If
you’ve spent any time flyering for these kinds of events - at any scale -
you’ll know that a lot of them can end up in the recycling bin, without anyone
reading them. Aside from the potential for waste, this also means that many of your
flyers are falling into the wrong hands.
This
piece covers how to choose where your printed flyers go, the
main ways of getting them there, the rules you might run into, and how to work
out afterwards whether the money was well spent. Hopefully, it will give you
more bang for your buck in terms of advertising.
Who are the flyers for?
Handing
out flyers on a busy high street is the most obvious first idea, but footfall only
helps if the people walking past might actually buy from you. A dog groomer
will probably get more uptake leaving a stack on the vet's reception desk than
from a morning stood outside the train station.
It
helps to pin the audience down as narrowly as you can. "Local
families" is broad, and hard to act on. "Parents of under-fives in
*area*" points you straight to nurseries, soft play centres and the GP
surgery noticeboard. Decide, too, what you want people to do once they've read it,
whether that's booking online or turning up on the day, and make that the thing
they see first on the flyer’s design.
Once
that's settled, most of the other decisions about size, quantity and how to
distribute get a lot easier.
Where and when
Places
where people wait tend to work better than places they walk through. Someone in
a café queue or a waiting room has a minute to read what you've given them;
someone rushing for a train doesn't. A few hundred flyers in the right waiting room
can do more than thousands handed out in a city centre.
Timing
is just as important as location. Work back from when people actually make the
decision. Christmas offers need to be out in November or the first week of
December, and event flyers usually do well two to four weeks before the
date.Then there's the weather. Wind and rain make handing out flyers a
miserable task, and leave you with damp paper nobody wants to take. Have a plan
B for an indoor location if you can. If flyers are going to sit somewhere
exposed, like a porch or a station concourse, a heavier stock or a laminated
finish will keep them presentable for longer.
Ways to get flyers out
The
right method depends on your budget, how much time you or your staff can give
it, and how tightly you need to target. This is roughly how the main options
compare.
|
Method |
Handing
flyers out yourself is cheap but tiring, and it goes much better when whoever's
doing it has a one-line pitch ready. A branded T-shirt helps people see they're
being approached by a legitimate person or business. Leaving stacks in local
cafés or gyms takes less effort, though someone needs to check on them every week
or two so they don't run out or end up scattered across the counter.
Nearby
businesses with overlapping customers are worth approaching. A kitchen fitter
and an independent hardware shop, for instance, can display each other's flyers
at no cost to either. If you use a professional door drop company, solo drops
cost more than shared ones, but your flyer won't land on the mat with five
takeaway menus.
The rules in the UK
You
can hand out flyers in most places without asking anyone, but some councils restrict
it. The Environmental Protection Act 1990, as amended by the Clean
Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005, lets councils in England and Wales
designate streets where giving out free printed material needs their consent.
These areas are usually in town and city centres. Councils tend to charge for
consent and attach conditions, such as distributors wearing a council-issued
badge. Charities, political parties and religious groups are generally exempt.
It's
the business organising the distribution that can be prosecuted, as well as the
person holding the flyers. The rules apply to public land, so posting through
letterboxes or leaving flyers inside a building isn't covered. You can check on GOV.UK whether your council needs
you to apply. Northern Ireland has similar powers under its own law.
If
you're going door to door, skip any house with a "no junk mail" sign;
professional door drop firms generally do this anyway. Addressed mail to named
people is different because you're using personal data, so you'll need a lawful
basis under UK GDPR, and it's sensible to screen your list against the Mailing
Preference Service. For cafés, noticeboards and shared hallways, ask whoever
runs the space before leaving anything.
Tracking the results
Plenty
of businesses run a flyer campaign and never find out what it achieved. Fixing that
is cheap, but it has to be planned before the artwork goes to print. You could
use a different discount code for each area or batch, a QR code pointing to a
landing page you can track in your analytics, or a phone number or email
address that only appears on the flyer. Simply asking customers how they heard
about you costs nothing and still catches a lot.
It's
worth looking at cost per enquiry rather than the total number of enquiries. A door
drop in one postcode might bring in fewer responses than a day handing out
flyers at a station, yet cost far less per customer. If you're not sure which
will work, split the print run and try two approaches before ordering in bulk.
Final thoughts
With
bonfire night a couple of weeks away and Christmas events close behind, there
sadly isn’t much time to test and adjust this season. If you change only one
thing, add some way of tracking your flyers, even if it’s just a code printed at
the bottom or asking people at the door how they heard about you. When you come
to plan next year’s fireworks display or panto run, you’ll know which venues
and methods earned back the print bill.
