Leaflet ads are a great way to reach people in local areas of London.
Leaflet ads have consistently remained a considerable part of the advertising efforts of most successful London companies.
No matter which technological changes in the advertising landscape have shaken up the industry, leaflet ads have remained.
This is mainly because leaflet ads guarantee that you can get your advertising materials to every single household in your chosen area. This is not something that is available through any other method.
There are multiple ways we can get our flyers into the hands of our potential customers.
Some of these methods are more effective than others though. Time and effort are precious commodities and wasting them is not something a good business does.
If you are going to hand out flyers the logical question would be. How to hand out Flyers Effectively?
Let’s have a look at the different ways we can hand out flyers and you can make a decision on which of these is right for you.
Even though leaflet posting is fundamentally a simple task there are a few techniques and general principles, rules and techniques you want to keep in mind when planning a flyer campaign in the UK.
These are especially important as designing, printing and delivering leaflets carries a cost. You want to make sure that at the end of your campaign you are getting the best results you can considering your investment.
These techniques will range from guidance on which principles you should keep in mind when designing your flyer, how you should time your campaigns to whether your delivery company should be working in bad weather.
Law companies have been successfully using flyer delivery in London for decades.
Leaflets can yield great results when properly designed and targeted. Due to the costs associated with the physical production of flyers and their delivery it is important that you carefully plan your drops.
You want to plan and design your campaigns ideally with the help of a professional distribution company that understands the business and London as a whole.
Let’s talk about the most important elements of flyer delivery, how your law company can get the most out of it and how to find a reliable distribution partner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The design of your flyer is one of the most important elements in the success of your campaign.
Good targeting, timing and delivery are all crucial but without good design you will never get optimal results. A bad design can easily sink an otherwise perfectly good campaign.
General principles
We will spend a good amount of time discussing specific designs and talking about what makes them work.
Before we do that however we should have a look at some of the general principles that will be governing our thinking about leaflet design in all cases.
Simplicity
The most important principle we need to keep in mind is simplicity. This applies in terms of the message we are trying to convey, the goal of the design and the design itself.
Your flyers should have one main message they are trying to deliver. If you have a sale on a specific service happening, at least 90% of your flyer should be dedicated to this.
If you want to let everyone know that your Italian restaurant now delivers food in their area, focus on this message only. A great picture of your food plus information about how people can order is all you need. There is nothing to be gained from adding a large menu or anything else.
High quality photography
Since we are keeping our flyer design simple, your photographs and/or illustrations become more important.
Most modern flyers will have at least one side taken up by a photograph or a custom graphic.
To source photographs you can either use online stock photo platforms or have a professional photographer take custom pictures for you. (Unsplash and Pexels are the two most popular free stock photo sources)
In this we include illustrations and graphics since some brands and companies prefer to use custom illustrators to using photos.
Consistent branding
It is crucial that the branding used on your flyers is consistent with your website, social media and other printed materials.
The colour scheme, logo and fonts that you choose for your flyers should have some relation to what you use in the rest of your business. You don’t need to keep too strictly to every type of font and colour but it’s important that the general feel remains.
While you do this make sure that you take on board input from the designer who is making your flyer as well. If he or she believes that you should use new design elements in your flyer, consider
their points.
Restaurants flyer design
The largest change in restaurant flyer design over the last ten years has been the de facto disappearance of the leaflet menu.
As most takeaway orders now take place through an app or a website there is relatively little to be gained from including a full list of dishes you offer on your flyer.
Your takeaway leaflets should focus more on explaining which type of cuisine you specialise in and what makes you unique.
Your customers will go to your website or app to order your food and as such your leaflet menu would serve no purpose.
RockIT Burger
Here you can see two flyers by RockIT burger in London. Clearly they are focusing on showing fantastic images of their food and explaining the concept of their restaurant. Burgers with an Indian twist.
There is no question about what they do. If a customer wants to order their food they will scan the QR code and see the whole menu in their delivery app of choice.
The usage of QR codes for takeaway flyers is a widespread technique that works. A simple QR code can save you having to include hard to read URLs on your flyer and send people directly to your delivery app of choice.
TAKA
Here is a slightly different take on the same idea. The Taka sushi restaurant in London decided to go with their classy logo on the front side of their takeaway leaflet design.
With that they also describe what their restaurant specialises in and include a QR code to order. On the back side of the flyer they show you a great picture of their food, more testimonials and another QR code.
This is a great example of a good restaurant leaflet. The design is clean and classy and it tells you exactly what the restaurant is about.
V&Me
V&Me run a slightly different food delivery service. They focus on delivering fresh and healthy food for toddlers.
The images they use make their focus very clear. All of the text on this leaflet design is focused on explaining the service and the image used couldn’t be more clear.
When designing the flyers you should first clearly identify the demographics you are targeting.
A powerlifting gym will need to use very different design elements to a pilates studio.
When you carefully identify the types of clients you want to be talking to make sure that the images you use reflect this.
Similar to takeaway leaflet designs you want to focus on explaining the concept of your gym first.
Try to aim every element of your flyer in this direction. Your text, colour scheme and images should all be delivering one message. Whether your focus is powerlifting, crossfit, yoga, pilates or MMA.
Retra Fitness
Here is a great example of this. Retra Fitness in London specialises in HIIT classes. They run a continuous HIIT class that people can jump into at any time of day.
Their colour scheme, logo and image choice show a youthful and mixed environment. There are very few words on this flyer and the word HIIT is mentioned multiple times.
There is no question about what Retra Fitness is about after looking at this flyer. It’s a great example of gym leaflet design.
There are many different types of tutoring businesses and schools out there.
If you are running one of these and are looking at designing a flyer, the first thing you need to think about is how do you make your flyer explain what you do in one glance.
Using good quality photographs is again the best way of doing this.
If you are mostly focused on children, use a picture of a child. If you focus on adult learning make sure that your photos reflect this.
Online Super Tutors
Online Super Tutors focus on both of these demographics. The way they solved this is by dedicating each side of the flyer to one of these groups.
The important thing to point out here again is the fact that both the text and the images on each side are clearly communicating a single message.
One large headline, a subheadline, a quality image and contact details is all that is needed.
By splitting the flyer into two sides that are each devoted to a separate audience, Online Super Tutors managed to keep things simple while communicating to a wide range of potential customers.
Household services and Law companies
Sometimes your business will not fit into a larger category we could discuss using general terms. In this section we’ll have a look at two flyers that each offer a fairly unique service and talk about why they are examples of good leaflet design.
Maison Plan
Maison Plan are high-end handymen. They specialise in managing whole households and can handle anything that could possibly go wrong inside a home.
They decided to use an illustration rather than a photograph for their flyer. They’ve done a great job with this and kept the flyer very clean.
This gave them more space to use text to explain exactly what they do in bullet points.
If they used photographs as well as this amount of text on one side of the flyer the result would likely be cluttered and difficult to read.
Thanks to the great illustration they chose they’ve managed to keep things clear while delivering a lot of information to their potential customers.
Hazelhurst Solicitors
The last design we are going to discuss today is also the simplest. Hazelhurst Solicitors provide a wide range of legal services related to immigration.
They chose to use only text and very basic design elements on their flyer. The goal here was to keep everything looking professional and purely informative.
This approach works very well for their kind of business.
As you can see even though most types of flyers benefit greatly from large high quality photographs that doesn’t mean that this approach is right for everyone.
At The Private Postman we offer free design consultations to all our clients. We can either design your flyers from scratch or offer pointers for your own designs.
If you are looking to start designing your flyers get in touch with us here and we can help you think through the right approach.
In a large city like London pests are a reality everyone has to deal with from time to time. Whether we are talking about business premises or households almost everyone will need pest control services at some point.
Good advertising makes sure that your pest control company is on the list of places to call when the need comes.
There are many ways one can advertise a local pest control business in London nowadays. There are online methods that most often centre around social media and search engine ads.
There are also some very effective offline methods that are equally and sometimes more effective.
Advertising in trade publications for B2B marketing is a good example of an offline marketing method for a pest control business that works.
In this article we are going to focus on flyer delivery as that is our area of competence. When done right, flyer distribution is one of the most effective forms of marketing a local pest control business in London can use.
Pest Control flyer delivery to households
There are two markets you can focus on as a pest control company. You can either advertise to businesses (B2B) or to households (B2C).
Let’s have a look at households first.
There are some important elements to delivering flyers to households we need to understand first.
Most flyer delivery campaigns that target households focus on privately owned residential homes. What is most often excluded from this is local authority housing, businesses and inaccessible large apartment buildings.
This is important to mention because if you want to target any of these categories you will have to speak to your distributor and use a separate tailored service to do so.
The great thing about flyer delivery is that it allows you to reach every single household in your selected area. There is no demographic skew, no age categories overlooked or anything like that.
Every single household in your area receives your carefully curated physical piece of advertising. No other marketing method can achieve this for you.
Your flyers will make their way through the letterboxes of every household in your area, people will have to interact with them in some way and many will keep them for a later reference.
Shared vs Solo deliveries
There are two ways we can distribute your flyers. Shared and solo.
Shared delivery refers to a technique where we deliver your pamphlets together with one or two flyers by other high quality non-competing companies.
Solo delivery describes a service where we deliver your flyers on their own.
In reality what this means is that when we do shared delivery we put your flyers in each letterbox as a part of a group of 2-3 flyers. In Solo delivery it’s just your pamphlet.
Most people intuitively want to use Solo delivery as at first glance it appears to be a better method.
We tend to discourage this where possible. When Shared distribution is capped at the maximum of three flyers and is conducted properly there is no difference in the response between Shared and Solo campaigns.
You will have exactly the same response whether your flyers were a part of a shared drop or a solo drop.
As such you can expect the same results from a well executed shared campaign at a significantly lower cost to a solo campaign. We recommend that you use Shared deliveries where possible.
Selecting the right area
You can use the savings from doing shared drops to expand your target area or run multiple deliveries over the same ground.
The way you select where you deliver your flyers should have a method to it.
Many factors can come into play when you are deciding on which area to target and as such you should discuss this with your distribution company.
When we help our clients in this we first look at geographical proximity as a factor. If you run a local business do you have your local area fully covered?
If you operate in a larger geographical area (like the whole of London) we look at where most of your business is coming from, demographics, income levels, types of properties and more.
We then pick the most interesting areas from this selection to fit your budget and goals.
We use a proprietary mapping system that has very accurate household numbers that we constantly update. We share these maps with you so you can be sure that the numbers of flyers used correspond to the number of households targeted.
Local Authority Housing
If you want to target local authority housing and council properties you can do so using a separate service.
We run deliveries that exclusively target these addresses.
These have to be separated from our regular door to door drops as the logistics of reaching local authority housing are considerably different.
Many estates use locked gates that need special keys or access codes. Their layout is also considerably different to other areas.
We have accounted for all of this and we do run a service that allows you to reach these homes. It just needs to be done separately from our large door to door drops.
If you know that you want your campaigns to target local authority housing please let us know.
Pest control services are required by businesses as much as households. As such targeting local businesses with flyers is fairly common for pest control companies.
We can deliver your pamphlets to local London businesses in a similar way we can deliver to households.
There are some complications that come with targeting business addresses. Businesses are more spread out than residential homes.
Our distributors have to often introduce themselves when they enter a business and explain what they are doing.
All of this makes B2B flyer delivery slower compared to normal door to door campaigns. This means that per flyer delivered B2B campaigns are more expensive compared to B2C.
On the other hand a single hit on a flyer has a considerably larger spending potential compared to what you can expect from a single household.
As such if you often work with businesses it is a very good idea to target them with your flyers as well.
We’ve discussed how we can deliver your flyers, the different addresses we can target and which techniques we can use.
It is worth mentioning at least a little bit about how you can create your flyers in the first place.
At The Private Postman we help our clients with the design of their pamphlets as well as print and storage.
Design
The design of your flyer is very important. No matter how carefully you plan your campaign if your pamphlets themselves are not designed well you are likely not going to get the best response.
You definitely want to work with a professional designer if you can. At The Private Postman we can either offer you free feedback on your existing designs or help redesign your flyers from scratch.
Flyer design has largely moved towards simplicity and the use of high quality photos. At least one side of your pamphlet will likely be taken up by a large image so spend some extra time sourcing quality photos to choose from.
Print
When it comes to print you want to keep things simple. Try sticking to an A5 format flyer. Anything more complicated than that tends to create more problems than it solves.
With the paper you choose, try to stay between 170-250gsm for the best value. Your flyer distributor should manage your stock and store it in their warehouse facilities.
Also try to talk to your distributor about their contact with printing companies. There is a big chance they’ll be able to get you a deal for your print that’s considerably better than you could get on your own.
When deciding on using a marketing tool two questions need to be answered. How effective is it and how much does it cost?
We know that leaflet distribution is effective as it’s been used by the most successful businessesin London for decades. But how much does leaflet distribution cost?
Introduction
Leaflet distribution costs are calculated on a per 1000 basis.
The average cost to deliver a 1000 leaflets in an A5 format in London is approximately £48+VAT.
In general the accepted minimum drop is 5000 leaflets.
However there is more that goes into the cost of a leaflet distribution campaign than just the per 1000 delivery cost.
Let’s have a look at this in more detail and discuss the individual elements that will impact your costs.
The costs for this kind of delivery tend to be higher as the distributor is fully devoted to delivering only your leaflets.
Solus distribution will run you £85 per 1000 leaflets +VAT.
How much does shared leaflet distribution cost?
This is in contrast to the more common Shared distribution where your leaflets are delivered together with one or two other non-competing clients.
This means that if you are a real estate agent your leaflets will be delivered together with a local restaurant and a high quality hair dresser for example.
This allows us to minimise some of the distribution cost and spread it over multiple clients.
Shared distribution will run you £48 per thousand leaflets +VAT.
In a place like London shared leaflet distribution is mostly recommended as many marketing materials and post get delivered through each door every day.
This means that even if your leaflets were delivered on their own they will be laying on the doormat with other letters and flyers.
At that point it makes no difference if your leaflet was delivered as a part of a shared leaflet distribution drop or not.
How much does the format of your leaflet
affect distribution cost?
When you are printing and delivering a single page 200gsm, A5 leaflet the costs will most likely correspond with the above mentioned numbers.
Sometimes you might want to deliver a larger A4 gatefold leaflet, booklets or folded menus.
Any extra complications like larger size, folds or multiple pages will have an impact on the cost of distribution as well as production and print.
There are specific instances where a more unusual format can be beneficial. However we mostly recommend sticking to the good old A5 leaflet on high quality paper.
It is the most robust and rugged format in use. Even if we take every precaution a multi page leaflet can result in some damage to the flyer/brochure while delivering.
Many letterboxes in London are not of the ideal size or construction.
Many homes have rusted metal letterboxes, overly tight springs and other issues that don’t negatively affect the delivery of an A5 leaflet but can have an impact on a gate fold A4 flyer.
Design
Design is an incredibly important part of your campaign planning.
It doesn’t matter how well you plan your drops, targeting and timing. If your flyers do not deliver your message clearly your campaign will likely fail.
A good quality custom leaflet design made by a professional will cost you somewhere between £200-£400.
Given the fact that you can keep using this design for as many campaigns and deliveries as you want this tends to be money well spent.
Professionally designed flyers will also considerably increase the effectiveness of your drops.
In many instances a single extra client gained due to the quality of your flyer design can cover the whole design cost for you.
When you are delivering tens of thousands of leaflets as most companies do this benefit only multiplies.
Your flyer delivery company should be able to help you whether you are looking to design your flyer from scratch or just to tweak your existing flyer.
At The Private Postman we have designers that can help you with either. We can also offer you free feedback on your existing design if we believe there are elements that you should improve.
You can then take this to your own designer or make the changes yourself.
How much do leaflets cost to print
If you want to deliver flyers you must first print them.
We’ve already discussed how the format you choose for your flyers will heavily impact the cost of production.
Let’s have a look at the costs for printing a regular 170gsm, A5, double sided flyer to establish a baseline.
The print of 5,000 flyers of this type will cost you £149.
The more flyers you print the less you will pay per unit. To print 25,000 of the same flyer will cost you £581 This is a 22% lower price per leaflet compared to printing only 5000.
Should you print larger quantities then?
Depending on your plans it might be worth it for you to consider printing larger quantities for a few drops in one go instead of multiple smaller print jobs.
A good leaflet distribution company will be willing to store your flyers free of charge if you explain the situation to them.
Storing your flyers for an extra couple of months is a non-issue for a professional distributor with a warehouse.
If you have a good relationship with your distribution company, also ask them for their printing contacts.
Most distributors will be able to get you a considerably better price for print than you will be able to get on your own. Distribution companies tend to have good relationships with UK printing houses and have better leverage than you on your own.
It is also worth pointing out that in the UK we do not pay VAT on the printing of flyers.
Campaign example
Here is an example of the costs for a common campaign that a local business might run in their London area.
Service
Number of leaflets
Cost
Is VAT
applicable
Leaflet
design
£250
depending
Print
25,000 A5, 170gsm leaflets
£581
no VAT
Shared Delivery
25,000 leaflets
£1200
+VAT
CAMPAIGN TOTAL
£2031
B2B flyer delivery cost
B2B flyer deliveries tend to work differently to residential door drops.
Due to the fact that business addresses are spread out differently to residential homes, the time required to deliver the same amount of leaflets differs quite a bit.
The distributor will also often present themselves to the manager or receptionist while making each delivery.
As such costs for B2B flyer distribution work on a per day/per person basis.
You can expect to pay £120+VAT per person to deliver your leaflets per day.
A good professional flyer distribution company will not hide extra charges for their services to you.
You can expect some charges to apply if you need your flyers picked up from your location. However beyond that all you should be paying for is distribution itself.
Your quoted price should include storage, GPS tracking and delivery updates as well as delivery iteself. These are intrinsic parts of the service that you shouldn’t accept separate charges for.
Always check that this is the case and look out for companies trying to charge you for things like GPS tracking. A good reputable company will not do this.
We hope that this summary of leaflet distribution costs in London has been helpful. If you have any questions or if you’d like to book a campaign with us please feel free to get in touch here.
There is a wide variety of advertising methods you can use to market your locksmith business.
There are two distinct but related worlds to pay attention to. Online and Offline. We are going to discuss the advantages of each of these and how you can use them together for best results.
As we specialise in leaflet distribution we are going to spend some extra time talking about targeting your clients with flyers. We are going to pay extra attention to the specifics of the locksmithing business and how these will influence how you choose to advertise.
Let’s get into it.
Advertising a locksmith business offline
One of the main advantages of advertising your locksmith business offline is the control you keep over every element of your marketing.
Many online trade apps and directories allow you to advertise but severely limit how you can present yourself.
You often only get a small icon and a short description of yourself next to all of your local competition. It is almost impossible to separate yourself from your competition as there simply isn’t enough space to do so.
This often leads to competing on price and paying the app provider for higher placement in the search results. This is generally not desirable or sustainable.
You can compare this to advertising with leaflets.
Your leaflet will most likely be an A5 format. This is considerably more space than you get in any online trade directory.
On top of this your flyers will never be delivered together with your competition. You will always be a part of a drop with companies that in no way present a conflict or compete for the same clients.
Most of this is true for other offline marketing methods. Whether you choose to advertise in related print publications, local events or stick to leaflet distribution much of what we mentioned above will apply.
Online marketing methods
With all that said it would be very unwise to not pay attention to the variety of online advertising methods that are available.
We’ve already mentioned trade apps and directories some of which might be worth paying attention to.
There is also the world of social media marketing, search engine ads and more.
Let’s briefly talk about social media. You might think that there is not much about locksmithing that is exciting enough to post about.
This is not the point. The point of your locksmith business being on facebook, youtube, instagram and some of the other platforms is not to compete for millions of views with pop music videos.
There are three great reasons to be on social media that have nothing to do with trying to post entertaining content to attract views.
Communication
– The great thing about social media is the ability it gives you to communicate with your potential customers.
Facebook in particular has done a very good job allowing businesses to do this. If a potential customer finds your locksmith business, social media gives them the ability to ask you questions they might have without having to block off time to call you.
These questions could be about your availability, prices or specific issues they might be having. They can of course send you an email but the easier you make it for people to get in touch with you the more of a chance you have of attracting their business.
Social media marketing
– Marketing on social media gives you an amazing ability to target demographic groups at a level of granularity that is otherwise impossible.
You can target people of specific ages. genders with specific interests and habits. You can even carefully pinpoint the exact areas where you want these people to live. This is a great tool to use if you educate yourself on how to do so.
Combining social media ads with other offline methods like leaflet distribution and hitting the same areas with leaflet and social media ads at the same time is a great strategy as well.
Showing that you are active
– Regularly posting on social media can serve the purpose of showing your potential customers that your business is active.
While a potential customer is searching for a locksmith they go through a process of elimination. This often happens very quickly and based on split moment decisions.
They find 10-15 companies that could potentially do the job and they have to decide on who they call.
Seeing that your locksmith business is active on social media and that you’ve posted two new images in the last week could help them decide that they will call you first since you’ll seem approachable.
There is more to online advertising than social media of course. A good example are google ads.
Google ads
– Outside of paying for your website to pop up when people search for specific terms you can also retarget people that have recently searched for certain services.
This means that you can serve your Youtube and Google ads to people that have recently searched for locksmithing services in a given area.
There is no need to discuss why this is an amazing tool to have access to.
Leaflet distribution for locksmiths in London
One of the best ways of advertising your locksmith services locally is with leaflet distribution.
As we’ve mentioned your flyers are most often going to be in an A5 format. You can use this space in any way you want.
This means you can deliver your branding properly and with the help of a professional graphic designer you can craft your flyers to perfection.
One of the biggest advantages of flyers is that they can be delivered into every household in a given area.
When you select which part of London you want to target, you know that a good leafleting company will put your flyers into every household within it.
There is no skew in terms of demographics, age, income level. Your flyers make it through every letterbox.
This is something that is fairly unique to leaflet deliveries. No other marketing method can do this. You flyers make it into every home.
It makes flyers an incredible brand building tool. You can choose your preferred areas and have your leaflets delivered regularly.
Your flyers being delivered into every household in your key areas regularly can bring results that other methods of advertising would struggle to compete with.
How do flyers work?
So what are the specific things about flyer distribution that you should know?
Use great photography
Most often one side of your flyer will be fully devoted to a high quality picture. Spend extra time considering what this image should be and discuss this with your graphic designer.
Stick to A5
The good old double sided A5 flyer is still the best format to go with. If you stick to a good gsm range (200-300) they are resilient, deliver your message clearly and are not expensive to produce.
Repeat deliveries are good
If you have a budget for 60,000 flyers you might want to consider delivering to an area of 30,000 homes twice over a 4 week period than to 60,000 households once.
Repeat deliveries are very powerful and often bring better results than larger single delivery campaigns.
Use a reputable company
Always use a reputable company with professional systems in place. You need to make sure that the flyers you produce are of high quality and that they all find their way to the right households. You can find out more about our service here.
There is a good amount of logistics, tracking and training involved in professional leaflet delivery. You always want to use a company with good robust systems and a good reputation. You can find more information about our GPS tracking here.
Stick to shared distribution
Your locksmith leaflets can either be delivered on their own or together with up to two other flyers. Delivering your flyers together with others is called shared distribution.
Always go for this option where available. Shared distribution (when done right) gets you exactly the same results as having your flyers delivered on their own at less than half of the cost. You can find out more shared and solo distribution here.
Door to door only
Locksmiths should really consider only door to door deliveries to residential households or B2B deliveries. Any other delivery method is not suitable for a locksmith business.
Offline B2B advertising for locksmiths
When it comes to leaflet advertising for your locksmith business we’ve discussed only B2C methods so far.
If you want to target businesses instead you can do so with leaflets as well. B2B leaflet delivery has similar advantages to the more common B2C deliveries.
B2B flyer distribution allows you to target all local businesses in selected London areas. This generally excludes multinational chains and large office buildings as there is no point in delivering flyers to these places. Find out more about our B2B services here.
Every other business however will receive your leaflets. Estate agents, flower shops, bike shops, gyms, cafes, restaurants, laundromats and more.
A presentable distributor will deliver your leaflet to the manager or receptionist and briefly explain what the leaflet is about.
As such B2B deliveries are slightly more expensive than B2C but they can be an excellent way to contact local businesses with a physical piece of advertising.
Online B2B advertising
There are B2B marketing options for locksmith businesses in the online world as well.
LinkedIN is the most obvious place to go for B2B online advertising. The targeting here is again the most attractive element.
There are many ways one can advertise a care home. In general, long term strategy and careful targeting should be a part of every campaign no matter the medium you are using.
At The Private Postman we specialise in leaflet distribution (see our page on this topic here) and as such we will mostly talk about how you can use flyers to market to the right people in the right areas.
Let’s have a look at leaflet delivery for care homes and whether it works.
To run a successful leaflet distribution campaign for a care home one needs to focus on a few important things.
One of the more responsive age groups will be the 70+ age demographic. People of this age tend to gravitate towards tangible and physical marketing methods and are willing to use the phone to enquire about a service they have an interest in.
On the other side of this will be drops that are advertising to the family of the potential care home customer.
These will be couples and families in their 50s and above. These households will require a slightly different approach to the design of your flyers as well as numbers of repeated drops.
A good delivery company will be able to help you identify where you can find these demographics in London and if needed target them with separately designed leaflets.
At The Private Postman we have an in-house design team that can help you develop a design that communicates your message clearly and that incentivises people to keep your flyers.
We also have relationships with some of Europe’s largest printing companies that allow us to print your leaflets on a wide variety of paper to make your flyer interactive and worth keeping.
Multi-drop campaigns
With an institution like a care home one needs to adopt long term marketing strategies.
In the world of leaflet distribution this will mean delivering to the same areas multiple times. This could mean running two drops in a 12 month period at strategic times or more regular deliveries .
You want to base the number of repeated drops every year on the types of households you will be targeting and the parts of London you will be delivering in. Your leaflet distribution company will be able to advise you on this.
A business like a care home benefits from mind-share much more than from short term marketing efforts. We want to condition a whole area to have your name come up in people’s mind as soon as a care home is mentioned.
So do leaflet deliveries for care homes work? The answer has to be Yes.
But it works the best if you think long term and approach your campaigns with a time frame of months or years.
Quality of delivery
The most obvious thing one needs to consider when running a leaflet distribution for a care home in London is the quality of delivery itself.
When you are choosing your distribution partner you always want to ask about the quality control systems your distributor has in place.
For example at The Private Postman we don’t deliver in the rain, we never bend or fold your leaflets unless absolutely necessary and we provide our clients with information about our deliveries in real time. See more information on this on our homepage.
It doesn’t matter how well targeted your campaign is or how great your design is. If your leaflets are delivered in the rain, folded and in a bad shape they will not work.
The fact that our clients are informed about where their deliveries are taking place is also very important.
In reality it allows them to come see their leaflet deliveries any time without having to inform us.
Tracking
A big part of assessing the quality of delivery is tracking. We’ve already described that we run a form of live tracking that informs you about your distribution as it is happening.
The more common method of tracking a leaflet campaign is through GPS.
Each distributor carries a GPS device on them when they are delivering. This tracks their movement and is later downloaded into a computer.
The data is superimposed on a Google Maps like format and sent to you as a proof of delivery. If you wish, you can retrace the steps of each distributor that was carrying your leaflets.
This is very helpful especially if you have questions about delivery to specific addresses or if you just want to make sure that everything went according to plan.
We have pioneered this method of tracking in London in 2009 and it has become an industry standard since then.
No matter who you choose as a distribution partner for your care home always check how their GPS tracking works.
Getting a healthy influx of new workers has become a challenge for many industries in the last couple of years.
Care homes certainly have to deal with this issue and finding good sources of reliable workers is a must.
You can use leaflet distribution to find new workers as well as new customers. These campaigns will be completely separate targeting very different homes and areas.
However at The Private Postman we have developed systems that let you get as many workers as you need. Whether it’s 5 or 500.
We get your leaflets to exclusive overlooked markets with workers with no visa issues.
On top of this we deliver your leaflets on their own. As such you are not going to be competing with every other care home looking for workers like you would on online recruiting platforms.
Most importantly we can help you reach workers that are living locally to your care home.
Many restaurants, schools and other businesses are already using this system to a great effect.
Another thing worth considering is the fact that combining flyer deliveries with other marketing methods can enhance the effectiveness of both.
A good example of this would be using social media ads together with your flyer deliveries.
You can choose to target a specific area of London with your flyers. When the deliveries are finished you can wait a few days and target the same area again but this time with carefully crafted facebook ads.
In this case you want to use the same design elements in your facebook ads as you do on your flyers.
Having people see your ads both in the online and offline world compounds the effectiveness of both efforts.
Just make sure to keep your branding consistent and visible on your flyers as well as your facebook ads.
High quality images
Leaflet design over the last decade has mostly been evolving into simpler forms.
One side of the flyer tends to be devoted to a high quality image and the other side shares a few basic ideas with text.
Flyers with hundreds of words describing your service in great detail no longer work. You can keep this information for your website of information brochures.
Your flyers should be as simple as possible in order for them to be competitive.
Since one side of your leaflets is going to be almost exclusively devoted to a large image you want to make sure that you source the best photo you can.
It is great you can have your own high quality photographs made for you by a professional photographer on your premises.
However it is not necessary. There are many good sources of very good stock images on the internet you can use.
If possible, always consult a professional designer for your flyer designs.
You can also speak to your distribution company as they can help you make decisions on which images are the most suitable for you and your flyer.
So – Leaflet delivery for care homes, does it work? What do you think?
If you have any questions or if you’d like to book a campaign please get in touch with us here…
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