Advertising a business with flyers placed in letterboxes certainly does work. However you do have to repeat them in the same areas for best results. And you just never know when the calls will actually come. Sometimes you'll get a bunch of leads quickly. But they can take a very long time to come back.

For example just recently I got a call from one of my flyers. The woman said she was in Spearwood. I realized I hadn't done that area for months. And a person I've been doing this for intermittently for ages mentioned that she got a call from someone a couple of years after I'd distributed them. (She knew this because of what he referred to when he called.)

So if you get a flyer campaign done it's best to not expect them to come back straightaway. That's easier said than done, particularly if you've put out quite a few.

I believe that this impossibility of knowing when you'll get a response is what causes some people to feel that the method just doesn't work.

Say a business commissions a run of a couple of thousand. Only one call comes in over the following week, then nothing for weeks on end. After a month the business owner concludes that this is all he's going to get. He thinks: "I got just one call from two thousand. No good. Won't try that again!"

But over the next couple of months after that another four calls trickle in. That then means the ultimate response rate was closer to one in four hundred. That's not bad -- particularly if it was in an area that had never done before.

Unfortunately this new evidence doesn't make him reappraise his initial conclusion. Determined to be decisive, he made up his mind for good early on. So he never uses the method again. That's an unfortunate outcome and one to be avoided if possible.

If you are going to use flyers to advertise something, it's always a good idea to do a good solid run of at least a  couple of thousand (more if possible). And you should go back and do the area again a couple of months later. This is because the first time people see your flyer very few of them even take any notice of it. The second time it's a bit familiar to them, so more people will investigate. You're basically starting to get on their radar.

A specific example

For example, I've done several drops for a woman based in South Perth. Most of them have been in that suburb and in neighbouring ones like Como, Kensington and Victoria Park. She always got a better response from those areas. Of course, this was partially due to those suburbs being quite comfortably off, and able to afford what she was offering (weight loss hypnosis). But the repetition helped a lot, I believe.

After having really focused on those areas I then did a couple of thousand in Innaloo. No calls from this suburb, at least as far as I know.

I think this was mainly because these people had just never seen her ads before. Those in the South Perth area had been exposed to them repeatedly in the past and so noticed them again. 

Clearly, persistence pays

So it can take a while before you actually get on the radar of people. That's why it's good to keep doing them over and over again. Although of course, you don't want to repeat drops too soon. Do that, and you can end up annoying them!

In this need for repetition and persistence, offline marketing is a lot like the online kind. In both methods, you just have to to keep appearing in front of people. On Twitter, for example, persistently logging in and tweeting really helps a lot. Firstly, you get more followers that way. Then you start to stand out in the streams of those following you. You've appeared so often they actually know who you are. Then if you tweet a link to one of your blog posts, for example, they're much more likely to click on it.