Have you tried using leaflet deliveries for your school? It sounds simple enough, producing a few leaflets and having a company deliver them door-to-door for you, but it’s not as simple as it sounds.  I’ve always had a saying when it comes to marketing – “success is in the detail”. I’ve learnt that this is especially true for leaflet delivery campaigns. Today, I would like to take a few moments to discuss the finer details that have transformed our campaigns from average performers to heavy lifters in our marketing arsenal.

Design

Before you start, it’s important to plan how your delivery will fit into your broader campaign. Consider what the main objective and try to focus on one key message. Whether people glance at the leaflet, or read the whole thing, you want to be sure that they’ve received that one key message. Don’t be afraid to be specific – general marketing never really works.  

The look of your leaflet will say a lot about your college too. I opt for cleaner designs and avoid using text over images (which is hard to read). Try not to overwhelm people with too much information, you don’t them throwing it out straight away, keep it simple and to the point.

Timing

Normally, people assume that earlier is better, but this is not the case when distributing  leaflets for event promotions. I learnt this a few years ago when I was running behind on my distribution for an open event. We started delivering leaflets a month before the event, rather than the usual six weeks and I noticed a better (and quicker) response. I now give the supplier three weeks to deliver the promotional material, with a one week safety-net. Ensure you not to leave it  too late though – if you have a large delivery to do, rushing the supplier will affect the quality of their delivery.

Choosing a Supplier

This is the key to getting leaflet deliveries right, so much so, that I would spend a year testing suppliers against each other to ensure I had selected the right organisation for ongoing promotions. Price is an important factor to consider, but don’t put both your printing and distribution costs at risk with a non-reliable supplier.

If possible, try to find a supplier that only delivers your leaflets and maybe one or two others at a time. Bundled deliveries tend to get missed or go straight in the bin.

Some services offer tracking at an additional fee. I’ve found this to be out of my price range, but it is certainly worth testing smaller drops that are tracked versus larger drops that are not tracked.

Measurements

The first step in measuring the effectiveness of a campaign is to ensure that your supplier is reliably distributing your leaflets. I would ask a college parent from each suburb to keep an eye out for your leaflet and to inform you when they receive it.

Another tool I often use with leaflet campaigns is ‘SMS keywords’ which allow your prospects to interact with your marketing campaign through SMS. You can do this using SchoolCampaign. This is a great tool to measure the effectiveness of your campaign while facilitating prospect engagement.

It Is All About the Numbers

When planning how many leaflets to distribute, I recommend a larger area of distribution instead of focusing on only one or two suburbs at a time. I have previously stuck to around 40,000 leaflets to give me the exposure I need to build campaign visibility.

Broader Strategy

Have you ever noticed that you never really see something until you’re in the market for it? Try to ‘warm your audience up’ by supporting your campaign with local press, or a Facebook campaign for the postcodes that you will be distributing to.

If you are pointing people to your website, make sure that you have some visibility with the same call to action and artwork on your homepage so that you let people know where to navigate once landing on your website.

I hope that the pointers above will give you a few ideas to take your next leaflet distribution to the next level. What has worked for you?