Marketing Your Business With Flyers: Flier Marketing Ideas, Tips And Strategy

December 10, 2013

Since this post is a bit long, here are internal links to the different sections for this page to make reading this page more convenient for you:

Book And Course To Help You Promote Your Local Business

I recently published a book on local business marketing that includes flier marketing and much more. You can get it on Amazon as a hardcopy or a Kindle version (if you don’t have a Kindle, you can read the book on the Kindle version of your smartphone).

If you prefer learning with video instead of reading, you can take my local business marketing course (it has a few free preview lectures – browse the full list of lectures to see if that course might be right for you).

Link to the local business marketing book on Amazon (browse the table of contents to see if the book is right for you)
Link with a discount to the local business marketing course on Udemy (watch some of the free preview lectures to see if the course will be right for you to promote your business)

Why Flier Marketing Is Still So Effective To Promote Your Business

There are so many cool ways to promote your business like social media marketing, YouTube, SEO (search engine optimization) and many other online and offline techniques. So, why is flier marketing still so effective?

The answer lies in two general truths. The first is that people still often prefer to have something in their hands that they can touch, feel, save on their desks or shelves and come back to when they are ready. They can save the flier in case they don’t necessarily need it right there and then, but think that they might make use of it later. The second reason flier marketing is still so effective is a little bit more practical. It is that YOU decide who gets the flier, and there are various levels of complexity for how you can decide on, and hone in on the most ideal people to whom to give your flyers. Precisely this hyper-targeting of your potentially ideal clients is what often makes marketing with flyers so effective.

Demographics, Psychographics and Geo-targeting With Flier Advertising

What are these fancy terms? Let me define them for you.

Demographics: measurable attributes of your target customers like age, sex (not “yes please” but male/female), education level, income level, where they live and the affluence of that neighborhood, their political affiliation, and many additional concrete and measurable attributes.

Psycho-graphics: these are not measurable but still important attributes about your target customers. These are things like interests, hobbies, needs, fears, desires, hopes, insecurities, things they feel that they are lacking and need in their lives.

Geo-graphics: this is basically where these people live. For many local businesses, you must find customers who are local and live within a certain radius.

Now let’s explore how you can identify the demographics, psycho-graphics and geo-targeting of your most ideal potential customers to whom you will give your flyers.

Article Update: many people asked me for all the possible offline marketing strategies that can be used to promote their business, and I created a full online course that will teach you how to do offline marketing like a pro.

Here is a discount link to my full course on how to promote your business with flyers. This course teaches you how to make flyers that get people’s attention, and help you convert people into customers. Check out the full course curriculum and watch the free preview lectures to see exactly what you will be getting in the course. And if you want to browse listings of all my best courses, here is a list of 60 Udemy course discounts.

And here is a discount link to my full and very loved marketing course on how to reach 1,000,000 people. This course has 13 hours of video tutorials, and tips on offline marketing, advanced social media marketing, search engine optimization, and much more.

And if you are a first-time entrepreneur, check out this course on how to start a business, which you might also find very helpful as you work on building your company.

Types Of Businesses That Get Best Results With Flier Advertising

While if you are creative and resourceful enough in how you do your promotion, you can probably successfully promote any business with flyers, some of the best types of businesses to promote with flyers are local businesses and events because you can geographically target people when you hand out the flyers.

Local businesses tend to be businesses that do business within a certain geographical radius, cities, or neighborhoods.

Businesses that tend to be difficult to promote with flyers are ones which don’t make a significant amount of money per customer and rely on reaching a large scale of low-spending customers to reach high revenue numbers. Since flyers have a cost to printing and handing them out, unless you can make a significant amount of money per each signed-up customer, it will lose you money because typically you have to hand out many flyers to generate a single sign-up.

Even More Marketing Resources

I wrote a marketing book full of actionable strategies to help your business get exposure. It teaches you the strategies I used to reach 1,000,000 for my business. The book is about 150 pages long. Here is a full description of my marketing book. Here is the marketing book on Amazon.

If you prefer watching videos instead of reading books, I created a few online courses that teach you how to be a great marketer. The courses are mostly video-based. Here is the advanced social media marketing course, SEO course, affiliate marketing course, and the full marketing plan and strategy course.

How To Design The Flyers

There are a few important elements that make or break a flyer marketing campaign. One important thing to keep in mind is that when you hand out flyers to people, they are usually on the go. That means they have only a few seconds to glance at your flyer before they determine whether they will take a closer look at it or throw it away (hopefully they will recycle the flyer).

That means that you have to make the value proposition in big letter and clear print. What you are promoting should be immediately clear, and it should also be clear what the value is for the person looking at the flyer.

Additionally, try to not go too heavy on the graphics. While graphics can be enticing and alluring, they can also cause a little bit of confusion. So try to have clear images that add to the flyer’s message in a nice way.

Where To Print Your Flier

You might wonder where to get your flyers actually designed and printed so I’ll cover a few options that you have.

If you want to do the design and printing online, I recommend a website called VistaPrint.com which is where I print my business cards and flyers. They have thousands of existing designs available that you can choose from. You can create the design and get it printed for you right on that site.

If you want to have a custom design, you can do that on VistaPrint as well, although it will be a little bit expensive. To get a cheap custom design, take look at Fiverr.com where you can get business cards and flyers designed for you for as low as just $5.

Of course, as these strategies succeed for you and you will need to print more and more business cards, flyers and other printed marketing materials, you can approach local print shops to see whether they can work out a deal for a significant discount printing in bulk for you. The designs they can print can be the designs that you found on VistaPrint or got custom made on Fiverr.

Generally, the ultimate design is something that most people outsource because let’s face it, most of us are not designers. It is easy to get the flyers designed for you and printed. The challenging part is to have what’s printed on it resonate with people.

Costs Of The Flyers

Marketing your business with flyers isn’t free. In fact, it isn’t very cheap. A cheap flyer can cost a few cents to print, and a good flyer can cost nearly a dollar to print. As you might guess, cheap flyers will get you the kinds of results that you paid for. So you will have to give out more flyers and spend more time giving the flyers out. Additionally, if you hire someone to hand out the flyers, that is a cost as well. When it comes to marketing, here is a tutorial about some additional marketing and customer acquisition costs that are more difficult to notice.

To fully understand how many passed out flyers it takes you to get a single customer, you must be able to determine whether the flyers generated any leads. That means that the contact information on those flyers must be unique. It can be a unique phone number or a url that people should visit. That will help you measure how many people contacted you because they got your flyers. This is called direct marketing. Here is a tutorial about direct marketing.

Keep in mind that since flyer marketing is not free, there are many other paid marketing techniques that can work. We will get to those later in the article.

Understand Customer Lifetime Value

Once you are able to understand how much it costs you to acquire a customer by marketing your business with flyers, you should also understand how much money you can earn from your lifetime relationship with this customer. Here is a video tutorial on how to determine your customer lifetime value.

Make Sure You Reach Your Target Market

When you are doing any kind of marketing, and especially marketing that isn’t free or cheap, make sure that you do not waste and mis-direct your marketing efforts. That means that you have to reach your target market with your efforts. Here is a video about how to properly identify your target market.

What Your Customers Think When You Give Them A Flier

When you create your business, logo, website, and everything else, a large part of your motivation is to grow your own personal success, brand, and improve how you are seen by others. 99.9% of all people are generally most motivated by improving their own situations.

Understanding this, what do you think your customers care and think about when they come in contact with your flier or your business?

All your customers want to know is “what’s in it for me?” so when you create your flyers, create the flyers out of understanding that this is how people will approach your flyers. I’ll explain how to create your flyers in the next chapter, but for now just think about this.

General Introduction To Marketing

Here is an introductory marketing tutorial that explains how to balance costs, targeting, volume and conversion in you marketing efforts.

Additionally, since flyer marketing is one of offline marketing strategies, take a look at a few other offline marketing strategies such as how to market your business with business cards and and article about whether business card marketing is still effective.

4 elements of an great flier

There are 4 things that should be present in every effective flier. In coming sections of this chapter I will explain how exactly to create each of these sections for maximum effect and conversion. For now, let me just explain what each of those four elements is.

The most important element is your offer. It must excite people because by being so compelling that it grabs people’s attention, and gets them to stop in their tracks and take a look.

The second element of a well crafted flier is the photo. You should have one large and clear photo. The photo should communicate what the benefit of your business is, and inspire people to imagine how great it would be for them to get the benefits of your business.

The third element that every well crafted flier should have is the call to action. You must tell people to call or visit or engage with your business in whatever other way that makes sense.

The fourth element of a well crafted flier is the extra details section that expands on, supports and explains your main offer. Those details should drive the point home about how great it would be to get the benefits of your business.

AIDA For Your Flier Marketing

AIDA is an acronym that stands for: Attention. Interest. Desire. Action.

AIDA is an age-old sales method. After I explain it to you, it should influence everything you do in your sales for the rest of your career. It is that powerful once you fully master it. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to master.

To honestly share with you my own experience with AIDA, when I first learned about it, it took me only a few minutes to understand it, and I thought that I fully got it. But looking back at it, it takes a lifetime to master. It ultimately took me a long time to become truly good with AIDA. But as you get better and better with it, you will notice how much stronger your sales become and how much better you will be able to convert leads to actual sales. Now that I’ve given you this little bit of background, let me explain what AIDA actually is, how it works, and how it will be extremely relevant to your flier marketing.

The first element is AIDA is the A which stands for attention. In the real world, what grabs people’s attention is the headline of whatever ad you are creating. In the case of flyers, the A or the headline is the offer on your flier. The offer must be so good that it stops people in their tracks. If the offer is mediocre most people won’t take too much of an interest.

The next part of AIDA is the I which stands for interest. Once you have people’s attention with your headline, that attention will only last a few seconds unless you build on it. The way you build people’s interest in your flier is with your photo and the extra offer details that you add below the offer.

The next part of AIDA is D which stands for desire. This is crucial. People’s interest must turn from theoretical and vague interest to true emotional desire for whatever it is that you are offering. After grabbing people’s attention, building an emotional desire in them is probably the second most crucial element of your sales. In fact, after you master headline writing, the element of AIDA with the most depth which truly takes a lifetime to master is the process of turning people’s interest into a true emotional desire.

After people’s emotions are involved and they truly desire your product, they will do the rest of the work for you by convincing themselves just how much they need whatever it is that you are selling.

Once you really get people to desire your product, the last part of AIDA is the last A which stands for action. You must get them to take action, which is to buy something or call your business or sign up for something in some way, whatever that may be for your particular business.

Now that you understand AIDA, always apply it to anything you are selling.

Now we are ready to walk through the elements of a successful flier in more detail, with AIDA in mind.

How to create an amazing offer (the A in AIDA)

Your offer is the A of AIDA, and it must grab attention. Creating a great offer is easy in theory. If you offer something for free or at an incredible discount, people will flock to your unbelievable offer in droves.

The problem with doing such an offer is that it will lose you a significant amount of money.

The key to being able to realistically give such a great offer is to be able to make a significant amount of money on average per each person that takes you up on that offer.

For example, if you are promoting a gym, you can give away a pretty significant free membership trial just to get people to take you up on that offer. Most gyms give one free class to try for free, but what if you gave away 10 classes or 10 free days? That would certainly get people’s attention much more. Using the same gym example, if you significantly reduced initiation fees much more than people typically expect, that would also get people’s attention.

The trick is that if a person signs up, some people might remain members for many years, which would get you thousands upon thousands of dollars from them. And if they love your gym they might also get personal training, buy some of your gear and workout clothes, and even make you more than $10,000 over the lifetime of their membership.

By getting their attention, you increase the chance of that $10,000 client happening vs. not happening.

So whatever business you have, you must refine and improve your long-term customer strategy and make sure that you can make a significant amount of money per customer. Once you have a large LTV (lifetime customer value) you can make your attention grabbing headlines more and more attractive, while still being profitable and sustainable long-term.

So if you own a gym, you must get people to remain members for a long time. If you own a restaurant, you must get people to order or visit from you many times. If you own a cleaning or a gardening business, you must get people to use your business on a regular basis. For almost all kinds of businesses, what this really boils down to is simply making sure that you provide a consistently great service at a fair price. That will get many people to become long-term customers, which will enable you to give more attractive offers to get people’s attention.

Additional tips to write more attention-grabbing headlines involve using words like FREE or giving a x% OFF (some percent off) discount or $x OFF (some amount of dollars off) discount. Try to also use numbers in your headlines. That gets more attention too.

What kind of a photo to choose

The photo you choose for your flier should help people build their interest in your business, and the image in the photo should get people to begin imagining themselves getting the benefits of whatever it is that your business offers, and how much better their life will be after getting what your business offers. This will help to transition them to true desire for your product after they truly imagine themselves getting all those amazing benefits, and how much better their lives would be after getting the benefits of your business vs. not getting those benefits.

The photo must inspire their imagination.

Extra information and details (I and D of AIDA together with the photo)

Under your headline offer, you should also have a few (maybe three) bullet points that further expand on your big headline offer. Use those extra details to list 3 benefits and not features of your product or service. This will work together with the image that you choose to get people to imagine having those benefits in their lives, and begin to desire those benefits.

Together, these extra product benefit details and the photo are your I and D (building of interest and desire) of AIDA.

For example, if you are promoting a gym, some of those benefits might be things like quickly losing weight, looking better, wearing an attractive bathing suit on the beach, or many other common benefits that a gym ultimately offers. Those benefits have been promised to us by people for decades because they work to get people imagining and desiring to be like the people in the pictures.

Call to action (the last A of AIDA)

After people desire your product or service, you must make sure to close the deal and get those people into the doors of your business. You do that with an effective call to action which is the last A of AIDA, and the fourth element of a successful flier.

To make your call to action more effective you can add urgency to it by either limiting the total number of products available in that offer or the time during which the offer on the flier is valid.

For example, you can urge people to call this weekend (or week or month) because the offer expires after that. Or you can say that only x number of people get the offer, and they get it on a first-come-first-serve basis. These kinds of things are designed to get people to act on the offer instead of filing it away and forgetting about it.

How to get flyers made (cheapest to expensive)

Now that you know how to design all the necessary elements of your flier, it is time to get them printed.

It might seem that the cheapest way to print the flyers is on your home printer. Doing this will give you low quality flyers which will be on basic flimsy paper. It isn’t great, but at least it is a start.

Of course, cheap looking flyers will have a far lower conversion rate. So you would be well advised to get the flyers printed at a local print shop or on vistaprint.com which I mentioned earlier. If you are resourceful you can negotiate a discount with a local print shop or find discount deals on vistaprint.com, and it might end up being even cheaper to print flyers that way instead of printing them from home.

There are a few types of flyers that you can print. They can be business card size, postcard size, fold-out brochure type of flyers, or hang-on-door types of flyers which you can hang on people’s doors instead of having to slide them on the floor under their doors if that is one of the ways in which you distribute the flyers.

Mistakes NOT to make with your flyers

Do you remember the section of the book that talked about what your customers are thinking? Remember how all your customers care about is what’s in it for them?

Whatever isn’t for them, don’t add that to your flier. For example, do you think they care about your logo? They don’t really care. Do you think they care a whole lot about you? I am sorry to say that they don’t. You are a feature of the product or service, but you are certainly not a benefit. They will care about you a little bit later in the sales process, but they don’t care about you when looking at the flier.

So don’t add your logo or too many details about you or your credentials just yet. Instead, add what you can do for them, and the benefits you will give them. Try to take out all the unnecessary information from the flier because it will just create clutter and confusion. And every little bit of increase of clutter and confusion in the flier will decrease its effectiveness.

Your customers will never tell you why they didn’t call you and why they didn’t engage with your business. They will ignore you in silence. So you must be proactive in understanding the reasons why they might not engage, and not make those mistakes.

How To Do Your Flyer Marketing & Who Should Hand Out The Flyers?

Long-term you will, of course, hire someone to hand out your flyers because you have a million other things you need to do for your business, and don’t have time to stand there and hand out your flyers.

But when you first start out, it is very important that you hand out your flyers, and if you really want to hustle (which I know you do) it might be a good idea to spend an hour or two every few weeks handing out your own flyers even as your business matures.

Handing our your own flyers will help you see how people react to your product offer, and you will even be able to chat and interact with some of the people to whom you hand the flyers. Those conversations are invaluable because those people will explain to you exactly why they do or do not take an interest in your flier, and that will give you further ideas for how you can improve your flier design and overall flier marketing.

Those insights and ultimate improvement in your flier design will boost your flier marketing results and give you more customers long-term. Doing this will make your overall flier marketing more effective and profitable.

Where you can hand it out or post flyers

You may already have some ways in mind for handing out your flyers, but let me quickly list a number of ways in which you can distribute them. Hopefully it will give you some additional ideas to the distribution strategies you already have in mind.

While you can obviously hand flyers out on the street, you can also put them under people’s doors in their homes and apartment buildings. You can also get the hang-on-door flyers made and hang them on people’s door knobs to get more attention than just sliding them on the floor. You can also buy outdoor flier dispenser trays that can stick to glass so that people can take them when your business is closed or if they are just passing by on the street and don’t necessarily walk in. You can also approach other nearby businesses and ask them if you can leave your flyers on display in their store. This usually works if you offer to display their flyers somewhere in your business. You can also give flyers to people at the point of purchase. Those flyers can have additional discounts for next purchases. This would incentivize people to come back to your business to redeem the discounts on those flyers. You can also go to neighborhood and community events and try to distribute the flyers there. You can also put flyers on the windshields and side windows of cars. You can also post your flyers on community billboards and bulletin boards, and on neighborhood posts where people post announcements. Lastly, you can mail the flyers by snail mail to people who live in the neighborhoods which you target with your geo-targeting.

How To Track Effectiveness Of Your Flyer Marketing

I already alluded to tracking the effectiveness of your flyers earlier in this book, but since this is an important topic, it is worth covering it again with more focus.

If you don’t have a way to track effectiveness of your flier marketing campaigns, you have no idea whether it is profitable or whether it is worth doing in the future. It is like shooting blind or in the dark. That is a very bad strategy because for all you know, you can be wasting your time and money.

The professional approach would be to enable yourself to track the results of your flier marketing. The way you would do that is to give a unique email, phone number, discount code, or website URL (some page on your website with a discount offer) that only people who take the flier would know about. This way you can tell whether the flyers are generating leads, and then track which of those leads become paying customers. Over time you would be able to track how much revenue and profit those customers brought your business over the long-term, and be able to calculate whether the total profit from those people covered the cost of your flier marketing campaign.

That is the only way you can determine whether the flier marketing campaign is actually financially viable long-term or whether you are losing money on it.

But once you find a flier design that converts well and generates many leads to your business that then convert into paying long-term clients, you will have an absolutely winning long-term formula for the lifetime of your business that you can use to grow and expand as much as your heart desires!!

How To Spell Flyers or Fliers

Note in case you are wondering, both version of the spelling of the word “flyers” or “flier” is acceptable in the English language, but the singular flier is more common while the more common of the plural version of this word is “flyers.”

Most first-time marketers have a marketing plan that goes something like “I will promote my business by handing out business cards, flyers, and promote my business on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Does that sound something close to what you have in mind for your marketing?

In this article, I will explain how to effectively promote your business with flyers, and why it isn’t the best option for you overall. Then I will explain how to discover the best marketing possibilities for your unique business.

Types Of Businesses You Can Promote With Fliers

Flier marketing is effective for promoting local businesses such as restaurants, barbershops, various stores or boutiques, gyms, local events, various kinds of home repair, and other similar local businesses.

Flier marketing is especially effective if you offer some kind of a discount or an introductory offer to help sweeten the deal for people to come and check out your business.

Additionally, if you are just launching or opening your business, flier marketing can be very effective to let people know about your business so that they can come and check out your grand opening.

Here is a full list of businesses you can promote using flier marketing: restaurant or diner, coffee shop, barbershop, nightclub, local event, most kinds of stores ranging from boutiques to grocery stores to jewlery shops, animal care or grooming, lawn care or landscaping businesses, moving businesses, gym, frozen yogurt or ice cream shop, a deli or a sandwich shop, a beauty salon or a hair salon, a spa, a daycare business, a hardware store, commercial cleaning or residential cleaning, car wash, general contractor business, dog walking or pet sitting, martial arts studio, or a dance studio.

Further Marketing Resources

For more business-starting resources, please take a look at our business planning mobile apps. Here is the iOS business plan app and here is the Android business plan app. Additionally, here is the iOS marketing app. And here is the Android marketing app. And here are our business apps on the Kindle. And here is an article where I give the argument that our Android apps are the best business apps on Android.

And please check out and subscribe to my YouTube channel where we cover many marketing topics.

Full Playlist Of 70 Marketing Tutorials

Yes, that is correct. This playlist has 70 marketing tutorials. After watching these, you will be a real marketing pro! The videos will start one right after another.

Get Press Coverage For Your Business

In addition to the educational resources like books and online courses, I can directly help you promote your business by helping you with your SEO and getting publicity and press coverage for your business. Here is how I can help you get large exposure for your business.

Author: Alex Genadinik