If you’re a small business owner you’re wearing many different hats. One of those is a marketer’s hat. You want to get your product in front of as many people as possible while also keeping costs low. Flyer advertising offers that for new businesses or even established ones. However, finding the best places to distribute flyers is tough if you haven’t done any flyering.

You can start to get creative with your advertising and you’d be surprised at how many different places you can promote your flyers. The traditional means are of course residentially and street promotion. In this article, we’ll get explore many possible locations that can help you bring in new business.

Best Places to Distribute Flyers

Residential

Residential was always going to be the first one on the list. Although it might not suit every type of business, it suits MOST types. What better way for a restaurant or other physical store to reach their closest customers than to target the homes directly around their business.

When you plan on flyering residentially, you have to keep certain things in mind. The first is that it is illegal to place flyers inside mailboxes.

That’s not a problem for us anyway. We don’t want our advertisement mixed in with bills and other priority mail. It places us lower on the totem pole of importance.

On the other hand, we can place the flyers on the doorknob (door hangers) which have shown to produce higher conversion rates than direct mail.

Door hangers aren’t also seen as much of a nuisance as a regular flyer. Regular flyers stuck on doors can fall off and be found on the ground when your customer gets home. Door hangers are found neatly placed on the doorknob and people appreciate them more than their counterparts.

To distribute flyers residentially, use a postal map to determine how many houses are in a particular zip code. This way, you can map out the route and bring enough flyers to cover the entire area.

Street Promotion

Street promotion is another obvious tactic that we see a lot in metropolitan cities. Basically, you’ll be passing out flyers in areas with high foot traffic, preferably near your business. However, you don’t have to have a physical business in order to benefit from this type of advertising.

Often times E-commerce businesses find it profitable to put some of their advertising budgets into offline marketing because it is less crowded and expensive than advertising online. They can reach an audience that their competitors don’t have access to.

College Campus

College Campuses are great for flyering, especially at lunchtime when most students are out of class. You can pass them out to the dorms or also find out events where there might be a large group of students meeting. Definitely get in touch with the school and find out their handbilling rules.

Club Events

Club events are one of the best places to distribute flyers for many reasons. There are tons of people there and they’re probably already interested in what your flyer is promoting. You might be advertising another event or even a late night restaurant that is serving clubgoers after hours.

Public Events

There are tons of events happening daily in metro cities where there are tons of people meeting up for common interests. You could go to a music event or a public fair.

Public Parks

Parks are a great place to flyer because they are usually packed. You can expect an even greater amount of people during certain holidays, like the 4th of July.

Train stations

Depending on where you live, you can definitely benefit from flyering in the train stations. With an unlimited amount of foot traffic to work with, you could essentially pass out 150-200 flyers per hour! With those numbers, you can definitely expect to see a nice return on investment.

Business to Business

Another method of flyer distribution which is often overlooked. As mentioned above, some types of businesses will not benefit from this type of distribution. On the other hand, there are lots of businesses who could.

Business to business distributions usually entails coffee shops, gyms, restaurants, medical offices, and any other type of office setting. The reason why this type of distribution works is because you can leave a stack of flyers at each of these locations. Let’s say you’re trying to get new customers for your restaurant. You create a flyer that offers a nice discount during lunchtime. You go around to the local businesses around the area and ask to leave a small stack on their counter or in their breakroom.

Worst comes to worst, they can only leave them in the breakroom. Regardless, there’s going to be hungry employees one day who say “what the hell, let’s try this restaurant today”.

The best case scenario is if they allow you to leave some flyers at the front counter. Anyone coming to the cash register will see your flyer without wasting one. This means you’ll have the ability to present your advertisement without having to lose out on anything. If they see the flyer and like the ad/want the offer, they’ll grab one. Otherwise, they won’t!