Five Steps To Create A Fabulous Flyer

Flyers are a budget-friendly, quick, and effective way to advertise your business.  Whether you are reaching new clients, and using your flyer as a calling card, or advertising a limited time promotion or special event to existing customers, flyers are a basic, inexpensive marketing method.

Use these five steps to design, create, and distribute a successful flyer campaign.

1. WHO will you target?

What is your strategy for reaching the consumer? Will you hire a distribution company to post flyers in a certain zip code or neighborhood? Insert your flyer in a publication? Post flyers in public spaces? Mail your piece to existing customers?

2. WHAT is the purpose?

The purpose of your flyer should be clear to you. Your message should be clear to the recipient. Make sure that your company brand, your message, and the look and feel of the flyer all match up.  All marketing efforts should be consistent and complementary.

3. WHY are you using flyers?

What are you hoping to gain? New clients? More money? Be specific and set goals, so you will be able to judge is the program was a success, and determine if your message or delivery needs tweaking.

4. WHEN will you send them?

Timing is everything.

Once you have a clear idea of who your audience is, it’s imperative that you get your message in front of them at the right time.  Stick to a schedule, and give your recipients a chance to respond to your offer.  Use the knowledge you have about your industry or existing business to determine an ideal time to distribute your flyers. Is your business seasonal? Do things slow down or gear up around certain holidays? Does your call to action expire?

A flyer advertising your 4th of July sale is totally worthless on July 5th, and almost totally worthless on June 1st.

5: HOW will this work?

Go Pro.

Great design and professional printing are more important than many businesses realize.  Contrary to what a lot of smaller businesses might think,  creating a quality flyer is very affordable, and should increase your ROI significantly. Trust me, your audience will know if your flyer has been created in Microsoft Word and printed on copy paper.

If you don’t have the right experience or employee for the job, know that competent freelance graphic designers are everywhere. Check out your local university to  find students looking to build their portfolios, or visit Craigslist to find talented designers with reasonable hourly fees.

Get a quote from a professional printing company. You will be pleased to find a very minimal price difference between a full-color, higher quality paper flyer and a black and white, lower quality paper flyer from a big box copy shop.

Have Good Form.

Use the angle, or tone, that works for your company- and be clever and creative, but always keep your content appropriate to your audience.

Keep it simple, but smart. Include relevant information. Even if you are super excited that your company is able to provide 350 unique services, and is licensed and insured by 72 different  agencies, resist the temptation to tell the world on one flyer. Do not be afraid of white space.

Use key words in your heading that grab the reader’s attention. “Free” is perhaps the most obvious choice, but consider words that fit the tone of your business, like guarantee, save, new, best, now.

The reader of your flyer will want to know , almost immediately, what they stand to gain from doing business with your company. Tell them as soon as possible. Is it your great service? A discount? A free gift? Highlight the offer and speak directly to the recipient, use “you” instead of “we” language.

Using a million different typefaces per flyer, or really, more than two will overwhelm the reader. Your flyer will look busy and unprofessional, and no one will want to spend the time digging through fonts to find your offers- even if they’re great. You should also consider a professional logo. Check out 99Designs if you are looking for a logo and  working with a very small budget.  This flyer is chock full of flyer dont’s. In one little page, this company has managed to bad mouthing other lawn care professionals, exceed what the legal word limit should be by 5 or 6 times, utilizes way too many fonts, and includes the worst logo I’ve seen. Actually, it’s not a logo, it’s stupid stretched out WordOut, and I’m pretty sure the whole world knows that.

You might think that if a business has put the effort and money in to creating a flyer, they would have proofread it. Sadly, you would often be wrong.

Have several people check your work. Spelling and grammatical mistakes are incredibly easy to make when you’ve been looking  at the same layout for too long. At best, a mistake will make your company appear unprofessional.  At worst, you will include a wrong phone number or web address, and get zero return.

Get the results you want from your flyer program through research, creativity, and planning. Your success story could be a single sheet of paper away!