The working lives of people in London have changed in a number of ways since the events of 2020 and beyond. Some of these changes were temporary and others have stuck.
The most relevant development in this domain has been the rise of flexible working, hybrid working and the work-from-home culture in general.
In this context, flexible and hybrid working is describing an arrangement where an employee or a worker will commute to the office on some days and work from home the rest of the time.
Why is this important for advertising?
If you are looking to advertise your services and products to potential customers, having an understanding of where they spend their time and attention is very important.
If more people are working from home, it might be a good idea to devote more of your advertising budget to targeting them there.
Let’s have a look at some of the data we have relating to flexible working and how it may be affecting different forms of advertising.
Statistics
In 2023 the ONS have published an analysis that focused on the topic of homeworkers and prevalence of hybrid working.
You can find it on the ONS site here.
It found that 16% of people reported working exclusively from home and 28% reported some kind of flexible working arrangement, where they commuted to work on some days and worked from home on others.
The ONS analysis also found that people in professional occupations were most likely to report to be working from home in some capacity.
Very interestingly it also found the highest levels of hybrid working in the UK were reported by workers in London. 4 in 10 workers in London reported to be in some kind of hybrid working arrangement.
The BBC have also reported on this fact in this article
The Standard also reports that one in five Londoners now work from home
In this article by Forbes we can also clearly see that the higher the income of the worker, the more likely they are to be working from home or in a hybrid capacity.
It is no surprise then, if we look at the Transport for London data from 2023-2024, that we see a decline in the usage of London buses and the tube.
In comparison to 2019 it appears that at times the usage of the tube is up to 27% lower.
How does this affect advertising?
It is clear that it has become much more common for people in London to work from home than ever before. Fewer people therefore use public transport on a daily basis.
As a result, advertising methods that target your potential customers in their homes should be something you are looking at to take advantage of this reality.
If you are spending your money on outdoors advertising, you might want to consider reallocating some of your budget to a more direct form of marketing that reaches people in their homes.
We can also see that workers who earn more, tend to work from home more often. If these are your target demographic, the effects described above will be even more important to you.
Leaflet distribution
If you are looking to reach people in their homes with your advertising, leaflet distribution becomes an obvious choice. Flyer delivery campaigns work on a simple principle.
– You select the area of London you want to target
– With the help of your leaflet distribution company, you design and print your flyers
– Your leaflets get delivered to all the accessible privately owned residential addresses within the area you’ve selected
Once mastered, leaflet distribution is a future-proof way to advertise your services. No matter which changes in technology are around the corner, people will always have a letterbox.
We know that people tend to remember leaflets they’ve received and that a large proportion of the population still keeps flyers they find helpful for future reference.
You can find out more about these statistics in our article focused on the topic here.
Leaflets also give you complete control over how you present your services and products. This is not something that is possible on the many comparison sites and industry specific apps where you often end up listed next to all of your local competition with very limited real estate for text and images.
If you want to find out how a leaflet distribution campaign might work for you, have a look at our page focused on Door to Door services here.
