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Localized Advertising – Door-to-Door Ad Distribution on the Fly!
Have you ever had to distribute door-hanger advertisements for your business?
Have you ever employed door-to-door sales techniques to increase your brand
awareness?
Have you ever had to walk mile-after-mile repeating the sales pitch, over and over?
Have you ever had to stand outside of an arena event and pass out flyers to exiting
patrons?
If you stop to think of the cold calling technique of door-to door advertising, you would
discover how sometimes humiliating it is to have a disinterested and irritated individual
slam the door in your face, yell insulting things toward you, or be escorted off of their
property. To combat this instantaneous humiliation, the idea of door-hanging
advertisements gives the sales person a means of getting the word out to more people
faster than before but more importantly, it saves the person the anguish of the advertised
becoming irate over the interruption. Having been in situations were I have used these
techniques either selling for other companies or trying to gain customers for a newly
opened business, I came up with the idea of trying a door-to-driveway or door-to-doorstep
advertising campaign to build brand awareness for a national car sales corporation that
needed grass roots advertising for the local area around their dealerships...people
actually came in and bought. Since I have leg injuries from an auto accident, I needed to
find a way to cover the same amount of territory as my competing sales people. The
company already supplied a few thousand door hangers; however, the advertisement
brought awareness to all of the local 11 dealerships and I wanted to build awareness just
to the dealership that I was at, and more specifically, I wanted the traffic created to come
specifically to me.
Keeping the first campaign in mind, I was part of a team at a professional basketball game
in which we handed out 7,000 flyers to build awareness of a local college basketball
season. I designed a half-page flyer text advertisement—therefore, two ads can be printed
on every page—that put emphasis on my name, my contact information, and schedule.
You can substitute any advertising design on this half-page ad.
I chose a colored card-stock weighted paper for printing because I needed paper weight
for the distribution method used and a lower cost than the cost of printing in color. Printing
black and white on colored paper is easier and cheaper than printing expensive color ads,
unless you can afford it. But for the purpose of this campaign, you do not need to spend a
fortune making your company look good in print.
Once the printing is done, cut the full-page printed page in half, which produces two half-
page ads. Next, take the ads and roll them into a cigar shape and secure with small rubber
bands. Tiny rubber bands can be b purchased at the local office supply company, but the
best bet for the appropriate size can be located at a local beauty supply company—ask for
small hair braiding bands, usually kept in 500 and 1000 count. Keep a large box handy to
place the rolled ads in until it is time to distribute.
Now it is time to distribute. Normally, door hangers would take about 2 ½ hours to
distribute 500 hangers and would receive a few inquiries for the effort; so being limited to
the amount of walking I could do, I decided to drive a car and throw the ads onto the edge
of the driveway at peoples houses. I wanted the advertisement to be in the same
placement as the local newspaper so the ad had the best chance to be noticed, picked up,
and acted on by the potential customer.
As a homeowner, I myself have had numerous advertisements thrown in my driveway, and
as the homeowner I am responsible for picking up the ads in my yard. I have seen ads for
grass cutters, electricians, Avon sales, donations to thrift stores, and many more, so any
kind of message can be placed on these ads.
Now with the new way to distribute, I could get 2000 ads out in approximately 1 ½ hours
and had responses before I returned to the dealership. It makes me wonder how many
people really do watch the front of their house and wonder what a slow moving vehicle was
throwing at their house. After seeing the instant results of my effort, every sales person at
the dealership enacted the same door-to-driveway campaign for the shear fact of the
number of ads distributed for the time distributed was achieved with far less effort than
before. Results we quicker and slightly higher; but, I do not know the exact increase
numbers because I did not do any kind of analysis on exact number of responses for the
number distributed. I do know that I got a lot out a lot quicker than before and I didn’t have
to walk anywhere except to the car.
A few things to keep in mind:
•Make sure it is NOT going to rain on the day that you distribute.
•Try NOT to distribute after 2:00 PM because of children being released from school and
them walking and playing in the streets.
•Try NOT to distribute during the weekend because that is when you want people to be
acting on the ad that has been delivered, and the kids are in the streets again.
•The perfect time seems to be between 10 AM and 12 PM, a two-hour break in morning
commute traffic and the beginning of lunch hour traffic.
•Keep a map and mark the streets covered as to not deliver in the same area too often.
Written by eRixonline © 2004-08-28 Permission to Reproduce in Entirety with link: http:
//www.on-line-associates.com Word Count: 1000
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