Flyer printing is often an integral part to any print marketing campaign. The results of a well-designed flyer and a well-executed flyer campaign can be extraordinary. But at the other end of the spectrum, poorly designed flyers can make the whole process completely pointless. Here at StuPrint.com we have seen the whole spectrum of flyer designs so have a read of this article to get an idea of how to make sure your flyer budget is fruitful.
StuPrint.com had an exhaustive list of printed flyers on offer. We cover the entire range of paper finishes, paper weights and flyer sizes. And over the years we have printed millions of the things so we’ve seen an awful lot of designs. But the actual artwork for the printed flyer is only part of the battle (and we’ll discuss that below) when it comes to properly executing a successful flyer campaign. We’ve had a sit-down here at StuPrint.com HQ and have come up with 3 key questions you need to be asking yourself before you start:
1. How many flyers should I be ordering?
2. How are you going to get people to engage with your flyer?
3. After the campaign, how good was the response and what should I focus on next time?
So lets go through these…
1. How many flyers should I be ordering?
This might seem like a silly question but it is actually prudent to give it some thought. This is wholly due to the fact that you will most likely be working within the parameters of a confined print budget. As a rule of thumb in the world of print, heavier paper stocks are more expensive that lighter ones. Similarly, color printing is more expensive than plain black and white. Unfortunately, and predictably, the vast majority of people find the heavier stock to convey a sentiment of sturdiness and luxury. It’s a shame, but I would be more likely to read a flyer that was thick and glossy than a flyer that was dull and thin. That’s just the way it is.
So there’s a trade-off between number and quality: do you spend your fixed print budget on, for example, 10,000 black and white A6 flyers on 140gsm paper? Or do you go for 2500 full color A6 flyers on 350gsm card? Well you need to spare some time to consider your product. How many people are realistically going to be interested in your product? If it is a niche product then it’s likely that fewer flyers, but of a higher quality will be better for you. For example, most of the printing we have done for customers going do industry exhibitions has been on super-high quality stock because they know they will only need to hand out between 750 and 1000 flyers over the course of the expo. On the other side of the coin, we have had many local firms selling products/services with broad appeal (take-away menus, mini cab companies etc) that simply want to get their business out to as many people as possible. In these circumstances, they have often gone for thinner paper but have printed many thousands of them.
It really is a matter of horses for courses. Just take a long look at your product, the amount you’d be happy spending on print, and your target market and make a decision based on that.
2. How are you going to get people to engage with your flyers?
If you’re spending good money on getting flyers printed then you want to be damn sure that people are going to engage with it. This, again, is a matter of knowing your product and knowing your customers. If you don’t know already, by doing a bit of market research it is very easy to find out whom exactly your product appeals to. Once you know this the rest is easy. It is logical to argue that a flyer design tailored to specific groups’ tastes will be more powerful than one that is not. So know your target market. If you have a product that is mainly based at men, then don’t make your flyers pink as that is a classically female color. I know that is an incredibly obvious thing to say but it really is worthwhile sitting down and considering what your market wants to see in a design. You will find that most demographics have broad tastes in common. So select fonts, colors, and designs that are most likely to appeal. If your customer group is split across several demographics, and if you have a way of targeting these groups individually, then you might actually find it worthwhile developing several designs that can be run out at the same time. The added cost of setting up multiple flyer designs can be outweighed by having a potentially much more efficient print marketing campaign.
A crucial question to ask yourself is “what should I actually be putting on my flyer?” You have a limited space over two sides of paper and you need to make the most of it. But at the same time you do not want to overload your artwork with information. If you get handed a flyer in the street you don’t want to read an essay in size 9 text. You’d be more likely to stick it in the bin than actually engage with it. So you need to get your message across succinctly. This is actually easier than it sounds: get the relevant information across! Timings, dates, contact details, prices and a brief summary are all you really need but you might want to consider some (good) reviews if you have them.
Aside from shear content, you also need to make sure the design is fundamentally pleasing. If you have the wiggle room in your budget, a graphic designer with a good brief can be a great asset here. If not, its worthwhile getting hold of some of the Adobe Suite’s design programs. These can really help when it comes to laying out your design and getting it print ready. For more information on this, why not have a read of some of our other articles on great websites for free stock images and the information you need to make sure you artwork is completely print ready.
3. After the campaign, how good was the response and what should I focus on next time?
So you’ve researched your customer-base, designed your flyer design accordingly, selected the print specifications most appropriate to your print budget and you’ve gone to print. Whether you’ve taken on a third-party to distribute them, handed them out in the street or posted them out to your mailing list, it is crucial to learn how successful your campaign has been. What are the best ways to achieve this? Well in the world of e-commerce the adverts and banners you find online will lead you through to a specific page of a website set up specifically for that advertisement campaign. These are known as landing pages. With the correct analytics tools being used an advertiser can see exactly how successful their online campaign has been. Print campaigners are not so lucky. The assessment has to be far more qualitative. We get a lot of customers promoting amateur dramatics events with printed flyers. It would be near impossible to distinguish the absolute impact of the flyer campaign because there is very little way of knowing how many extra people turned up to a performance solely because of the flyer they were handed or posted. But there is one thing in particular you can do: coupons. If people are told that by presenting the flyer they hold to one of your representatives that they will receive, say, 5% off the standard cost, you will be able to gain a substantially better idea of how well your campaign has done. But why is this beneficial? Well flyer campaigns are not free! So if you can get close to knowing that by sending out 5000 300gsm A6 full color flyers into a community (£72.50 with StuPrint.com), your sales actually go up by X% then you can be pretty sure that the whole process was completely worthwhile. If you decide to run another, then why not tweak everything a little and see if you get a better response? By keeping up this trial and error approach you can be pretty confident that you will eventually reach the most efficient level of print marketing.
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