How to Use Flyers to Effectively Promote Your Business

Marketing tools like business cards, posters, and flyers are tried-and-true techniques for grabbing prospective clients’ attention and growing your business. Paper advertising is cost-effective and easy to distribute, to reach a broad audience and increase your company’s exposure.

Whether it’s an event, product, or service, flyers can help promote your business with an easy-to-read call-to-action, high-quality materials, and eye-catching design.

First Steps

Before designing your flyer, you need to consider some critical factors that can affect how people respond to your advertising efforts, namely intent, audience, and timing.

Intent

What’s the point of your flyer? What is the primary purpose behind all of your effort? These are essential questions when you’re formulating a handout to promote your small business. Is the aim to inform an established audience base, or is it to reach new clients? Each of these will merit different approaches.

A flyer advertising a singular event, like a concert, game, sale, or gathering, will use a different approach than a flyer about an ongoing service or aspect of your business, like your menu, hours, or contact information.

If you are broadcasting about one singular event, a prominently displayed date and time are essential pieces of information. If your flyer concerns elements of your business that are more constant, a map to your physical address, social media tags, or scannable QR code are valuable additions.

Audience

To create a successful marketing strategy, you need to think about who you’re trying to reach with your flyer. Even go so far as to picture them in your mind and create an idealized customer profile.

Who is that person? What are their buying and spending habits? What graphics would they find appealing or aesthetically pleasing, based on their characteristics? Tailor your design to this perceived audience.

Timing

A flyer that is trumpeting an upcoming event has to be timed right, and some of the most successful marketing tactics often consist of two well-timed distributions.

Consider it from the point of view of your audience – if you were to receive a flyer about an event you were interested in, when would you like to get it? Two weeks before? A month prior? Many need some lead time to organize their calendar; give your event some lead time to prepare your potential attendees.

You should also think about any upcoming holidays. Holidays are prime advertising time to capitalize on the increase in spending. Depending on the holiday, if there’s any gift-giving involved with the traditions, you may have many flyers vying for attention with yours.

Flyer Design Elements

You need bold, legible text paired with a show-stopping palette and a thoughtful graphic. A successful flyer catches attention, delivers the information, and makes an impression on one 8.5” x 11” paper.

A headline immediately lets your target audience know what the flyer is about with blocky bold lettering and contrasting colors. If your flyer is about an event, the title, time and date, and location should be the most prominent words.

If your flyer is more generalized, aiming to inform potential clients of the products or services offered by your business and your location are the critical display elements. The viewer should walk away knowing exactly where to find your shop, either online or on the street.

If you want to make the most cost-effective flyer, print on both sides. One side should be purely for display. The other side should be informational, including crucial details like prices, menus, or maps.

Legal Distribution

A flyer is ineffective if it’s immediately torn down for being posted illegally.  For a cost-effective return on investment, you need to know the best places to post and distribute your flyers so that potential customers will quickly see them.

The four main ways to distribute your flyers are to hang them in public places, pass them out physically, keep a stack in a high-traffic area for passersby to pick up or distribute them house-to-house or car-to-car.

Not every public area allows you to put up flyers, so be wary of signage telling you otherwise. Here is who you can contact if you would like to pass out flyers in any of these public places.

Schools

If you want to hang up flyers in a school, you’ll need to fill out approval forms and get your flyer approved. Make sure that all content is appropriate for a schoolyard.

Parks

Some parks have bulletin boards with a map of the area’s topography as well as other notices. If you want to hang flyers in the park, you’ll need to talk to the maintenance crew.

Cafés and Restaurants

Owners and managers can give you the say-so if you want to hang up your flyer in their establishment. Coffee shops are more amenable to local businesses advertising in their spots than higher-end restaurants will be.

Neighborhoods

Each neighborhood has a different set of policies surrounding whom they let solicit. Some areas are stricter than others, but it’s worth checking before you go knocking door-to-door.

The Wrap Up

With a great design, a strong intent, savvy timing, and the proper approval, your well-placed flyer can reach people beyond your local area. Flyers are time-tested as a marketing technique. They are easy to print, cost-effective, relatively long-lasting, and influential.

The printing professionals at Comix Well Spring can help you produce flyers that will tell readers precisely what they need to know. Contact our team to explore how flyers can effectively promote your business.