A Flyer Method Revisited

I wanted to talk about this flyer distribution method once again primarily because I keep on getting phone calls from people telling me that it's working for them in unbelievable ways.

As a quick refresher, this is a way to distribute flyers fast by throwing them out your car window.

This idea was initially brought to my attention by Phil Ruthven. What he does is buy zip lock baggies at Sam's Club and sticks a flyer in each baggie.

He then sticks one rock in there along with the flyer and zips it up. In preparation prior to doing this though, he sticks all the rocks in a big 5 gallon bucket, drills 4 or 5 holes in the base of the bucket, and then fills the bucket with water. This washes the rocks and eliminates rock "dust".

When the ziplock baggies are ready, he loads 'em up and heads to his target neighborhoods and throws 'em out the car window.

The amount of calls I've received on this distribution technique has just been astounding. It has worked extremely well for everyone that has called me about it saying that they used it.

The key to its success of course is that you can throw hundreds of flyers out the window vs having to walk the streets house to house to house. Our time is limited so let's make the absolute best use of it that we can.

Mark Morse, from here in Alabama, called me about this "throwing" technique, but he does it with a little twist. Instead of flyers, he'll stick a 4 by 6 full color postcard in the baggie. Good thinking Mark!

Another person called me and said that he created 4 individual "postcards" on one piece of card stock. So he's still getting out a quality piece (although not full color) and is able to save a few bucks by getting 2000 "flyers" from only 500 pieces of card stock.

I did get one call from someone saying that this technique doesn't really tie in with the image he's trying to create for his business.

Here are my viewpoints concerning those thoughts. We all know that this business or any business, is a numbers game, right? I mean the more people we expose to our sales message, the more jobs we'll get.

So I personally believe that the huge benefits of exposing our message quickly to a large number of people, supercedes the need to create the "perfect" image for our "suspects".

As a side note, I use to call prospects "suspects". Technically they're prospects, but early on in the prospecting process, I considered 'em suspects. I mean until they called me for an estimate, that's really all they were.

The only people I truly cared about were the prospects (and of course customers) who ended up calling me for estimates. So although an overall high quality image is super important, it wasn't AS important for suspects. Make sense?

Now when a suspect turned into a prospect by calling me for an estimate, then I'd wow 'em with a powerful estimate package, company uniform, full color business card, etc. etc.

So what I'm saying is that it wouldn't bother me in the least if a suspect wasn't impressed with my company because I threw a flyer/postcard on his or her driveway. I'm more interested in getting my message out quickly to as many people as possible, than I am in impressing the suspects.

Anyway, if you've been hesitating on your marketing, or are not sure what to do first, I urge you to jump into this method feet first.

Pump out 300 to 500 flyers each morning for 2 to 3 hours in your target market neighborhoods and watch what happens. If you work another job full time, then do it in the afternoon. Either way, it's fast, it's cheap, and it makes the phone ring!

'Til Next time…Happy Cleaning!

Best Wishes,

Steve