Flyer Design Tips - Information is King

Nov 7th in | Features | by Arthur

Flyer printing is a great way to promote your business but only if the whole process, from design to distribution, is done properly. What’s more, poorly planned, designed, printed or distributed flyers usually end up in the bin so unless you’ve got money (and time) to burn it’s worth doing planning what information to put on your flyer before designing or printing it.

Quick Summary

Know and keep your flyer design, print and distribution relevant to your target markets. It is much better to print five sets of 1000, targeted flyers than 5000 generic ones.
Choose whether you want your flyer to advertise your products or advertise your brand (Brand Advertising vs Product Advertising). Note that for 95% of companies brand advertising is an expensive and pointless exercise.
Answers to the five most common questions you receive about your product/service as well as clear contact info should be the most prominent and obvious pieces of information on your flyers.
Include a flyer specific call to action on your flyer to help motivate responses to your campaign as well as create accurate ways to measure the success of your campaign.

Research your target markets

Knowing your key target markets is absolutely critical to launching a successful marketing campaign through any medium. This knowledge will be key in influencing every single decision you make during the flyer design process from choosing the information, sizes, colors and fonts of your flyers right through to the best times of day and places to distribute them. Target markets can be

In an ideal world the design and information on every single flyer you distribute would be tailored completely to the unique needs of the person to which it was delivered ensuring the maximum possible chance of a response to that flyer. Since this would prove an extremely expensive, time consuming and potentially impossible process we attempt to make generalizations about the needs, values and priorities of large groups of people based on certain key characteristics including age, sex, occupation, address, income, sexuality, race and religion. Each of these groups forms a potential target market however for each individual product, business, event or service there may be one or many groups who form that entity’s “key target markets”. These groups may be as general as “Men” or as specific as “Hispanic, middle class, 40 year old, married, Muslim, one-legged, housewives”.

Putting even a small amount of thought in to considering two or three of your businesses target markets will greatly improve the rate of success of your flyers and you will get far better returns by carefully designing and printing five sets of 1000 flyers each targeted specifically at the needs and circumstances of a different major market segment than you will by printing and distributing 5000 flyers all with generic information on them.

This is because people will naturally respond to information that appears to be more relevant to them whilst quickly discerning and discarding information that they perceive to be clearly generic. Changes can be either aesthetic or in content and can have a dramatic effect on the response percentages to your marketing giving you the edge over your less well prepared competition.

Brand Advertising vs Product Advertising

Brand advertising is advertising with a strong emphasis on the company brand (logo and/or company name) and is largely used in an attempt to generate good will toward a brand rather than advertise a product or service.

Whilst I agree that there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing your carefully designed logo take center stage on a flyer one of the hardest things to accept as a business owner is that unless you’re a global brand like Coca Cola potential clients care more about the products or service you provide than who you are or your company name and logo. In fact people largely couldn’t care less about your logo or name will first decide that your product is right for them first and then (and only then) will they have a look at your company to evaluate its values and relevance, to their goals. So, whilst the choice is yours it’s worth remembering that product advertising generally produces significantly greater returns on marketing investments than brand advertising.

The upshot of this is to remember that every extra millimeter of space that your logo and company name takes up on your promotional flyers is wasted space which would be much better put towards displaying relevant product and contact information.

What information to put on your Flyers

What are the five first and most common questions you receive about your product, service or event? These five pieces of information as well as clear contact information should form the key core of your flyer design. The most common five examples that I’ve encountered are:

What is it?
Where is it?
When is it?
How much does it cost?
How long does it take?

Contact information is vital. Provide at least two highly visible contact methods such as a phone number and email and then supplement them with as many other sensible methods as possible (address, skype name, mobile phone, website address). Getting the client to contact you is the hardest part of the whole marketing operation so make it as easy as possible to do. A great idea is to include a perforation on your flyer with all of your contact, coupon and information details on it. That way your clients can tear off and keep your flyer’s key information for later use in a bite sized, convenient and unique way.

Remember to make yourself an information checklist and check it. If your flyer doesn’t include this information then it is most likely going in the bin.

Include a motivational call to action

A critical part of a successful flyer is to actually motivate your clients to act on the carefully designed and researched information within. By offering a flyer campaign specific coupon discount code with a timed expiry date you create a strongly motivational call to action as well as a highly accurate means of judging the success of your flyer campaign.