How to Hand Out Flyers for Business in San Francisco

Hitting the streets to hand out flyers is a great way to get up close and personal with customers and leads to word-of-mouth business growth.

Marketing flyers might sound like a thing of the past, but in a bustling city like San Francisco, they can make a huge impact. That being said, there’s a right and wrong way to hand out flyers to prospective customers. Doing it the wrong way could even drive customers away.

Let this post serve as a guide for handing out flyers in San Francisco. There’s a certain etiquette that should be followed in order to find success, so keep reading and let us be the ones to guide you toward a successful flyer marketing campaign.

Designing the Right Flyer

Before you start distributing your flyers to the masses, you need to make sure you’ve designed the best possible flyer to deliver results. You can have the most charming and effective flyer distribution plan, but if the flyer isn’t eye-catching and enticing, it’s not going to matter.

You need attention-grabbing marketing copy and eye-catching designs to ensure your flyer doesn’t go in the nearest recycling bin. It’s also important to capture your marketing voice and get your branding across so that the flyer sticks in people’s minds. Even if they don’t engage with you now, a good flyer will plant a seed in the consumer.

Learn More About Your Audience

The other thing you need to do is learn about your audience before you start doing handouts. If you have a strong grasp of who you’re targeting and what they enjoy, you can figure out where these people will be and how to approach them.

Start by analyzing your current customer base via social media and customer surveys. Use this data to create customer personas that help you segment your customers and get to know them better.

You can also look at competitors to determine how they’re appealing to their audiences and where they go wrong. Analyzing industry trends will give you a sense of what customers are looking for as well.

Target Specific Areas

Having done the research into your customers, you can start to target specific areas around the city. You never want to pick and choose locations at random because it’ll just nullify your efforts.

Carefully choose locations where you’ll find the right types of customers. If you’re handing out flyers for your new boutique, for instance, you’ll probably do well in Union Square or Mission. Winery flyers would do well in Sonoma County, but also in high-traffic areas of the city where you’ll find young people.

A targeted handout will give your flyers the best chance of hitting home with recipients. The best way to see a significant ROI in flyer marketing.

Person-to-Person Handouts

There are several ways to go about handing out flyers, with the most direct being person-to-person. This is the most proactive approach to flyer handouts because it gives you the chance to interact with the recipient.

You get to make a verbal sales pitch in addition to what’s on the flyer. Person-to-person flyer handouts help people relate to your brand, but you have to be careful here as well. You don’t want to come off as too pushy when handing them out.

It would be better for everyone to hire a flyer distribution company to do these handouts in your stead. Having brand ambassadors that know how to relate to customers takes the anxiety out of flyer distribution.

Display at Local Businesses

You can also bring a stack of flyers to a local business and let potential customers take matters into their own hands. Fostering reciprocal relationships with other local business owners can lead you to new segments of customers as well. 

It should all make sense, however. If you’re handing out flyers for your home painting business, it’s best to leave them at hardware stores.

Leaving Them In High-Traffic Areas

Doing handouts in high-traffic areas is always a good idea, but it can put too much pressure on the customer. If you want to take a more relaxed approach to flyer handouts, simply leave them in high-traffic areas for people to take.

We’re talking about subway stations, train terminals, and outside busy malls. You can also go to colleges and leave the flyers on bulletin boards.

This relies heavily on the content of the flyer and the way you display them in these areas. It can be risky because they could get damaged, but it also gives you a great chance of getting them noticed.

Door-to-Door Marketing and Direct Mail

Going door to door to hand out your flyers is another way to go straight to the customer. The average person isn’t accustomed to dealing with door-to-door salespeople anymore, but you also have the option of leaving doorhangers at the front door. This ensures that it gets in their hands one way or another.

You can also opt for a direct mail campaign where flyers are mailed out to specific customers on your behalf. This works best if you have a database of customer contact information. We know that having a targeted campaign is always better than sending flyers out at random.

Creating a Gameplan to Hand Out Flyers the Right Way

Making a business flyer that hits home with your target customer is one thing, but you need to be able to get them into the right people’s hands. These are some of the best ways to do that, but if you want to succeed when you hand out your San Francisco flyers, you need Thumbtack Bugle.

Since 1976, we’ve helped local businesses with postering, flyers, and distribution services. Our service area goes from San Jose to Sonoma, which includes San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Silicon Valley. No matter where your flyers need to go or how many of them you have, we’re here to distribute them.

To learn more about our services, routes, and rates, head over to our main site right now.