Introduction
Gardening and landscaping businesses want to focus their advertising only on specific types of properties. There is no point advertising gardening services to a block of flats.
Gardeners and landscapers are somewhat unique in this compared to other types of businesses like restaurants, gyms or law companies. These businesses might focus on geographic areas or various demographic markers instead.
As such, gardening businesses can benefit greatly from an advertising method that allows for accurate targeting of curated areas consisting mostly of homes with gardens.
Leaflet distribution is excellent for this. In this blog we’ll talk in detail about how leaflet delivery works for gardeners and landscapers. We’ll also touch on other supplementary things like the design and importance of a landscaping website.
Why leaflet delivery
Like we’ve already mentioned, one of the great things about leaflet delivery is that you can target a specific area based on the type of houses and properties within it.
This means that your leaflets are going to be delivered only to the homes of people who might be interested in your services with minimum waste. In short, you are going to be targeting houses with gardens and no one else.
When you are looking for a flyer delivery company to work with, you want to make sure they run a mapping system that allows for this.
If their system is based purely on postal sectors you are unlikely to be able to do very granular targeting.
You want your distribution company to run a proprietary mapping system that is based on property type, allows for flexibility and is not tied to government numbers and postal sectors.
At The Private Postman we use the TPP coded walk system that works exactly like that. You can read more about it on our page dedicated to GPS tracking and Mapping.
In general, you want to make sure that the mapping system your company is using has an internal logic (postal sectors are arbitrary) and that it allows for some flexibility.
How do leaflets for landscapers work?
The pipeline for getting from zero to getting a leaflet distribution campaign under way looks something like this.
Find the right distribution company, decide on a budget, design a flyer, print your leaflets, select your target areas and move on to delivery.
Find the right distribution company
We’ve already mentioned the most important thing to focus on when selecting your distribution company. Gardening and landscaping companies need a distributor with a flexible mapping system that allows for good targeting based on property type.
You also want to make sure that you can talk to an expert when planning your campaign. Some delivery companies have automated their systems and employed call centres to answer basic questions.
You want to stay away from these. You need to be able to speak to an expert that can advise you on which areas of London you should be targeting. If you already have a leaflet design finished you want your distributor to have a look at it and give you feedback.
You also want to check whether the company you are considering uses agency workers or if they try to build long-term relationships with their workers instead.
Your flyer delivery campaign is going to be successful only if every individual distributor does a good job delivering your leaflets. You always want to pick a company that has good long term relationships with their workers.
You can have a look at some information about our workforce on our why choose us page.
Decide on a budget
Your budget will determine how many flyers you can print and how many homes you can have them delivered to.
A good distributor should be able to advise you on how many flyers you’ll need to target the best areas within London. You might find that your initial budget is higher than you need to cover all the households you want.
In that case, you can look at running multiple deliveries to the same homes with rest periods between drops. This technique can yield great results. In some instances it is better to deliver your leaflet to 20,000 homes twice than to 40,000 homes once.
Discuss your budget and the idea of repeat deliveries with your distribution company when planning your campaign.
Design a flyer and print your leaflets
The most important thing about leaflet design when it comes to gardening and landscaping businesses is to use a professional graphic designer.
If possible, try to liaise with your distributor about your designs also. There is a lot to consider when designing a leaflet and you want to make sure that you are not handicapping your campaign with bad design decisions.
Get your flyer designed properly and discuss the concept for your leaflet with your distributor. Thanks to their experience, they might come back with feedback opn elements you haven’t considered.
Keep your flyers to a basic A5 or A6 format and try to get your printing done through your distribution partner. They will be able to get better prices with printing houses than you’d be able to secure yourself.
Select your target areas
Targeting is the name of the game when it comes to leaflet distribution for gardeners and landscapers.
You want to be closely working with your distribution company and select only the areas with a high density of homes with gardens. This should not be a challenging task for an experienced distributor.
Examples of leaflets for gardeners
If you are focusing mainly on garden maintenance, patio building, hedge trimming and similar services, you can structure your leaflet similarly to this example.
You want the largest headline on your gardener leaflet to clearly communicate what your services are about. Your branding and company name are important but they come second.
It’s not a bad idea to include a list of services you offer. Try to keep the number of services on this lest under ten if possible. You want to make it clear that you can offer a variety of services but you don’t want to clutter your flyer.
If possible, always send people to your website for more information. A leaflet is meant to introduce you to the client. Sending them to another place where they can get more information about you is a good thing.
You can focus on getting people to call you directly or visit your website. Don’t try to include too much information on your flyer.
If you focus more on garden design and you specialise in larger projects, you can use your leaflet more to introduce your brand and describe what you do through a good photograph.
In this example, the image of a large garden is taking up most of the leaflet. It is also clear that garden design for larger projects is the main focus of the company in question.
Some more information can be included on the other side of the flyer but the general focus of what this landscaping company does should be clear from the image and branding.
It is again important to clearly display the website URL and contact information. A leaflet is not meant to give an exhaustive account of everything you do, your history and achievements. Your website can do this.
Work on your website
In a world heavily focused on social media, it can be easy to overlook your website. However, for gardening and landscaping businesses, quality websites are a necessity.
A good website is one of the best places to show images of your work in high resolution. You can get into the intricacies of the services you offer and the kinds of work you can do.
You can display awards, accreditations and testimonials. It is difficult to do all of this in any other medium. Especially in a way that you curate yourself.
Even though social media is important, many of the potential customers who are seriously considering using your services will visit your website at some point.
Develop a great website for your company and link to it from all of your flyers. You can start looking at some basic web design rules to get more informed in this article.
