Experiment Offline flyer Advertising

Hi All,

The website I work for has started an experiment today which I’m going to document on this post. The experiment will also be blogged on other sites however if your interested you might want to track and see the outcome for your own sites. The experiment is to use old fashioned advertising to gain web traffic. No search engines, seo, link building etc.

We are going to use customised flyers, targeted and untargeted distribution via mailbox drop.

Today is day one: Graphic designers have created three flyers. DL size with our custom headers and footers. Three different content on each DL flyer. Each flyer has a unique QR code and number for tracking purposes. We are finalising this design before the printers get a hold of it. Printing on 350gsm paper. Printing 10,000 flyers.

We hope to have this campaign up and running just after Christmas as updates arise I will post on here and let you know our overall outcome and conversion. Any questions, analysis or things you would like to see happen in the campaign, please let me know.

 

Great. I am interested in seeing the outcomes.
Do you have anyway to track the success of the campaign?

 

post the results here. im very curious if your traffic will go up

 

I hope you have great luck with the campaign, but unless you are doing serious branding through large scale advertising offline advertising usually doesn't work well. I would be interested in what you niche is, and if it is completely local. If it isn't local then 10,000 flyers doesn't create very good odds. Mail advertising to focused groups 10 years ago produced about .5% response rate. Unfocused was around .2% or less. So best case scenario you are looking at 50 responses but most likely less.

 

Day two (13/Dec/2010): We have hired a professional copywriter and marketer to work on the body of the flyer. Around 20 words using current standards and attention grabbing techniques. We now have 3 different versions however will finalise to one version for the printers. Header, footer and contact information done. Using Adobe Photoshop as the design tool for the flyer.

@Aaronmcgray – We are using a unique QR code and a number on each flyer. The unique number is printed on the bottom right in small font. Customer service will request this number when potential customers call.

@Hoodala – Thanks. We hope to have some success to with the time and money put into it. Niche: Website Design, Hosting, Domains. We have decided 10,000 flyers within 50 KM of our business. 5,000 targeted, 5,000 untargeted. We had a terrible response last campaign that’s why we are spending time on research and location for this campaign. We need 8% as a minimum to call! < Yes maybe high but we have set high standards on this campaign.

 

Thanks for posting such a thread, I was thinking about advertising in my local areas using flyers as well.

Keep us updated!

 

I'm interested. I'll be keeping tabs on this thread also!

 

I have some fresh experience to share with you. As already mentioned the offline marketing techniques have been known to perform badly for online businesses. I had an opportunity to run some flyers and a number of ads in (focused!) print media. The response was a big screaming zero. Good thing is that not a lof of money has been invested in this so it was considered an experiment. I would also love to hear your results, although I suspect you may not do better either. I guess we just proved the theory.

 

Hmm. I would recommend about 100+ other ways above this one! But, hey; doesn't hurt too badly to test it for yourself

 

I know of other people who have done similar things with great success. I wish you all the best.

 

It's been 7 days since your last update. Any more news?

 

interesting! look forward to your findings...

 

What kind of offers are you promoting? Even tho this method is quite good, its also good to have in mind the public on the area you are going to work with.

 

good offer. i am impressed

 

Rachel - what product does your company sell? Flyers can work, but they fail horribly for some products. If you are planning to just stick flyers on cars at the mall, they have to be very appealing to the people you are spamming (i.e. family/kids products, etc). Otherwise people will just trash the flyer and you've wasted a bunch of ad budget.

 

Day three (30/Dec/2010):Sorry for the lack of updates. With limited staff and the Christmas period we have prioritised are workload and this took the back seat for a few days. We used a professional copywriter and marketer to create a few lines of text for our flyer. Used power words and current advertising techniques. The header and footer stayed the same with our company information. The flyer is currently with our graphics department and we around 95% complete. In Australia everything is pretty much closed for the Christmas and new years period so we hope to send this to the printers around Jan 12th - which is when we will update this thread again.

Domain Names, Web Hosting and Web Design. We are only concentrating on the web design section for the flyer. We are targeting a specific area of the business rather than the entire company.

Someone asked about our budget for this project: Design of flyer, marketer and graphics for under $300US. Distribution: <$2000.00 US
Flyers will be distributed as follows: 5000 targeted (Small Business), 5000 untargeted.

 

Great idea. Keep us updated. Though I feel 10,000 flyers is inadequate. We'll see how it works out.

 

Update 7th of Feb 2011: We just received our flyers from the printers. We wanted it perfect, so we spent a little more time designing and making some graphical changes to the flyer. The DL flyer is now complete. All 10,000 created and printed to perfection! (Also on great quality paper - 350 GSM Paper - Full one colour side).

We are now in search of a distributor to send these flyers to our potential customers. Will give you an update within the next few weeks once a distributor is found. Again we are targeting 5000 and 5000 untargeted distribution for our response rate.

Cheers,
Rach

 

Has there been any more updates?

 

Seems it is working as they did not reply for two months

Sounds I will do the same here