Monday, March 25, 2019

How to Make a Good Flyer

Before we get to how to make a good flyer, we have to understand the strategy behind a high-quality one. Here's a basic rundown of a door hanger. As you can see we don't have much space to work with. This means we have to choose our words carefully. The first line you see is the largest and is meant to grab the attention of the viewer as well as qualify them.

Right away the person knows what we're trying to sell here. Private Construction Management services. Right below it, you'll see a picture of a house that would look like our target customer. Under that, there's a brief description that reinforces credibility by mentioning the years of experience with all kinds of projects.

Anyone looking into renovating their homes will identify with this flyer right away. We ask them the question "Have a project in Mind?", always qualifying them. The next line tells them what we want them to do, which is to call for a consultation.

Door hangers work really well compared to regular flyers. For one, you won't have to worry about your message getting lost in the mail. The direct mail route is often pricey and your ad will compete with priority mail like bills. On the other hand, everyone has one front door and your ad will command their full attention.

Flyer Headline Examples
The headline is arguably the most important part of the flyer. Some people spend the most of their time trying to choose the right image that's going to catch the attention of the customer and dazzle them with their creativity. It sounds nice. It just isn't the case.

The reality is that we have 1 second to catch the attention of the person we're trying to reach. We have to talk about what THEY want as opposed to what we're offering. In the example above, Private Construction Management might not be an ideal headline. Instead, we could've said something along the lines of "Got a Construction Project in Mind?".

It might or might not get a good reception. The key is to grab attention and eliminate anyone who wouldn't buy from us while selecting those that would. We could write a whole book on choosing the right headline but adhering to some guidelines should put you on the right track. The following are some good headline examples for flyers or for any ads in general.

How-to Headline: People like to learn and the how-to headline is found everywhere. How to hire a good construction management company. How to make a million bucks in 20 min. You've seen it before. It works.

Question Headline: Just like the one suggested above. Asking a question engages the reader and causes them to answer it subliminally or consciously. Either way, we've got them communicating with us just through the headline.

Testimonial: Testimonials are great anywhere. They reinforce your brand and its authority. No one wants to buy from the new guy on the block. They want someone tried and tested.

Crazy Offer: A crazy offer can go a long way. A really long way. You should always have a crazy offer on your flyer regardless. If its good enough, it should be the biggest and first thing they see.

Choosing the Best Image for Flyers
As we said previously, finding the perfect image for your flyer isn't as important as some people might think. A funny or creative image will get a positive response, but it won't necessarily get us the exact response that'll bring us sales.

Our picture should flow well without our headline and service. If we're advertising for a taekwondo school, you might use a picture of children wearing their G.I uniforms.

A picture like that will help people identify quickly what your service is and if its for them. The image should be able to work independently from your headline, and vice versa.

The Elevator Pitch
Flyers have limited amounts of space for words and pictures. We want to get in as much as we NEED to, not as much as we CAN. This is where a lot of people go wrong. They design their flyer to include every single detailed explanation of what they do.

You should remember that the flyer shouldn't serve as an alternative to your website. Your website is where your customers will go if they want a more in-depth understanding of your company and services/products.

The next section you should include in your flyer is a short description of what you do and why they should choose you. In short, it's a small elevator pitch about your company.

"We manage construction projects for homeowners and have been doing it for over 20 years". Simple, yet effective. At this point, we have a headline, a photo, and a small elevator pitch that's going to help us land the knockout punch.

How to make a good flyer or offer
How to make a good flyer is based on the offer you give. An amazing offer has a time limit and simply cannot be passed by. These flyers receive upwards of 8-10% success rate. You really must be able to give tremendous value, or you won't get too many replies.

A simple flyer with no offer can expect a 1% conversion rate. This means that we'll turn 1% of the people that see our flyers into paying customers. You send out 10,000 and you get back 100 customers. Pretty simple stuff.

If you put a great offer, you can see 800-1000 customers out of 10,000 flyers. Suddenly, it makes a lot of sense to give away a great offer. Restaurants, for example, would benefit greatly by offering a free appetizer. They might lose out on some short-term profit but they'll win in the long term.

Strategizing a Flyer Campaign
A good design is useless without a good strategy for distribution. We know flyer advertising is a numbers game and so we have to choose our target customers carefully. A restaurant might benefit better from delivering to homes instead of street promotion. That isn't to say that a restaurant shouldn't use street promotion as part of their campaign. However, if you don't have enough foot traffic near your restaurant to justify it, you're better off just targeting the homes in the neighborhood.

These customers are going to be your loyal regulars. The cost of acquiring one of them is inconsequential to the value that they'll bring as a lifetime customer. For homes, door hangers work best. The reason is that other flyers have to be stuffed in other places near the home. They might be stuck on the mailbox or squeezed between the door frame. On the other hand, a door hanger is going on the doorknob. Basically, to get into their home they're going to take it off the door and they'll look at it for about a second.

They should be able to see exactly what you're offering, how much, and what they have to do to redeem the offer. For example, you're advertising a pizza restaurant. A really good flyer for this type of strategy would be "Get a free pizza slice with an order of a pizza and a soda". The customer picks up the flyer and sees that they're getting a free pizza slice and all they have to do is to go buy 1 and a soda.




What I Learned About Hiring an Advertising Agency

Competing and succeeding in the business environment takes more than simply offering a quality product or service or having demand for it. Customers cannot give you their disposable income in exchange for what you have to offer if they never have any idea that it exists in the first place! The market is full of examples of subpar products that continue to gobble up all of the market share of an industry simply due to brand recognition or because they got there first. Hiring a company to help with your ad push can make the difference between profits or bankruptcy. Here is what I learned about hiring an advertising agency.


  • What does an agency do?

In some instances, companies confuse the world of advertising with sales. They hire a company to help them market their products and complete an ad campaign and when the sales do not immediately show a bump they jump to pointing fingers. The true goal of the service though is to act as a match maker- matching up the service or product with the right customer who is looking for that exact need.


  • Establish long term goals

Having a vision upfront does wonders for the success of a campaign in business. Think about any other aspect or goal in life. It took an initial idea and then a vision to make it happen. A vision will frame all the work into a cohesive strategy and allow time for cause and effect to do their job. Being short sighted has many negative consequences, one of them being that you may accidentally pull out of a plan just before it is about to report successful numbers.


  • Decide on a budget

Deciding on a budget is a great way to make maximum use of your funds without the worry of extra expenses popping up in the middle of the job. Creating a scope and vision that can be tracked with using proper milestones, metrics, and data will allow for not only maintenance of the ad budget, but it will help keep the timeline on schedule throughout the process as well.


  • Branding

A good company can help you figure out your branding but they cannot do all the work for you. You must bring your overall idea of what you want your brand to represent and to which audience. Simply trying various methods will not work. Not only is it a waste of time, effort, and funds, but it can confuse customers, create a bad reputation, or alienate future or current customers. Take control of the vision of your brand and let the agency you hire execute it.
  • Consistency across media

You will want consistency across different media channels when executing the campaign. This creates a strong message and branding push that will be maintained regardless of how the customer accesses the information. This consistency will work wonders for both internal and external optics.




Vehicle Wraps: Wheeled Promotions

Mobile advertisement is when one displays their name, service or product along with address and contact details. It is also the quickest form of marketing as potential clientele notice it immediately.

From being stuck in traffic to driving a company vehicle, vehicle wraps always make an impression. They catch the attention of people wherever they go by turning heads. A well-designed warp can clearly set a vehicle apart by its unorthodox visual appeal. It is the longest serving brand of advertising with wraps functioning without problems for about four to five years if cared for. They also offer the best return on cash spent for not only businesses but events, products, and services. If you're looking for the most versatile choice for every dollar spent on effective promotion, wraps are your number 1 choice!

Benefits

To make it easier to understand, here are some benefits of using vehicle wraps and why they are a memorable way of spreading the word about your business.

Grabs Attention: with its visual appeal including bright colors and design, company vehicles are prominent on the road in the midst of traffic. A plain white van, for instance, wouldn't be able to come to anyone's attention but a well-designed vehicle wrap is almost instantly noticed.

Wider Audiences: if the fleet is large enough and if company vehicles travel far and often, a business is able to reach tens of thousands per month. With this form of advertising, a much larger audience is reached out to.

Friendly Advertising: print ads and other mediums can interrupt a person, for example, while reading, but vehicle wraps attract the attention without being a nuisance. The message is given off in such a way that it's not a distraction. Customers respond in a much more positive way to this non-assertive method.

It's for every business: restaurants, specialists, consultants, healthcare services and construction companies can utilize wraps. They are not limited to specific businesses or industries.

How Much Does It Cost?

Vehicle wraps are proven to be low cost and generate the most number of impressions of all forms of advertising. It is unlike other mediums such as billboards where wraps work like a moving promotion campaign and work twenty-four hours a day all year-round. The rates of impression vary according to the size of the city and the population but a wrap can generate anywhere from thirty to eighty thousand impressions per day. That's a good number, but if you're a business, the more the merrier! Small business owners look at an investment of three thousand dollars that would work for five years. Against other forms of publicity for the same duration of time, this is peanuts!

A Sign Promotion is proud to serve its clientele in the Edmonton area with high-quality solutions for all types of wraps, signs and decals. We ensure customer satisfaction with our production methods and usage of first class materials for our customers.




Increasing Your SEO With Negative Keywords: How?

We have been there. Relax! Panic begins to install. Reviews can help search engine positions. While most of us would like testimonials that are positive, the bad ones are not as poor as you might think. Allow me to explain why. Following months of work, you launch a new service or product and, instead of compliments, your company receives the review that is dreaded. A couple of negative reviews do not possess the capability. It is not the world's end. Will your inspection suck at all the life and money out of your business, leaving you with nothing to show for all of the hard work you have put into building your own brand? Listed below are advantages for having negative reviews.

1. The number of reviews increases with more negative reviews.

Google yields results that reveal stars everyone has when people search for a company. Imagine if you are running an enterprise? Can your SEO hurt? Obviously, nobody knows testimonials help SEO. And more importantly, the analysis demonstrated that the number of testimonials influenced how customers would react to some website's average score. Google's inner search engine optimization guidelines teach website reviewers to remember that some of the greatest sites get poor reviews. Consumers need to understand your company has an after before a purchase decision is made by them. Hardly any men and women are going to see everyone if your website has 100 testimonials, or perhaps just 25. But have you noticed that Google reveals how many testimonials the business has entire? You may rest assured your standing will not sink while testimonials that are negative should not be discounted. When making conclusions, to put it differently, consumers rely on shortcuts. Probably not. The proof for your company raises and leads to research elements that are localized. The folks behind search engines such as Google know that nobody is ideal. The point is that you simply would like a diverse variety such as a couple of reviews, to assist search engines to affirm the validity of your enterprise.

2. Credibility increases with negative reviews.

Research indicates that customers like to find a mixture of great reviews when seeking to establish whether there is a company trustworthy. Favorable testimonials are more persuasive than overly positive testimonials. They have a tendency to become suspicious when customers see only positive reviews. If authenticity is led to by many different testimonials, it stands to reason that customers will be prepared to devote some time thereby boosting your search engine positions. Time on the webpage (the period of time spent on a single webpage) and session length (the general amount of time spent on a website) are equally essential steps when you are aiming to enhance SEO. This applies if you are an e-commerce shop with a worldwide reach or even a local bakery.

3. Build relationships with customers.

Additionally, it assists with SEO that is neighborhood. Knowing they'll be cared for if anything goes wrong helps clients feel comfortable making a choice. Google is not concealing the fact so that it's safe to assume that the exact same is true for the sites of companies that testimonials contribute to search positions. It proves that you value customer feedback and you are eager to take actions whenever your company responds appropriately to reviews. Here is the takeaway on this stage: companies are given an opportunity to demonstrate they're willing and able to handle their reputation by negative testimonials. In case you've got a customer service issue (or a different kind of difficulty), then you will know what is happening and you're able to fix the issue. One more advantage of obtaining reviews that are negative is that you getting opinions about your company which you may take on the action.

4. Provides an accurate picture of the business.

Negative testimonials assist clients know. A negative reviews offer a balanced look at services and your products, raising your business' authenticity and trustworthiness. Having testimonials online that is accessible helps make sure that if customers decide to purchase, they are more likely to understand beforehand what they are getting decreasing the variety of clients in the long term in addition to yields. Clients experience disappointment when expectations are not met. Looking from favorable to not-so-great can guarantee customers your site is a great spot and as we have already mentioned at a variety of testimonials, your search positions are improved by the period of time consumers spend on your website.

5. Drives your SEO and content marketing.

In the event, you mine the information inside each and every remark that is negative, you can help amend and goal your own search engine optimization strategies.

What did this customer want that we are not providing?

What has been that this customer promised that we did not match?

What questions does that customer have regarding our products or our business?

What kinds of searches could direct another consumer for this content?

Reviews will help you understand your viewers. Ask yourself as you see. You can create networking posts that address each of those difficulties or a set of articles.




Why You Need Lots Of Landing Pages

Whenever you're promoting something, and you want the person to go online to a web page, you need a custom landing page. Whether it's an actual advertisement, or a link from someone else's site, or even a media release you put out, each one of those should have it's own, distinct landing page.

A landing page is where you send folks who respond to a notice you've put out into the world. You want to engage these folks in a specific manner, and get them to perform a definite action, like join an email list or purchase a product.

So yes, you may technically have a three page website, but behind the scenes you may have over a dozen different landing pages, depending on where your incoming links are, the specific markets you're targeting, the reasons they may have in responding to your call to action, and the conversations already going on in their heads.

Let's say you sell dog collars. There are tons of reasons people might look for a dog collar. Maybe they want their small dog to be safe, maybe they want their large dog to have a stylish collar. Maybe they're looking for a harness for their support animal. One person wants a collar that's leather-free, while another one only wants natural materials. What you want is a specific page for each of these folks, one that addresses their concerns and ONLY their concerns.

As I've mentioned in previous 'casts, there are two ways to address your prospects. You either offer to remove a pain point, or to provide a pleasure point. Those are two very different things. For each of the "dog collar" examples above, you could either remove a pain point, or provide a pleasure point. Let's say you have 6 different solutions to a given problem or situation. You can present each of those solutions in two different ways. Suddenly you need twelve different landing pages.

I have a nonprofit client, looking for donations. That's the very basic info. They're a cat rescue operation (point #1), willing to take small donations (point #2), or large donations (point #3). This fall, we're going to try to find people willing to make a large donation to their nonprofit.

I have to appeal to these prospects by either providing a pleasure point, or removing a pain point. What I need to do is create A & B versions of a landing page for each of the points mentioned. So at the very least, I need six different pages: one set that addresses people who have an interest in rescue cats (point #1), one that addresses people who want to make a small donation to help care for rescue cats (point #2), and one for people able to make a large donation - for my purposes, that's any amount of $5,000 and above. That's point #3.

Let's say I'm creating pay per click search engine ads to capture the eyeballs of people able to make a large donation, which is exactly what we're planning for this fall. First, there are two groups of people - those who love cats, and those who don't necessarily. Second, we have the reasons they want to make a donation. Some people are in it for the recognition. Some people are in it for the effect their money will have. Others are simply looking for a tax writeoff. Who makes large donations? Obviously, individuals. But also, corporations and foundations.

So I need to create an ad for each of those specific interests, and then I need to create a different landing page for each of those ads. The focus of one landing page might be, "We'll publish your name in our newsletter, on our website, and send your name and photo out in media releases." The focus of another landing page might be, "Your donation is tax deductible and will reduce your tax burden for the current fiscal year." I could address the concerns of people who love cats in two different ways: "Your contribution will keep the cats under our care healthy until we can find a family to adopt them," or "Your contribution will help remove unwanted cats from the streets."

It sounds like a pain in the rear, I know. But that's what marketing is: you're looking to have the right conversation with a specific person. If creating the right links, and sending individuals to specific landing pages accomplishes your goal (like building your email list or making a sale), then it's worth it.

Once you start building these landing pages, you need a good statistics program on your website to sort out how many visits you're getting to each of these pages. You should be able to tell where these visits are coming from because you should never send visitors to a specific page from more than one source. If you run the same ads on both Google and Bing, make a different copy of that landing page for each source. You might name one "Large dog collar safety Google" and the other one "Large dog collar safety Bing."

Also, you don't want to list any of these landing pages on your navigation system for the site. You don't want people stumbling on them from a general search. If someone finds one of your specific landing pages from a link on a news page, and then forwards that link to a friend, that's fine. Essentially they're both coming from the same place.

What it boils down to is: you need a LOT of different landing pages.

Today's action items:


  1. Start writing the marketing copy for two different versions of a landing page. One of these pages should supply a pleasure point for your customers, and one should remove a pain point.
  2. Build the two different landing pages, or have your webmaster build them.
  3. Create copy that offers the pleasure point, and that offers the pain relief. Put this copy in ads, media releases or other marketing materials that you disseminate. The link in the "pleasure" release should point to the "pleasure" landing page, while the link in the "pain" release should point to the "pain" landing page. And of course, action item
  4. Start recording and measuring the results.