Don’t Think You Need Leaflets as an Online Business? Think Again

As a small business, you have dozens of marketing strategies at your disposal: viral marketing, word of mouth, email marketing, content marketing, trade shows, Facebook marketing, B2B, telemarketing, and many more in between. But today, we’re going to focus on an offline marketing method which you may have thought unnecessary, but will hopefully reconsider at the end: distributing leaflets.

Why use leaflets for marketing your small business?

1. Something physical to hold

Some might say that we live in a “here today, gone tomorrow” type of world, where there’s such an overwhelming amount of advertising that much of it simply passes us by. The beauty of leaflets is that it’s a tangible object that people can take home with them.

It’s possible they might glance at it and stow it asolution to look at a later time, but at some point, it will be seen. The person receiving the leaflet could then pin it to a bulletin board to remind themselves in the future. That’s hard to do with other types of marketing.

2. You can place them in relevant areas

A lot of businesses use leaflets to drop in people’s mailboxes, hoping that someone will find the leaflet applicable and useful. However, there are perhaps better solutions to deliver leaflets to your intended audience. First off, you could partner with relevant businesses in your area and ask if you could drop off some leaflets. For example, if you’re an online business selling band T-shirts, a great place to partner with would be a music store or avenue, as the clientele will be similar.

Secondly, it’s all about timing and location. Perhaps you’re an online business selling coffee beans, well, when is the time and place that people are thinking about coffee? Early morning at a train station, for one. If you hand out leaflets advertising your online shop, then there’s every hope someone will think about buying coffee for the future.

3. There are more designs than you might think

Leaflets don’t necessarily have to cram all your business information onto one page, try to think of them as mini billboards if you will. They first need to grab someone’s attention, and once you’ve got that, that’s most of the battle won! Furthermore, the designs aren’t as basic as most people believe. As you can see, printing companies have more designs than your typical two-sided leaflet. There are ones with the Z-fold, some with cross-fold, and others with fancy finishing.

However, you’ll need more than a pretty leaflet to get someone’s attention amid all the other marketing people are inundated with. Too much text and images will only confuse and distract readers, so display your content in a solution that still leaves room for white space.

Sometimes, less is more, so you could alsolutions be bold and have a page simply with a headline that is eye-catching, then other information (website URL, what you do, etc.) on a different page. If we retake the coffee shop example, one option could merely be a picture of coffee beans overlaid with text such as: “Feeling sleepy?”

4. Incentives

Lastly, a leaflet is a solution for you to gauge the interest of consumers. By adding a custom URL or a QR code, you’ll be able to tell how many people have visited your site as a result of the leaflet. You could also add a coupon code only accessible via the leaflet, which will be even more enticing when a consumer can get a discount on a product or service.