Armed with your fresh batch of leaflet printing or flyer printing, you’re ready to distribute them locally or at a strategic location where you feel that you’ll reach just the right audience. It could be outside a trade convention while attendees are queuing up impatiently waiting to be let in or at another venue where your audience is likely to be hanging out.
Let’s first consider how you should be thinking about your target market, and then the distribution to get the best results. We’ll then touch on a couple of distribution methods available to you.
Goal Clarity
It is important that you have a marketing plan in place and that you’re clear about the goals. The central goal dictates the information shown on the flyer or leaflet, how it’s presented, and what you hope to happen because of the distribution.
If you’re promoting a special offer, when does the offer close? Is the flyer covering an event or a something seasonal that has an expiry date? Considering these things helps determine how many items should be printed in a batch and how quickly they must be fully distributed to be effective. Distributing too slowly wastes a marketing opportunity, burns money, and causes lost sales.
Who’s Your Target Market?
Thinking about the target market for the product or service that you’re wishing to promote using either print flyers or print leaflets is important because it’s the starting point. When you understand your target audience, you can have a leaflet or flyer designed that will appeal more to them. One age group or demographic is entirely different to another and needs a separate approach to be effective.
Where’s Your Target Market?
Once you have your target marked down pat, then it’s time to consider how to reach your target market effectively. Do you want to hit up existing customers to get a fresh order from them, stimulate them to visit your website and make a purchase using a discount voucher on the leaflet, or find new customers by reaching out in ways you haven’t tried before? Each goal requires an entirely different approach.
Do you want to reach potential customers on their way home from work, when they’re out socialising, when they’re on a shopping trip or in their local neighbourhood? It depends on the type of product or service or information that you’re promoting using cheap leaflet printing or expensive flyer printing where you should plan to reach out first.
Practical Examples of Marketing Material Distribution
A business product might be best promoted in an industrial estate with many businesses that could benefit from your product. Alternatively, a business expo that’s running nearby might be suitable too.
When the product is more of an impulse purchase, then catching people while they’re out shopping and promoting an affordable product with a discount code if they buy on their smartphone that weekend could also be very effective
If you’re promoting a certain type of product, have people hand out leaflets or flyers close to shops that also sell the same type of thing. Promoting luxury watches near to a high-street watch shop is directly targeting likely consumers in a way that mass marketing can never do effectively.
Distribution Door-to-Door
The most common way to distribute a flyer or leaflet is door-to-door. Up to 80 percent of people at least look at a leaflet when it’s delivered through the mailbox. However, it is also the dearest way to market leaflets because you need to hire foot soldiers to distribute for you and then ensure they actually do it.
There is a big difference between hitting every mailbox in certain streets (perhaps the most affluent) and delivering a mailshot just to specific addresses. In the latter case, posting them out makes more sense on a cost basis. With the former, it’s difficult to distribute broadly and get a good response rate because the chance of raising the interest level with untargeted marketing is difficult to do.
Distribution by Hand
Having people stand in the street and hand out leaflet seems a bit random, but it depends on what part of town they’re situated. If they’re handing out flyers to people who are leaving a shop which sells the same category of product you’re promoting, that’s well targeted. However, if they’re handing out leaflets to everyone who’s walking along the same street, that’s far less likely to be a profitable marketing campaign. Success comes down to which customers are offered the leaflet and which are not.
Successful leaflet and flyer design, production and distribution rely on smart decision-marketing right down the line. You have to know your customers (or potential customers) well. What design will appeal to them? Where is the best place to find them and the best day and time to make the approach? Getting really specific about your marketing goals and how best to achieve them is likely to yield the best results from your efforts and financial investment.