Why Leaflet Distribution Fails For Most Small Business Owners

As an owner of a leaflet distribution business I have seen a pattern over the years that I would like to share.  Sadly most business owners spend all their time and money getting their business looking great, they pour the money into the making/building of the business and forget about the advertising of it. I have seen the most amazingly designed and built businesses with the latest and greatest of tools to help their job and yet they have nobody in their store.  Why?  Because they don’t budget to advertise their business, they spend all their money on getting the business to its starting point, they forget about getting their name out there. These are usually the business owners that then come to their local leaflet distributor with 1000 flyers and expect miracles; they don’t get 500 calls so they decide leaflet distribution doesn’t work.

Let me ask you this, why does Harvey Norman, Bunnings, Coles, Woolworths, Super Cheap Auto, Kmart etc put out catalogues EVERY WEEK, SOMETIMES TWICE A WEEK?

These are mega multimillion dollar companies that can afford the best and most expensive market researchers and analysts and accountants in Australia and even the world. What does this tell you?

Leaflet distribution, flyer delivery, pamphlet drops work, and it works the best if you do it repetitively, this is not a sales pitch but merely a fact.

Have a budget to advertise your business; it can be for online, radio, flyers, tv, only you know what you can afford. Try and have enough to drop an area 4 or 5 times initially, you are better off dropping 1000 flyers into an area 5 times than 5000 flyers into an area once.

Statistics tell us that approximately 80% of your household income is spent within 10km’s so target the areas within 10km of your business initially. Drop flyers into a small area but drop them repetitively so that you are branding your business and building up trust with the public. The key here is to never stop dropping that area, keep dropping those areas once a month and when you have the money start dropping another area within the 10km range, and keep doing this until you are dropping the whole area.

You and I don’t have the budget of the Harvey Normans, but we can certainly follow their lead, repetition, repetition, repetition.

The sad truth is most small businesses forget to put aside a budget for advertising and spend all their money making the premises looking great and have nice decals on the car, a fancy computer and all those sorts of things, and they forget that all of that makes no difference if they don’t have any customers.  You really need to have a budget for 3-6 months advertising.

You can be the best in the world at what you do but if nobody knows about you or your business then it doesn’t matter.

I hope this article is useful to any new small businesses out there.