Boost Your Results of Your Flyer: Three Marketing Tips
Continuing along the subject of my last post about maximizing your flyers copywriting, I would like to write about ways to market brands. If you’re creating a flyer for yourself and you have a personal or professional brand, integrate that visual style into the design. Or if you’re creating a flyer for company or individual who has an established visual identity, ask for a style guide or brand guidelines and work those elements — like logos, brand colors, and fonts — into the flyer. Below, I have three marketing tips to boost your results of your flyer.
1. Integrate Your Branding
The flyer above for a farmer’s market uses lime green and brown, the colors of its logo and places them throughout the design for a cohesive, clean look.
Even if a style guide isn’t provided, you can create a flyer influenced by a company’s website or other marketing materials. This creates a consistent visual for the brand and will help make it more memorable for viewers engaging with it.
Bonus Tip: Curious about creating a style guide for your own brand but don’t know where to go? Make the process even easier by creating an editable, shareable online guide using Frontify’s free style guide-building tool.
2. Include a Call to Action
You’ve accomplished your design and copywriting, and now it’s time to close the deal. Many times it’s as easy as asking for it. The call to action (or CTA) is an essential marketing concept, and it’s not hard. You want your audience to do something? Simply invite them to do it. And CTAs aren’t only for selling things. Holding a grand opening? “Visit today!” Promoting a no-cost event? “Get your free tickets now!” Marketing an organization or service? “Visit our website at…”
You get the idea. If you think a call to action will help the purpose of your flyer, trying one out is definitely worth it. Address your audience directly, make it friendly and conversational (you don’t want your audience to feel pressured), and you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.
This promotional flyer for a design business features copywriting alone — it utilizes bold fonts and a simple, black-and-white color scheme — to communicate how clients can benefit from good design and branding. The writing is simple and concise, and ends with a call to action, “Add value to your brand through creative, intelligent design,” as well as where to go to do that (the company’s website) and what you’ll get from choosing this business (“creative ideas, well executed”).
The flyer below takes a slightly different direction, putting the CTA (“Download free DSD music”) right at the top where it won’t be missed:
Bonus Tip: Once you start looking, you’ll notice CTAs everywhere, both in print and online. If you’re using a CTA on your flyer, you (or your client) would likely also benefit from having a CTA button on your website. First, check out some tips and inspiration for designing CTA buttons here, then use what you’ve found to create your own functional button using this free tool.
03. Distribute Physical and Digital Copies
So you have a stack of newly printed flyers, and now it’s time to insure they get seen or make it in people’s hands. You have traditional options like mailing them out or hanging them in windows or on bulletin boards in public places like restaurants, libraries, and post offices.
Although, you may also want to consider distributing your flyer digitally. You can send it out in an email, publish it on your website, or post it on social media. If you do opt for that method, you’ll want to make sure your flyer looks its best online. Two of the most important aspects to consider are color and file type:
Color: When designing a flyer for print, your file should be saved in the CMYK color model, since that’s what printing equipment uses. However, if you view a CMYK file online, the colors will look distorted. So you’ll need to switch your file to RGB (the color model that computer monitors and other screens use) to ensure the colors display as you originally intended.
File Type: JPG and PNG file formats both display well online. JPGs are your best bet for flyers that feature photography or are otherwise highly detailed, while PNGs display lines and sharp edges well and are best for designs with lots of text and solid blocks of color.
In closing, remember that your tips for boosting your flyer's results: integrate your branding, include a call to action, and distribute physical and digital copies. These guidelines are simple rules to use, but also can be expounded upon and even sometimes broken to extend one's creative boundaries. Practicing these simple step continually have helped me through my years as a designer, and I am sure they will help you as well.
Thank you for reading!
For more pointers, check out my other posts on design such as"How to Maximize Your Flyer's Copywriting" and more.
Want more on this topic?
It is my hope my blog post has been a helpful resource and will give you the guidelines you need to create a successful flyer. Also, be sure to look through design websites such as Canva. It offers even more examples of creative designs that showcase 50 flyers and explains why they work so well.
Credit: Written & Updated by Jonathan Irving of JI Designs LLC on 01/16/21. Some of this post was inspired by Canva.