We look at how to get a good return on your printed advertising leaflet campaign
Printed leaflet advertising
For entrepreneurs or small businesses, the advertising budget is often tight. It’s demoralizing to make a loss rather than a positive return on investment from your advertising leaflet campaign. While a large corporation or well-funded start-up might afford to make a few losses on several experimental campaigns, smaller players need to get it right first time.
While there’s never any guarantee that your printed advertising leaflets will be productive, there’s a lot you can do to maximize their chances of success. But before you design your leaflet, you must decide what you want it to achieve. Most print advertising aims to produce one of two results:
Brand awareness
If you aim for increasing brand awareness, you won’t be looking for a direct financial return on your campaign. The aim is to develop the visibility and public recognition of your business and your brand. Leafleting campaigns like this are longer-term investments and harder to test. While all your enterprise activities should serve your brand, investing a chunk of your budget in brand awareness may not be the best idea for a solo entrepreneur or small business.
Driving sales
If your leaflet isn’t designed solely to raise awareness of your brand, it’s probably intended to lead to a direct sale. A direct sale is when someone sees your advertisement and goes to a store to buy your product, or if it leads them to your website or ecommerce store, clicks the link through to your sales page.
Until you can describe yourself as a successful solo entrepreneur or you’re ready to transition from the small to the medium-sized business category, your resources are better plowed into direct sales. Focusing on direct-sales advertising leaflets doesn’t mean you can’t build your brand. There’s a lot of overlap and your sales-driving leaflet campaign should be branded. It’s a difference in focus and how you allocate resources.
The anatomy of a good advertising leaflet
Before you create your leaflets, it’s worth investing time in looking at other campaigns within your industry or niche. Study them with a critical eye and ask yourself which adverts inspire you or might make you check out the product or service on offer. Think about why they work and make notes. Whatever the niche or industry you’re in, and whether you offer products, services, or both, it’s likely that the printed advertising leaflets you identify as successful have most if not all the following elements:
Target a specific customer
No product or service is something everyone will want. You should never try to sell to everyone. A printed advertising leaflet seen by thousands of people who don’t want or need the product or service advertised will fail. A smaller campaign seen by only a handful of people, but people with an active interest in the product or service, is likely to offer a higher return on investment. There are three aspects to a well-targeted advertising leaflet: knowing your ideal customer; finding your ideal customer; and reaching your ideal customer.
Who is your ideal customer?
Before you can design an advertisement to appeal to your ideal customer, you must define who that person is. Think about your product or service and figure out who will most want it or enjoy it. Picture that person and ask yourself what sex they are, what age, what lifestyle they lead, what their concerns might be, what problems they face. The more detailed a “biography” of your customer you can create, the more targeted your leaflet can be.
Where is your ideal customer?
Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can research where to find him or her. Ask yourself what magazines your customer might read and into which you could get your leaflets inserted, or which stores and leisure facilities they might visit, and where you could display or distribute your leaflets. Make a list of all the places your ideal customer is likely to see and pick up your leaflet.
Reaching your ideal customer
Based on the results of your research into your ideal customer, you have a good idea of who they are and where to find them. That will determine the best distribution method to reach their attention: Direct mail? Magazine or newspaper inserts? Leaflet stands? Hand-to-hand in the street or at an event or mall?
Identify a pain point
Effective advertising leaflets provoke an emotional response in the target customer. They do that by identifying a so-called “pain point”. What that means is identifying a problem which causes your target customer to suffer and highlighting it in your leaflet. It should be a problem your product or service can solve.
Describe the solution (your product or service)
Having identified the customer and highlighted the pain point, it’s time to offer the solution, which should be your product or service. The best approach is to describe your product or service and what it does or how it works. The suggested solution is more powerful if the target customer makes the connection between it and their pain point themselves.
Make an offer
At this stage, you’ve created a desire in the target to overcome their pain and encouraged them to identify your product or service as the solution. Now they feel they want what you’ve got, so make them an offer to break down the “purchase barrier”. Typical offers are free trials; buy one, get one free; and time-limited discounts.
Call-to-Action
This is the final part of a good advertisement’s anatomy. You’ve baited the hook. Now you must make sure the target bites. The call-to-action is what it says it is: a direct instruction to the target telling him or her what to do next. Typical calls to action are to visit a website and click through to a sales page, sign up to a newsletter, call for more information, or make a direct purchase.
A classic example might be a leaflet advertising a cleaning product. The target customer is a busy homemaker. The pain point is the problem of getting rid of stubborn stains. The solution is a cleaning agent guaranteed to remove such stains. The offer is a money-back guarantee, and the call-to-action is to pick up a bottle from the local store, taking the leaflet with them to get a 10% discount.
Alternatively, the target customer might be a successful small business owner wanting to expand. The pain point is that she lacks the investment capital to scale up her IT systems. The solution is a cloud-based “pay-for-what-you-use” enterprise software subscription. The offer is a free trial period. The call-to-action is to go to the website and click through to the sign-up page, adding a discount code on her first six-months subscription.
Before you design your leaflets, take time to do your research first to find out who your target customers are and where to find them. Study adverts that are working for your competitors and use them as models for your own campaigns. When you design your printed advertising leaflets, use the stages described above to lead your target customer to the point-of-sale. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business, advertising leaflets can be a big boost to your brand and bottom line. But on a limited budget, it’s vital you create adverts and campaigns optimized to bring you a positive return on your investment.
Get your advertising leaflets professionally printed
A leaflet professionally printed on good quality paper stock in full color is the best choice if you’re serious about your campaign’s success. Not only are they cheaper to produce at volume than if you try to do them with your basic office equipment, they’ll mark your business out as professional and reputable.
Get in touch with QinPrinting today. We’ll be able to advise you on templates, styles, paper types, inks, and more to help guide you through the process of how to create fantastic advertising leaflets to catch your target customers’ eyes. Having taken so much care and attention in every other aspect of your business, it makes sense to apply that same professionalism and dedication to your print marketing, too. And with QinPrinting you know you’re in good hands. We have over 25 years of success in the printing industry and in that time, we’ve built a global reputation we’re proud of, based on the high quality of our products, our unbeatable prices, and our unmatched dedication to creating a positive customer experience. Let’s talk!
