflet distribution works well only when done correctly. When approached carelessly or by someone with little 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.
Reading time: 8 minutes
1. Selecting demographics on qualities other than only income
Good targeting is an absolutely crucial part of improving the chance of your flyer drop working and generating business.
It is the first element of planning any campaign one should consider. Many leaflet distribution companies tend to segment London into areas based only on income. This is simply not enough.
As you can imagine an older couple will respond to different types of advertising compared to a young family even though they might 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. (You can have a look at this article talking about some of the most affluent postcodes in London for context.)
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 every one of them should be considered.
2. Use more than one design
It might be a good idea to use a different leaflet design in different parts of town.
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 is the ultimate brand building tool for any local business. This is probably the most important of the 10 Practical leaflet distribution tips that really work.
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 the most impactful distribution technique and a complete game changer in the leaflet distribution business.
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 goal of your pamphlet distribution campaigns however isn’t to 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 still works the best for this purpose.
There are many distribution techniques that can help make your flyer drop more successful. Using novelty formats is not one of them.
5. Think long term
Different leaflet distribution techniques can increase your ability to generate leads and drive sales relatively quickly.
Leaflet marketing is however 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 always win.
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 not a very well defined goal. 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 drastically 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 message you are communicating remain simple.
You don’t want to be offering 8 different types of services on your flyer. Always 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 crips 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 you are 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.
This is not obvious as not every flyer distributor can do this reliably. When it comes to figuring out how to distribute pamphlets to businesses many more elements are involved compared to regular residential deliveries.
The distributors themselves need to be presentable and introduce themselves 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 larger chains like Costa or Dominos.
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 B2B 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 exact maps they use and ask about the methodology that guided their creation.
Some areas of London can be fine with simple segmenting into postal sectors and mapped out easily. Others require more nuance.
Your flyer delivery company should consider things like demographics in the creation of their maps. The borders of each map should not be arbitrary.
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 local authority housing.
In most cases the best place to put flyers is in people’s letterboxes. Not into every possible property in a given area.
Your distributor needs to 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 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 how to give 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 privately owned residential addresses. For most companies that are looking to sell their products or services to individual customers door to door is the way to go.
As it excludes everything but privately owned residential addresses it doesn’t waste any of your flyers. We know exactly how many flyers you need to deliver door to door in each area as our distributors deliver to most London postcodes every week.
These deliveries can be very efficiently organised and as such are very cost effective.
Delivering a 1,000 leaflets door to door is 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 be delivering the absolute majority of your pamphlets door to door.
We hope that these 10 Practical leaflet distribution tips that really work will be helpful.
If you want to get a better idea about The Private Postman have a look at our hompage.
