Introduction
Beauty salons have many promotion techniques available to them. With the visual focus of many social media platforms a good online presence with some talent in photography can theoretically be very beneficial for a beauty salon.
A lot of these online options however tend to be quite crowded and standing out on a platform like Instagram can be very difficult or almost impossible.
In this environment it is a good idea to consider whether there is a marketing technique that can help us advertise our services locally in London while not having to compete with others on heavily saturated online platforms.
We believe that leaflet distribution is just such a technique. Let’s have a look at a few tips on how to get more clients for a beauty salon with leaflet distribution.
Strong branding
We’ll start our discussion about flyer distribution with branding.
Branding is an important element of marketing for any beauty salon business. Leaflets as a medium are unique in how much they benefit from good branding.
You have complete control over the way your flyers look. This is very important as many “trade apps” and online aggregators don’t give you a lot of control over how you can present your business.
Not only do you get to control exactly what your leaflet looks like, you’re also using a fairly large physical medium. An A5 flyer gives you a lot of space for high quality images, logos and other branding elements.
(We generally recommend A5 leaflets for our beauty salon clients. This size allows for the use of large high quality photos of your work as well as leaving a good amount of space for your branding.)
Using the same colours, fonts and logos across platforms and mediums is a very good technique to develop mind-share in your local area. This includes your website, leaflets, storefront and social media.
London is quite heavily saturated with businesses so staying consistent in the way you communicate in your marketing efforts is very important.
You can read up on some important branding principle in this article.
Leaflet design for a beauty salon
Leaflet design is obviously closely tied to branding.
If at all possible we recommend to our clients that they use professional designers for their flyers.
We are happy to give you feedback on a leaflet you are creating with your designer to make the process easier. We can also offer you a full in-house design service with The Private Postman.
As you will be spending a considerable amount of money on printing and distribution of your flyers it is imperative you get your design right first.
The way your flyer looks and the message it delivers plays a crucial role in the success of your campaign.
Most modern leaflets tend to dedicate one side of the flyer to a high quality photograph or graphic.
The other side can include a more detailed description of your services and business in general. Overall the less text you can have on your flyer the better.
Always try to focus your leaflet on a single message. If you offer a wide range of services try to dedicate your flyer to one group of these.
You can always have other designs created and delivered as well if your beauty salon offers a wide range of products and services. This is especially effective as a part of a multi-drop campaign. But more on that later.
Try to keep your flyer design simple, focused on a single message and designed by a professional.
You can have a look at some examples of good leaflet design on our page dedicated to this topic.
Repeated deliveries
The above mentioned concepts become even more powerful when you look into repeated deliveries or multi-drop campaigns.
These campaigns rely on carefully planned repeated deliveries to the same addresses with a reasonable rest period between drops.
The rest periods will be 2-5 weeks minimum. Repeated campaigns do not have to be intense and can consist of as few as 3 drops per year.
On the other hand if you are approaching a critical period for your beauty salon or if you are opening a new location a more intense multi-drop campaign can be very effective.
London is a competitive place.
Many people here work long hours and live very busy lives. Capturing people’s attention can be a challenging task.
As such it is legitimate to try to get your advertising in front of people repeatedly.
What we are looking for is developing brand recognition and mind share when we use repeated drops.
When one of the locals in your area thinks about the service you provide you should be the first name to come to mind.
Focus Locally
The ultimate power of leaflet distribution lies in the fact that using this technique you can deliver a piece of custom made advertising to every household in your local area.
There is a clear benefit to focusing your resources on areas where most of your clientele comes from.
For a beauty salon this will mostly be within a mile or two from your salon’s location.
We can help you analyse how far your delivery radius should go, which parts of your area are the most desirable for delivery and how many households can be found in this selection.
We use a proprietary mapping system that gives you very accurate figures and allows you to track your leaflet deliveries in real time.
You can see a breakdown of the local London areas we deliver to on our page dedicated to this topic here.
Shared vs Solo delivery
When you start looking into flyer delivery for your beauty salon you will inevitably run into the distinction between Shared and Solo delivery campaigns.
Shared distribution works with the idea that we deliver your flyers together with one or two other non-competing leaflets.
On the other hand Solo or Solus distribution guarantees that it’s only your leaflet that is going to be put through each letterbox.
Most people tend to lean towards Solus distribution as it intuitively seems to be better.
However when done correctly there are no differences in response rates between Shared and Solus campaigns. On top of this, Shared delivery is approximately 40% cheaper.
As such the only benefit of running Solus delivery is some extra flexibility in terms of timing and location targeting. This comes from the fact that your distributor doesn’t need to arrange for multiple leaflets to go to the same area.
Overall, if you can run a Shared campaign in your area, always choose it over Solus delivery.
You can find out more on these techniques on our page focused on Shared and Solus distribution.
Work with a reputable distribution company
The quality and reliability of your delivery are obviously imperative to the success of your campaigns.
When you’re deciding on which company you will let handle your deliveries some of the things you want to check are.
Their mapping system
Talk to your potential distribution company about how they structure their mapping system. How do they arrive at the numbers of flyers they need from you for specific areas?
If the answer is simply pulling up numbers from government databases it is likely that they will be inaccurate.
You want to work with a company that has built their own mapping system that is based on the real situation on the ground in each area they cover.
Make sure that your distribution partner has a good reason for how their maps are put together.
Which addresses are excluded?
If you are targeting residential homes and addresses you need to make sure that your distributor excludes businesses and undeliverable addresses from their numbers and maps.
Talk to your potential distributor about how many undeliverable addresses are there in each area you are interested in and whether they’ve been taken out of the system.
How do they handle complaints?
Complaints happen in the world of flyer delivery. How does your potential distributor handle these?
Do they have a way of blacklisting problematic addresses? This is a very important element of any good leaflet delivery system.
What is the workforce like?
Try to find out what is the relationship your potential distribution company has with their workers.
Do they use agency workers or do they look to build long term relationships with the people that do the deliveries for them? How much do they pay their workers?
Always go for companies that try to work with their distributors long-term. Low-paid agency workers are simply not going to do a good job delivering your flyers.
What is the tracking system like?
Each distribution company has a different way of tracking deliveries. GPS tracking is a standard at this point. Some companies will also offer live tracking.
Talk to your potential distribution company about how they track their deliveries and how you can see these tracking systems yourself.
If you have any questions or if you’d like to book a leaflet distribution campaign with us please get in touch with here.
