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Hi All,
Firstly, I am new here and am looking forward to learning and contributing.
When we started our business 5 years ago we used direct delivery of our flyers exclusively. No email, no direct mail, we literally walked the flyers into businesses and handed them to receptionists. All we had to back up our flyers was a nice website we had a guy on Fiverr build for us. We were able to reach about 300 businesses this way, it took us 2 months, and we eventually signed up 12 contracts. About 3 months later we ran an ad on Craigslist for people to distribute our flyers directly, part-time. We offered $10 per hour, and we also said that if we got a contract from a business they had given a flyer to, we would pay them 10% of the profit for 3 months. We interviewed carefully and made sure they were the types of people we would feel okay with to represent our company, that is, appearance, positive attitude, good speaking skills, etc. We ended up hiring 4 people, two dropped out almost immediately, we hired 2 more people, and one dropped out. But we did end up with a good 3-person crew. We sat them down in a room one day for a couple of hours (our bank has a small conference room they make available to their customers, for free) and we trained them as to how we wanted them to approach the businesses, and the types of businesses we were interested in, that is, office buildings, not huge but not tiny, no restaurants, hair salons, bars, etc. They were trained to walk in, smile, hand a flyer to the receptionist, say "Hi, something for you folks to consider - thanks and have a great day!" and then they moved on. No sales talk whatsoever. We gave them very specific individual areas we wanted them to cover, that is, no one overlapping each other's areas, and we limited their time to 4 hours a day = $40 per day. Using this method they were able to give flyers to over 800 businesses in the Seattle area, it took about 2 months, and it really, really worked well. From this project we eventually got 21 contracts, and the project cost us around $2500 for wages and about $2000 for the "10% of profits for 3 months" agreement. Of course some of those contracts did not happen immediately, so the 10% bonus didn't kick in immediately either, but our distributors were okay with that. The contracts amounted to about $23,000 per month. Super simple, effective and very cheap considering the return on investment, as our customers keep paying us month after month, and yet our outlay for the project was a one-time occurrence.
One thing -- your flyers have to capture their attention. At the top of our flyers we have a photo of a frustrated-looking business woman, and next to it we start off with a big bolded question -- "Do any of these sound familiar?" Questions like this are called "pattern interrupts" -- they snap the reader into focus (yes, we did a fair amount of research on how to write effective sales flyers and kept tweaking them as time went by).
Then we made up some quotes that appear below the question -- "Our cleaning service just doesn't do what the contract says". "We can complain about something, it gets better for a while, but then it slips back again". "We have to deal with the cleaning service too often".
Under those quotes we say, "You shouldn't have to be the quality control person for your cleaning service". We call this an agreement -- almost everyone has said at least one of those things at one time or another, and they can relate and agree with those statements.
Then we introduce our company, give a few facts, and include my photo and contact information at the bottom.
Hope this helps!