Designing flyers seems like black magic to your average person. Unless you have a degree in communication or it’s your full time job, writing a good flyer can be very confusing. What should you put in, what to leave out, put more pictures over text, you need paragraphs text but you know that will bore people? Well there hundreds of different rules and design tips when it comes to designing and  marketing, but I’ve got six of them that will help make a better flyer if you follow them.

When they talk about communication there is a golden rule for conversation, always use open ended questions. A closed ended question is one where the person answering can give a simple response – no, yes, don’t know, – leaving you no way of continuing the conversation on. An open ended question is the one that makes the other person tell you a lot of information or makes them ask you a question giving you the space to carry on the conversation. Marketing is essentially a conversation between you and a potential customer, so leading in with an open question is the best way to grab their attention. Examples include ‘Are you wasting money on…’, ‘When was the last time you…’, ‘What is the best solution to…’, and so on.

Flyers have limited space to fit all the information you want to get across, but using an image can do a lot of the work for you. Why put in to text when you can show what you are going about.It’s easy enough to do a image search on the internet for something related to what you are trying to market. The question is it telling a ‘story’ that supports or contradicts what you want to get a cross in the flyer. While there are no hard and fast rules on how to pick the right image for the job, there are few common sense things you can look for. Does it show the customer what the results of using your product/service are?. Does it show what could happen if they don’t use you? Is it something to aspire to, or something to horrify them? Most importantly does it make you want to find out more, because if it doesn’t do that then you need a different picture.

I’ve talked about the limited time window you have to ‘make a sale’ in the 5/15/60 second rule for marketing . Because of the limited time you have to make a sale you want to keep the points simple and easily digestible. Bullet points are great for this and can be within that 10 second window highlighting the reason why the customer should see you. If you do have to have paragraphs of information, leave it for later in the flyer or have them with heading that encapsulate the information, just like the headings for each of the paragraphs in this article.

Following on from the idea of bullet points for limited attention span, so you keep the number of points limited too. Research has found that people only comprehended 5 to 9 points of information in any block, after which things become blurred. So keep your main selling points to this number range. Less important information can be put to the ‘back of the flyer’ where they can read it after you have already made that sale.

This one can be a bit a of challenge for content creators as you will be very knowledgable about the product or service you are selling. As such, you naturally will write as though the reader has as much knowledge as you so you and you will gloss over the simple stuff ‘that everyone knows’ to talk about the really interesting stuff. The fact is you will be mostly targeting people who know nothing about it and you need to give them the information ‘that everyone knows’ so they understand the cool stuff about what you are selling. The exception is when you are targeting a marketplace that will have a higher level of expertise, like engineers in a engineering company, then go into the technical details because that is what you will need to make the sale.

The fact of the matter is that no matter what profession / service / industry you are in, you will have competitors offering the identical or almost identical product or service. The normal response to situation is to offer things at a cheaper price. And then the competitors will reduce their price to the same or more, and a price war starts that no one will win. You have to sell your business as part of the total package, whether it’s the expertise, the experience, testimonials from happy clients, etc. The fact is that no matter what you do customers won’t be loyal to you for what you sell because of price, because they can always find it cheaper on the internet, it will because of what your business offers to them above and beyond the price.
Those are the 6 best tips I can give you for making flyers that zing, but they are not the only ones. There are hundreds more that can turn a flyer from ‘meh’ to ‘wow’, and we will happily help you find them when you book time with us at Copy Express to discuss your marketing and design