When asking how many leaflets a distributor can deliver in a day, we need to establish the type of delivery we are talking about first. There are two types of leaflet distribution worth mentioning.
1. Door to door
A door to door service guarantees delivery to a specific number of households in a pre-selected area. The leaflets are delivered through the letterbox directly into each home. This is our bread and butter and most of our deliveries are done this way. The amount of leaflets a single distributor can deliver in a day is approximately 800-1000.
This is a good amount that makes each delivery trip productive for the person delivering the leaflets, but it is not too physically gruelling to keep up with. Delivering too many leaflets in a single day will inevitably result in the quality of distribution declining. Speed of delivery isn’t everything.
The exact number of flyers delivered every day also depends on how many leaflets are being delivered to each house. At The Private Postman we aim to deliver
1 leaflet to houses with 1 doorbell 2 leaflets to houses with 2 doorbells
And a maximum of 3 leaflets to houses with 3 doorbells or more
These numbers are consistent with what is considered an industry standard.
2. Hand to hand
This service focuses on handing out flyers to members of the public in busy parts of London at specific times of day. The speed of delivery here is approximately 400 leaflets, per day, per distributor.
As such it is generally less effective than door to door and we tend to recommend it only in specific situations where door to door leaflet distribution is not an option.
Outside of a few use cases, door to door is superior to hand to hand in response rates and it is a more economical way to get your flyers to potential clients.
What can affect speed of delivery?
How efficiently a distributor can deliver leaflets also depends on a number of factors
1. Mapping system
When you are deciding on which company to have run your leaflet distribution, you want to check the quality of their mapping system.
Do they exclude business addresses, inaccessible properties or local authority housing?
Is the mapping system laid out in a way one can clearly understand, and does it allow the individual distributor to plan his or her rounds well to avoid wasting time?
2. Are the distributors experienced?
The level of a distributor’s experience will make a big difference on the number of flyers they can deliver in a day.
The biggest causes of slow deliveries are poor planning of a route and a need to backtrack. These are the two biggest enemies of speedy delivery.
Good mapping combined with a bit of basic planning before a distributor heads out to do a route can make a big difference to how fast one can deliver.
Having the distributors work close to their home or in areas they are familiar with can also help. Distributors with local knowledge of an area can avoid potential problems before they arise.
3. How many distributors are handling a given campaign
The most obvious multiplier for how fast your campaign will be executed is the number of distributors delivering your leaflets. When choosing a company to work with on a larger leaflet drop, check how many people they are able to assign to your campaign.
If you are looking to run campaigns of hundreds of thousands of flyers, you will need a distribution partner than can service this volume of work comfortably.
At The Private Postman, we deliver millions of leaflets in London every year and regularly handle campaigns in the hundreds of thousands of leaflets by working with a good and healthy delivering team.
The most important thing when it comes to advertising your personal training services in London is to know what kind of customer you are trying to attract.
Do you specialise in going to people’s homes and charge £100 per hour? This will dictate which areas of London will be appropriate to focus your advertising on and which areas are going to be unproductive to target.
In the case mentioned above, you might need to target a few different areas spread around town. Maybe some central postcodes. If you go to North/North-West London you can look at NW3, NW6. Or TW9 and SW19 south of the river. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, it’s meant to illustrate that if the services you offer require it, you might need to spread your campaigns around London a little bit.
On the other hand, if you have a local personal training studio and are hoping to get people into group sessions for £15/session you might want focus more locally.
Instead of spreading your advertising around London, you want to focus on areas within walking distance from your location.
On top of that, you might want to research how long it takes to drive from other/neighbouring postcodes and target the areas which are reasonably close. You can also consider what are the best public transport connections connecting your local area and see which parts of London are still within a 20-minute commute to you using public transport.
As you can see, these two approaches to advertising are very different. The type of client you are after should dictate how and where you will be advertising.
There is almost no situation in which you should be advertising to the whole of London. Always narrow down your targeting. Never just blast your ads to the whole city.
Separate the advertising of different services
You can also separate your advertising for different services you are providing. If your provide group classes like mentioned above but a part of your studio’s focus are also one-on-one back pain management sessions. You probably want to consider separating your advertising of these two different services.
You can for example have your back pain management sessions advertised at almost any time of year. On the other hand your group sessions might benefit from a push at the beginning of the year when people are likely to get motivated for this kind of activity.
Ultimately, you want to avoid advertising too many varied services with a single ad/medium at once. Whether you are advertising on Facebook or with leaflets. Make sure your ads are focused and simple to understand.
For more details have a look at the link above. We can, however still share some flyer delivery basics with you here.
Keep it simple
Keep your flyer design and your campaigns simple. Use a single page A5 flyer with a great quality image on one side. You can use the other side of your flyer to elaborate on the details of your services with more text.
Select the best areas you want to advertise in according to what we discussed in the first part of this article and don’t overcomplicate your targeting. Depending on your goals keep your campaigns between 5,000-50,000 flyers
Repeat drops
Most advertising works best when some element of repetition is present in your campaign planning. Talk to your delivery company about their view on how many times you can repeat your flyer campaigns in particular areas and how long the break between each drop should be.
Don’t overdo it with too many repeated flyer deliveries but don’t be afraid to target a particularly important area a couple of times at a crucial time of year.
As flyer delivery has a non-trivial entry cost due to flyer design, printing and the cost of delivery itself, try to work with professionals to maximise your chance of success.
Get someone who understands flyer design to put your flyer together. Get a reputable printing house to print your flyers. Work with professionals when it comes to delivery.
You want to get the most out of your investment and any mistake in design or delivery, can cost you. Work with professionals and get the most out of your flyer delivery efforts.
Online marketing methods for PTs
Nowadays a good chunk of your advertising will be happening online. Let’s have a look at some of the online methods that should be the most productive for you, when it comes to advertising your PT services.
Social Media
Social media is an obvious choice for a personal trainer. The way you approach it however, will ultimately have a big effect on whether your social media can bring in customers.
Social media is heavily saturated with content. Especially in the fitness realm. For you to punch through the noise and organically reach large numbers of people is possible but very unlikely unless this is your primary job.
As a local business or a personal trainer, you can use social media as a form of social proof and source of information for people that are potentially already interested in your services.
You can simply post regular updates about your classes, details of your own training routine or maybe some information about workshops you are attending. When you do this, people that have found you online or through your advertising can have a look at your posts and make a decision whether you are a good fit for what they’re looking for.
Is your training focused on hard core powerlifting, kettlebells, body weight training or high intensity interval training? If your posts reflect your focus, people get the idea about what you do very quickly.
This can help tremendously as this can act as a form of automatic selection. The people that want to do the kind of training you are offering are going to be more likely to call you and book a session after visiting your social media. People who are not interested in the training modalities you are using will be less likely to call you and spend unnecessary time figuring out that you are ultimately not a good fit for their needs.
Paid Ads
Social media sites can allow for some great targeted advertising. You can push your posts and ads to very specific demographic groups, with concrete interests in particular locations. These ads can be in the form of an image, video or a regular post.
Just from this description, It should be pretty clear that social media ads can be very effective tools, when used correctly. You can target the kinds of people that are the most likely to be interested in your services, with a high level of accuracy.
SEO and your website
Having a quality website is still an important part of presenting your personal training business. Even though your social media activity can be informative to your potential clients, the amount of well structured information you can have on your website is unique to the medium.
Your website doesn’t have to be very complicated. If you want, you can have an interactive booking system on your site, but it’s not necessary.
You can look at your website as the place to put all the relevant information about you and your personal training services. You can include videos of you training, your accreditations, blog articles on relevant topics, testimonials.
Due to the way you can structure your website, you can include a lot of information without having to worry about overwhelming people too easily.
If you want to take your website to the next level, you can look at Search Engine Optimisations (SEO). This is a field that focuses on optimising your site to come up closer to the top of searches on google and other search engines.
It’s a large topic to get into, but when approached correctly, it has huge potential benefits. It might be worth doing some basic research. You can maybe start looking into SEO here.
In this article we’ll have a look at some the most important things you might want to consider when it comes to advertising swimming lessons or a swim school in London.
Targeting and demographics
As a swimming teacher or a leader of a swimming school/program, your business is clearly going to be tied to a particular location. How you decide to target your advertising will depend on the exact location of the pool facilities you are using.
Location
Deciding on what is a reasonable radius around your facilities within which you’ll focus most of your advertising is going to be important. You want to look at how easy it is to drive to your location from different parts of town. Are there good public transport link?
If you are looking to advertise children swimming classes you probably don’t want to advertise in areas which will have more than a 20-30minute commute for your potential clients.
Whether you’re advertising online or using offline methods, there is going to be very little value advertising in South London, if your pool facilities are in North London.
This might seem like a trivial point, but you want to keep this in mind especially on social media. The temptation might be to chase numbers wherever they come from, however what really counts for your business are people close to your location that can realistically come to your classes.
Keep your advertising local and that way get the most out of the time and resources your put into your marketing.
Tailor your advertising
If you offer a wide variety of classes you want to ideally tailor each piece of advertising material to reflect who you are targeting with a particular campaign.
Whether you are creating a leaflet or a social media ad, try to focus that piece of advertising on a single demographic.
If you offer beginner swimming classes for children and advanced swimming classes for adults, it is a good idea to completely separate your advertising for these different services. (Unless you run these parallel to each other at the same time, and you are looking to get parents and their children to come together.)
Your social media ads or flyers targeting parents, advertising your children swimming classes, should look completely different to ads aimed at 30-50 year-olds looking to get fit through advanced swimming.
Timing
When it comes to your advertising efforts, consider which time of year is best for you to push harder and when you are less likely to get new clients coming in.
This might seem like common sense, but many business owners prefer just automating their advertising both online and offline and let things run the same way 12-months out of the year.
To get the most from your advertising budget, you don’t want to be doing that.
Advertising children swimming classes in London in the middle of March is probably not a great idea. Focusing your advertising budget more towards early September when people’s schedules for the year are being formed might be a better choice.
Maybe you have good experience running classes through the summer or half-term breaks. If this is the case, running your campaigns for the two weeks leading up to these might be a good idea.
Leaflets and Flyers
Leaflets are one of the most reliable forms of advertising for local businesses in London.
They are excellent especially when it comes to geographically targeting the households near your business or specific areas with favourable demographics.
As London leaflet distribution is what we do at The Private Postman, we can help you understand how to get the most out of your campaigns.
Keep it simple
Keep your leaflet to a basic A5 single page format. Devoting one side of the flyer to an excellent photo or an image is a good idea. The other side of your flyer can contain more text and detailed information about your services.
Try to avoid advertising too many different services on one leaflet. It’s better to run multiple campaigns, than create and unfocused flyer design that confuses the recipient.
Keep your targeting also reasonably simple. Ask your distribution company which areas would be the most appropriate for you and see if you agree with what they tell you.
Talk to your distributor about how much time you should keep between drops and give repeat drops a go.
Have your leaflet point to your website
If you have a good website, you can include a URL or a QR code on your leaflet to direct your potential customers to it.
The amount of information you can include on a good website is incomparable to any marketing tool.
Testimonials
Include testimonials from happy clients on your flyers whenever possible. Testimonials simply work and can make your flyers much more effective.
Online advertising
Advertising online can be very effective when done right.
Social Media
Social media ads are excellent as they can be targeted very carefully and each ad can be tailored to very specific demographics.
You can play with creating different ads to target parents, grand parents, adult looking to swim themselves. If you learn to do this well, you will be able to get a lot for your advertising spend.
Search Engines
You can pay to have your site come up in Google and other search engines when people search for particular search terms. This can be effective, however it can be quite a bit more expensive per click compared to social media advertising.
You can also try to optimise your website and include helpful written content on it to maximise your chances of rising to the top of the search terms organically. This is called ‘SEO’ or Search Engine Optimisation. It’s a large field and you might want to do some research on this yourself.
Website
Having a quality website with testimonials, good videos, images, FAQs, a booking calendar etc… is something that can’t be easily replaced.
You can include a huge amount of information on your website while keeping it easy to navigate. Potential clients will often look at your website before calling and the better your site is, the more likely you should be to convert them into paying customers.
Combining online and offline marketing
Running your online ads and your leaflet distribution drops at the same time in the same areas can help the effectiveness of both.
As people see your advertising in different domains, even if they don’t act on it immediately, they develop a familiarity with your branding and message.
If you do this sensitively, you can over time, develop brand recognition, that converts potential customers over the long term very well.
Advertising a trade business nowadays can be a challenging task. Most plumbers, builders, carpenters, electricians and people in other trades have found themselves having to rely on various online directories to advertise.
These directories can be helpful but they inevitably come with a number of issues. In this article we’ll talk about what these issues are, and how you can work around them by taking control of your marketing.
At The Private Postman our expertise is leaflet distribution and as such we’ll show you how leaflets can be a part of the solution for most businesses.
Advertising a dental practice can be delicate business. Building trust with your potential clients as a dentist is very important and it should be a big focus in your marketing.
Leaflets can help with this process. Let’s have a look at what’s unique about flyers and how they can fit into the advertising strategy of your dental practice.
How to use social media to spread the word about your martial arts school
Competing for attention on social media can be a daunting task. Millions of people and companies are fighting for tiny slices of each business niche. Large amounts of money are invested in creating the most eye catching and attention grabbing posts, videos and images.
If you try to compete in this way, you are taking on a very substantial challenge. One that’s probably incompatible with running a martial arts school and teaching lessons.
What you can do instead is use your social media to talk to your local area and your potential clients within it. There is no need for you to attract large numbers of clicks from Australia if your dojo is in Islington, North London.
You can use your social media channels for two purposes.
Show what training with you is like
You can share casual videos and images of people training in your school. If you do this regularly, this can serve to show people, who might be researching martial arts classes in your area, the kind of atmosphere and culture you keep in your school.
Based on this, they can make a decision whether your classes will be the right fit for them. This is equally relevant if you run family friendly karate classes focused on children or a rough and ready boxing gym for adults only.
In either of these situations you want the right kind of customer to walk through the door. You social media posts can serve to attract the right kind of person for whom your gym will be the right fit.
If you run multiple types of classes that range from casual classes for kids to serious training for adults, you can make this clear with a variety of posts.
Directly advertise
Use the various social media advertising options to target people in your local area. Most social media platforms allow you to target your posts and ads geographically.
This is relevant for a martial arts gym as you can make a reasonable guess on how far people are willing to travel for martial arts classes and target your advertising within this radius.
You want to get as granular with your advertising on social media as possible. Given that you can target people by their gender, age range, location and interests, you can tailor your ads to these very specific demographics.
Ads for self defence classes for young women should look different to ads for advanced jiu jitsu no-gi sessions for men.
Using flyers to advertise martial arts classes locally
Most types of businesses in London use flyers to advertise. Ranging from gyms to estate agents and everything in-between. Leaflets are a very effective tool for bringing in new customers and creating brand recognition in specific areas of London.
However, as designing, printing and distributing flyers carries a cost, you want to make sure that you get the most out of your investment. From our experience as an established leaflet distribution company we’d advise you to focus on the following.
Decide on your strategy
The first place to start when it comes to developing a proper leaflet distribution strategy is defining exactly what you want each drop to achieve.
You can aim to simply raise the awareness of your classes in a given area. In this case, you might try to make your flyer informative and mostly focus on sharing a wide range of classes you offer.
As a different example, you might want to fill a particular class in your schedule. Let’s say an early morning jiu jitsu class that professionals can attend before going to work. In this case you would aim your whole design and distribution strategy towards this end.
Knowing exactly what you want your flyer campaign to achieve will make all the difference.
Create your design with a pro
When it comes to designing your leaflet, spend the money and work with someone who is experienced in flyer design. There are many details that you might miss when it comes to leaflet design unless you work with someone who knows exactly how a flyer should be structured.
Stick to a single page A5 format on a reasonably thick paper (200-300gsm). Keep one side of your leaflet for information about your services and the other dedicated to a great quality picture that summarizes what you do.
Keeping things simple like this is the winning recipe, when it comes to leaflet distribution in London.
Find a reputable distribution company
When you are looking for a distribution company, look for someone who can demonstrate a good knowledge of London. Check that their distribution systems exclude undeliverable addresses, business addresses and other potential causes of waste of your flyers.
Ideally find a company that will be able to handle the printing and storage of your leaflets as well. Reducing the headache of storing and transporting tens of thousands of leaflets is imperative for a busy gym owner.
Most importantly, find a company that allows you to communicate with real sales and distribution people. Don’t book your leaflet campaigns via online forms and AI assistants on people’s websites.
Run the idea for your campaign by experienced people that care about the success of your campaign and who will want you to be a long term client.
In the age of social media, many people feel like having a website is no longer very important for some types of businesses. This might be the case for some. However, a martial arts school can definitely benefit from having a well designed and detailed website.
The main benefit of having a website is the amount of information you are able to communicate to a potential customer.
You can include details about the focus of each of your classes, share information about yourself and your other instructors or include an FAQ section to pre-emptively answer the most common questions people have.
You can also set up a booking system with a calendar to simplify the booking process for some people.
Your website doesn’t have to be flashy or complicated, but it should be informative. An informative website will potentially have a big impact on a potential customer who is serious and is deciding between multiple martial arts schools.
It can communicate more information than any piece of advertising, you’ll be able to create.
Engaging the local community
Being a visible part of your local community can also have a big positive impact on your martial arts school. It’s one of the best ways to also insulate yourself from changes in the advertising landscape, that are outside of your control.
For example, If your social media is bringing in the majority of new students right now, it’s a good to have alternatives set up, to know that an unexpected algorithm change or new legislation around social media advertising won’t impact you disproportionately.
You can aim to be engaged with other local businesses, gyms or schools. Provide free community seminars or public demonstrations of your skills adjacent to local events (farmers markets, fairs, etc…)
These things make a difference in the long term and over the period of years can create a steady stream of new students that is completely independent from your other active forms of advertising.
What are the advantages of flyers for a building company?
One of the biggest advantages of leaflet distribution is the fact, that your flyers reach every single household within your target area. This minimises any skew in terms of demographics. You are going to be reaching young home owners and older couples in the same way.
This is not the case with most other forms of advertising which tend to lean one way or the other.
This is something that is very relevant for a building company. There will be people that see your advertising that are looking to start a building project imminently. However there will be many people who might be looking to do so in a few months.
For these people it’s much more convenient to keep a physical piece of advertising like a leaflet than trying to save an online ad via a screenshot on their phone or a similarly clunky mechanism.
With flyers, you are also in complete control over how you present your company. You are not simply filling out a listing on a trade directory. You get to choose the size of images you are using, the types of information you are communicating and how many households you are reaching.
Which households should I target with my building leaflets?
When booking a flyer drop with a distribution company you want to make sure that their mapping system if focused on the types of properties you do most of your work on.
If most of your work is done on terraced and detached houses, this kind of system is ideal for you.
If you are looking to target the other types of properties instead (like large blocks of flats or businesses) a special type of delivery that targets only these addresses can be arranged.
This is important as the types of services you are likely to be offering to semi-detached home owners are going to be considerably different to what you’ll be offering a small business owner.
If you are looking to serve both, you want to run separate drops and ideally develop unique leaflets for both groups of customers.
Always check that your distributor has this or a similar level of separation in their system. Otherwise some of your flyers will be wasted by being delivered to an irrelevant type of property.
Where should you be delivering your flyers?
There are two types of leaflet distribution campaigns most building companies will be running.
You might be targeting an area of London that has a high proportion of the type of properties you specialise in with campaigns ranging from 10,000 – 100,000 households. The way you select these areas can be as follows.
– You specialise in repairs and extensions to Victorian terraced houses.
– You know that there are many of these particular properties in the NW6 postcode.
– Your distributor will analyse the postcode and come back to you with a target area of 15,000 households in NW6.
– You print 15,000 flyers and go ahead with a drop.
These kinds of campaigns are also often repeated within a reasonable time frame. Sometimes these drops can be repeated at particular times of year that are important for your business or they can follow each other more closely. Both of these approaches aim to build brand recognition.
The other type of campaign most building companies will run is targeting the area surrounding a current or recently finished project the company has done.
As the locals have likely seen your scaffolding and/or craftsmen at work in their local area, your advertising becomes more real to them. They can also check with their neighbours about their experience with your services.
This is an excellent approach to capitalising on your presence in an area and using a successful project to attract more local business.
What should a building company leaflet look like?
In terms of format, there is nothing unique you want to be experimenting with, when creating a leaflet for your building company. A single page A5 flyer is what we recommend in almost all scenarios.
The front side of your flyer should largely be taken up by a high quality image of one of your successful projects. If your branding is recognisable and has weight in the local area you are targeting, you can have this side of the flyer be dedicated to a graphic with your company branding.
Beyond this, you want your flyer to do two things. Communicate details about the types of services you are offering and build trust.
Providing building works or larger repairs on people’s homes is a sensitive thing. People are understandably worried about how the project they are hiring you for will turn out.
The better your leaflet is, the more it will instil trust in your services and experience.
To this end, when possible, you want to include testimonials on your flyer. Testimonials are a very powerful tool for building trust and confidence with new clients. When you can, use an image of the finished project together with the testimonial.
Make sure to include mentions of your memberships in relevant trade bodies and associations. Any unique accreditations are also helpful to mention as well as appropriate details about your insurance.
As long as you are focusing your leaflet design on communicating the core services you are offering and instilling trust, you are on your way to a successful flyer campaign.
You can also include a QR code on your flyer that takes your potential customer to your website, a case study or a video. This can be a fantastic tool to further help people understand how you work and show off some of the successful projects you’ve worked on.
Having a reliable method of advertising your private medical practice locally in London can help you regularly reach the people that are the most likely to need and use your services.
When it comes to advertising to households within specific London areas, leaflet distribution is one of the best tools you can use. Let’s have a look at why using flyers might the right approach for you clinic.
Why use flyers to advertise a private clinic?
Leaflet distribution has a number of unique advantages that fit nicely into what most medical practices are looking for in their advertising.
Ability to target the area local to your clinic
You might offer urgent care, private GP services and other services that benefit from having your clinic located close to your patients. Leaflet distribution is a great tool to target a specific radius around your location and reach every household within this area.
This is an approach that is used by a variety of location sensitive businesses. Ranging from Estate Agents to Restaurants that deliver only in very specific parts of London.
Reminding all the people in your local area of your existence and the services you offer is a powerful advertising tool. This is true whether you are occupying a prominent location on the high street or a more residential area with less footfall.
Many older people or busy professionals want to minimise travel time around London and as such will often prefer using a local service to a more remote one.
Most locally focused flyer campaigns will be targeting somewhere between 20,000 – 40,000 households.
Ability to target key areas around London
If your services are somewhat more specialised or if many of your clients don’t mind travelling, you might also look to target key areas around London that are not necessarily local to your practice.
This can open up opportunities to target hundreds of thousands of homes all over the capital. You can select areas as small as a few thousands households up to hundreds of thousands.
If you are not completely sure which London areas would be the most appropriate for your medical practice to target, you can discuss what your ideal client looks like with your leaflet distribution company. They can then help you prioritise and select the best places for you to deliver your flyers to.
Reaching all demographics including older people
As your leaflets are delivered to every privately owned, accessible, residential address in your selected area there is no significant demographic skew in who you are able to reach.
This means that you are able to reach busy professionals, stay at home parents and older demographics alike. This is very important as the latter group is obviously an important part of the clientele of most private health clinics but can be difficult to reach via online advertising.
When you are looking to do a flyer delivery campaign for your private medical practice you want to keep these basic ideas in mind.
Work with professionals
When it comes to designing your leaflets and delivering them, you want to make sure to work with professionals.
Using a quality design will make a big difference to the effectiveness of your campaign. You want to make sure that your leaflets are communicating the most important information in the clearest and most economical way.
We’ve also eliminated all undeliverable households, business addresses and local authority properties from our standard distribution systems. As such, you can be sure that the numbers of flyers you are printing are realistically going to be delivered and not wasted.
We can also help you arrange the printing, transport and storage of your flyers. This means you are not wasting any flyers but also not wasting time worrying about where you will store a 100,000 leaflets that just arrived from your printing house.
Repeat your drops
Another great thing about flyer delivery in London is the fact that you can repeat your campaigns with little effort. As long as you have your design in order and your target areas selected, a single phone call to your distributor is all you need to start a new campaign.
Repeating flyer drops to the same households at important times of the year is standard practice. A newly opened medical clinic can also aim to run a number of repeat drops in a shorter period of time.
This is often done to develop as much mind share in your key areas as possible. ie. Cut through the noise and make sure that you are the first thought in people’s mind when they need the kind of medical care you are offering.
Keep it simple
Keep your flyers simple, classy and to the point. Don’t experiment with unusual leaflet formats unless there is a good reason to do so. A good old A5 single page flyer is the best choice in 99% of cases.
Don’t try to get too specific with your targeting. Stick to areas no smaller than 5,000 households and repeat your drops when sensible.
If you stick to these basic rules you are on your way to get the most out of your leaflet distribution efforts.
Dog walking can be a very rewarding job. Spending time outside with dogs is, however, not all you have to do to have a successful dog walking business.
Advertising and marketing are a part of the deal. In order to have clients you must first somehow attract them.
This doesn’t have to be a daunting task. In this article we are going to discuss the most common and effective ways of advertising pet sitting services in 2024.
We are going to have a look at how you can use social media in a practical way. We’ll talk about leaflet distribution as one of the best forms of local advertising and we’ll touch on other ideas as well.
We’ll keep our focus local, which in our case is going to be London. We are not going to discuss how you can build a multinational pet sitting business with billions of Instagram hits.
We’ll focus on practical ways you can use to advertise dog walking and pet sitting services in your local area.
How to use social media as a pet sitter
Making interesting and engaging content for social media can be a real challenge for most businesses.
As a pet sitter or a dog walker you however have a unique advantage. Content with pets and dogs is interesting and engaging just by the fact that it includes animals. And people love animals.
On top of this, pet owners are often open to looking up new training methods, places to walk their dogs in their area, nutritional tips and more.
You are going to be best served by using visual platforms like Instagram for your pet related content.
The biggest challenge in using social media, that everyone has to contend with, is the intense competition that takes place on these platforms.
Because of the possibility of reaching a huge number of people, some of the most creative minds in the world are paid a lot of money to focus on creating content that is meant to capture the attention of millions.
On top of this, large brands spend tens of millions of pounds on social media. You don’t have to feel like you have to compete with this.
You should mostly care about people in the areas you can serve with your services. If you provide dog walking services in West London, you don’t need a hundred thousand people from Australia watching your videos.
You can create informative and engaging content about pet nutrition, training or local walking spots and pay Instagram to serve these posts to people that live in the areas you are working in.
You can then combine these useful and interesting posts with ads for your services.
This way, you can get yourself on the screens of people that have pets, are interested in pets and live in your local area. You can do this without having to compete with everyone else in the world at the same time. You want to compete for your local market only.
Advertising dog walking services using leaflets and flyers
Keeping in the spirit of mostly focusing on your local area, leaflet distribution is an excellent way of marketing dog walking or pet sitting business.
Leaflets are one of the most effective ways of advertising locally in London. The physical nature of the flyer is something that digital formats can’t replicate.
You can have a look at the statistics about how many people keep the flyers they receive and how they interact with them in our leaflet distribution statistics blog here.
One of the best things about leaflet distribution is the fact that you can reach every single home in the area you select.
As long as the home has a letterbox, they will receive your flyers. This is very different to social media advertising. On social media only the people that use the particular app you are using will see your advertising.
Leaflets simply make it into every household that has a letterbox.
It is important that you have at least a basic understanding of how leaflet distribution works before you start spending money on it.
The idea could be summarised this way – Make sure to use a reputable company that has experience working in your local area (in our case London).
Make sure that when you contact your leaflet distributor, you can speak to real people and not just AI assistants and chat bots. You want to talk to your distributor about where you are with your dog walking businesses and what you are looking to achieve with your flyer delivery campaign.
When you are planning the details of your campaigns, make an extra effort to discuss how your leaflets are written as that will have a real impact on the results of your drops.
On the more technical front. Go with A5 leaflets, shared delivery and try repeated drops where possible.
Advertising dog walking services in London doesn’t have to be complicated. If you keep things targeted, simple and focused on your local area your are well on your way.
Should you have a website to advertise dog walking services?
Most businesses can still benefit from having a good website. Even though most of people’s attention online is on social media, clients that are seriously interested in your pet sitting services are likely to visit your website.
You can use your website to include testimonials, display any accreditations you might hold and give more detailed information about your services.
If you like writing in longer form, you can also keep a blog. If you have useful things to share in written form on your website, you can benefit from this as search engines reward websites with useful written content by better rankings in search results.
Dog walking and networking
Since the beginning of this article, everything we’ve discussed has been focused on advertising locally to the London area in which you actually do business.
Your networking should take on the same philosophy. Are there any local pet shops, groomers or veterinary clinics in your area?
They might be open to cooperating with you. You can recommend your clients use the services of your friendly local pet groomer and they can recommend your dog walking services in return.
These partnerships can be very lucrative as an in-person recommendation from a trusted source is infinitely more powerful than any form of advertising.
If you have good people skills and do this correctly, your local network can become one of the most effective methods of advertising your dog walking services.
With that said, make sure that the local businesses you are partnering up with are reliable and are doing a good job. Once you partner up in this way, you are tying your reputation to whoever you are recommending.
Local reputation is everything when it comes to small businesses. People need to trust you with their pets and sometimes even access to their homes. You need to care about the reputation of your pet sitting business and you have to make sure it isn’t carelessly damaged.
It can also be very helpful to get to know the other dog walkers in your part of London. It’s good for you to have someone you can recommend instead of yourself when you get a call from a client you can’t serve.
What if you get ill? Can you have someone take over your duties for a while?
Having relationships with reliable and trustworthy local dog walkers and pet sitters can make the difference between you enjoying your job and being a slave to it. If you can develop a local network of people in your line of work – do it! You will not regret it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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