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Blog posts tagged leaflets
Five ways to improve the effectiveness of your leaflets
March 04, 2011
Whether you have boxes of professionally printed leaflets stacked under your desk, or just run off a few copies on your home printer in time for a networking event or exhibition, the chances are that you’ll have at least one leaflet for your business.
The question is, how do you create a leaflet that works for you? You know, one that actually gets people to pick up the phone and book in a consultation? Or one that drives them to your website to buy? It’s certainly easier said than done.
When I started out in the print industry more than ten years ago, everyone starting a business got themselves a logo, some business cards and either a leaflet or brochure. Times have changed, and that mix tends to be a logo, a website and a business card nowadays. But despite the medium changing, attitudes to how you get your promotional piece to work for you don’t seem to have changed.
Over the years, I must have spoken to thousands of business owners with the same laissez-faire attitude to creating promotional literature. The idea seems to be: get the word out and the people will come. So it wasn’t (and still isn’t) uncommon to see a leaflet with a logo pride of place at the top, followed by reams of text (or perhaps bullet points) on why XYZ Company is great. Unsurprisingly, these types of leaflet don’t tend to win their owners much business.
Fast forward ten years and things aren’t much different on the web. There are numerous examples of great websites, but there are also an uncomfortable number of sites that follow the same format – focusing all on the company and very little about the intended reader. If you’d like your leaflets (or your website) to win you more business, here are five things you must do before you get them out there…
1. Set Goals: What do you want this piece of collateral to do for you? (Hint: for websites treat each page separately as well as looking at it as a whole piece — it’s more work, but I promise it will pay off!). I know this doesn’t sound like rocket science, but you’d be amazed at how many people don’t sit down and have a good hard think about what they’re trying to achieve. Starting here makes it much easier to get people to do what you want them to.
2. Understand what would compel your reader to do what you want them to do. Why does your (potential) customer need or want what you’re offering? What happens if they don’t do what you want them to do? What’s the downside?
3. Write action-focused words that persuade people to do what you want: don’t talk about your business — talk about what’s on offer, why people need it, what’s in it for them and what the downside is if they don’t do it.
4. Create a piece of design that doesn’t just look gorgeous — it makes all the right things stand out and grabs the attention of the reader as well as reinforcing your branding. Much, much easier said than done — I recommend you leave this bit to the pros!
5. Deliver with a flourish: if it’s a piece of printed literature, get it in all the right places and deliver it more than once — three times in three months is my standard rule of thumb, but it’ll depend on what you’re doing. If it’s a website, you also need to promote its existence — think social media and offline promotion as well as traditional search engine optimisation and ad words.
Go on, give it a try! And let me know how you get on.
Fiona Humberstone is an expert contributor to Marketing Donut and managing director of Flourish.
A load of old junk?
April 27, 2010
The front pages, the billboards, the TV debates… as the election race heats up, it’s become almost impossible to avoid thinking about where your vote might go on 6 May. As in all the best marketing campaigns, each political party is employing different tactics over a broad range of media to get their message to the electorate. Can we learn anything from the way the politicians and the party marketing machines are doing things?
The major voter engagement tactic being used by one of the parties in my area is direct mail. Unfortunately for them, it's not really engaging this voter. Every evening I come home and sort through the post piled up on the table in the entrance hall. Every evening I feel a glimmer of excitement at discovering several envelopes addressed to me.
With the post under one arm and fumbling with my keys, I manage to get the door of the flat unlocked, race into the kitchen, tear open the envelopes, and… it’s yet another letter from this particular candidate. And it's probably about potholes or ‘unacceptable’ engineering work on the Northern Line. Some evenings I'm even lucky enough to have a ‘personal’ letter from the head of the party. What’s personal about a mass mailing that happens to bear my name?
The mysterious thing is that none of the other parties locally appear to be using direct mail – or if they have, their leaflets and letters have been swallowed by the vast amount sent by their opponent. One of the parties has encouraged local businesses to put up posters, while the other main party is barely to be seen. Apparently the seat is a critical one, which could explain the sheer quantity of letters I've received, but it would be interesting to see all three major parties using a wider range of methods to get voters' attention.
Why? Because the direct mail campaign just isn’t working. There’s too much of it, for a start, so any pertinent message is crowded out by so many other ‘important’ things I need to know. And it’s badly designed, badly written and just…annoying. The sheer volume of wasted paper also makes me wonder whether this party has any kind of environmental policy – something that could, actually, influence my vote.
The biggest shame, though, is that when used effectively, direct mail is a powerful marketing tool. I was recently handed an excellent flyer for a new café that has opened nearby. It was eye-catching, well designed and briefly identified what it offers that none of the other local cafes do, such as a quiz night and acoustic music at the weekends. The people handing out the flyers were friendly and were only planning to be campaigning like this for two days – they were there simply to raise awareness about the recently-opened café, not to remind passers-by about it every day for the next six weeks. Compared to the political leaflets, which are repetitive, lengthy and visually unappealing, the café flyer wins hands-down.
When I get home this evening, no doubt one of the first things I'll do is put some more of the leaflets in the recycling. Once a week would have been interesting and informative. Letters once, or even twice, a day is getting tiresome.
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