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Introduction

Businesses of various sizes and types have been using leaflet distribution in London to market their products and services for decades. Small one-man-band operations as well as multinational chains regularly use leaflet distribution campaigns all over London.

Personal trainers however fall into a category that sometimes gets overlooked when it comes to leaflets. Many trainers tend to focus on being a part of a gym or moving a lot of their marketing efforts online.

Let’s have a look at how one can approach leaflet distribution for personal trainers who work for themselves.

What are the challenges of online ads?

Personal training is a very competitive business. Much of the fight for new clients has now moved to Instagram and other social media platforms. Instagram specifically is an obvious choice as it is such a visual medium.

Using Instagram and other social media sites can be beneficial but they tend to be crowded with some serious competition. Everyone in the world is on social media and competing for organic reach is very difficult.
In order to be effective in that environment one has to combine clever content creation with targeted local paid ad campaigns.

If you are not a digital marketing expert you are still likely going to find it challenging to compete with everyone pushing ads in the same channels. In comes flyer delivery.

Leaflet distribution

Leaflets have some serious advantages over other marketing methods.

Reach everyone

The first one is that leaflet distribution allows for a personal trainer to get their marketing materials to every household in a given area of London repeatedly and reliably.

Being able to get your marketing into every single home in the areas that are most crucial for you business is a uniquely effective form of building brand recognition.

With good design and area selection this can be a great tool to arrange for a steady stream of new clients.

A good flyer delivery company will be able to arrange for repeated deliveries to the same households in a structured way. Over a longer period of time these kinds of campaigns can help make you a household name in your most important area.

You can find out more about repeated drops in this blogpost.

Targeting

Leaflet distribution allows for some important forms of targeting. If you have a stable place where you do your training sessions regularly (like your personal gym) you can focus on areas surrounding your location.

This area would generally be within walking distance from you or within easy reach via public transport and car.

Another obvious place to target are areas close to parks. Many people don’t feel comfortable going to a gym but are willing to exercise in their local park.

If the types of exercise you specialise in allow for working out outside, focusing on homes within walking distance from larger parks is a great way to reach out to a clientele that would otherwise not be responsive to visiting a gym.

To have a look at different options for the targeting of your flyer delivery campaigns you can see this blog dedicated to the topic.

What should personal training leaflets look like?

So, what should your personal training leaflets look like?

In general we recommend you stick with basic formats like a simple A5 flyer on decent paper (200gsm+)

It is important that you use high quality graphics or photos. Leaflets are a visual medium and using an excellent image can turn a bad leaflet into a good one.

You want to spend some time on deciding which images you are using and why. They should represent the type of personal training that you do as accurately as possible.

If you largely focus on callisthenics, make sure to include an image of someone doing these exercises. If you like using kettle bells make sure that you can see a kettle bell being used in the picture you choose.

Don’t settle for a generic image of a person exercising. Put some extra effort into sourcing the image that will communicate what you do clearly.

Try to consult your leaflet distribution company before you print your flyers. Ask them what they think about your designs.

Do they speak to the right demographics? Do they clearly communicate your message? Is the picture right? Should you make any changes?

A good leaflet distribution company will be able to answer these questions for you and give you some extra insight. Maybe you will find out that your flyer should be redesigned from the ground up.

These conversations can help you save large amounts of money you could throw away on campaigns handicapped by an ineffective design.

Your flyers should also include any certifications that you hold. Whether it’s your relevant academic education, industry specific accreditations or anything else.

The last thing you want to include on your flyers is a link to your website. This can be done via a URL that has been written out or a QR code.

You can find more information on QR codes and how to create one for yourself in this blog post.

We believe it is better for trainers to have a simple website where you can gather all the relevant information about your business. However, if you don’t have one, you can at least send people to your social media channels.

You will find that your well-designed personal training leaflets can become a real driver of traffic to your online channels.

Since many people are working from home now leaflet distribution is becoming an even more powerful tool.

Many people have more time to look through their mail carefully and will take any excuse to get up from their desk and see what has made it’s way through their letterbox.

Personal training leaflets and delivery strategy

We’ve already discussed the fact that you can target your flyer campaigns depending on the nature of the training you offer and your target clientele.

The timing of the deliveries of your personal training leaflets is equally as important as how you target your drops geographically.

There are some obvious timings throughout the year you can choose for your drops. January is an excellent time to step up your advertising as many people are looking to get back into shape after Christmas.

When you get people through the door at the right time as a personal trainer you can truly help them change their lives around.

September is another great time for leaflet distribution for a personal trainer. At this time you can catch people coming home from vacations while they are getting back to organising their schedules for the year.

The reason we are mentioning these timings is because you should be planning your campaigns at least a month ahead of these important times of year.

Getting your design right, your print done and the flyers through the door can take a while. You don’t want to be trying to rush your flyers at the last minute. If you plan ahead and communicate with your leaflet distributor your campaigns will go smoothly with no drama.

This can save you a lot of energy that you can spend on training your clients and developing your business. Try to plan your campaigns ahead of time to avoid last minute panic and rushing through important steps.

When you plan ahead, design the right flyer, target the right areas of London, hit the right time of year for your campaign and work with a reputable distribution company you are setting yourself up for success.

Personal training leaflets can be an effective tool that can help you make your way through any difficult time as a business no matter what is happening in the world.
We hope that this article about leaflet distribution for personal trainers in London has been helpful. If you have any questions or if you’d like to book a campaign please feel free to get in touch with us here.

Introduction

The UK public are pet lovers and the same applies to Londoners specifically.

The most common pets owned in London are cats followed closely by dogs. You can find some detailed statistics on pet ownership on the PDSA website.

If you run a veterinary clinic in London, it is likely that you will have to focus a good amount of effort on advertising. Marketing a veterinary clinic in London, however, comes with some unique challenges.

One of the most important things about advertising your services as a vet is to convey a high level of professionalism and expertise.

If you are advertising a hair salon, a good quality photo of your work can be enough. If you are marketing a restaurant, a great picture of your food can do the same.

For a veterinary clinic, the techniques to ensure your potential clients of your expertise will be slightly different.

We will discuss the unique challenges that come with veterinary clinic advertising and mainly how they relate to leaflet distribution in London in this article.

We also going to discuss some examples of well-designed flyer delivery campaigns that any veterinary clinic can use.

To make sure we provide a full picture we are also going to touch on some online advertising options.

What to include on your flyers

You have two options with your leaflets. You can either make them more general to inform your potential clients of your location, website address and include a list of the most important services you offer.

This is a good idea if you want to create one leaflet, print a good number of this one design and run a few repeated deliveries.

On the other hand, you can also choose to focus your flyers on one specific service.

If you offer a monthly plan for people’s pets that includes annual dental checks, vaccinations, flea checks and de-worming services, you can focus one side of your flyer on this one idea.

If you have a particularly well-equipped emergency unit, you can devote a whole side of your leaflet to it.

These more targeted leaflets can often yield great results and can be used in more sophisticated ways. We will discuss more about how this can be done below.

You want to make sure to source some quality photographs for your flyers as well. Whether you are going to use one of the online stock photo websites or whether you are getting custom photographs done doesn’t matter.

Make sure you have quality photographs that represent your veterinary clinic well ready to use on your flyers.

You should also include the relevant qualifications of your vets on your flyer together with all your accreditations and the relevant industry bodies you have relationships with.

Making sure that your potential customers understand your level of expertise and that they can trust you should be one of the main goals of your flyer.

Leaflets for a veterinary practice

One of the best things about flyers is that you can reach absolutely everyone with them.
Leaflets have no bias in terms of demographics as they can be put through every single letterbox in your target area.

This makes leaflets a fantastic tool to develop local mind share. You can have multiple deliveries a year reaching out to every household in your target area regularly reminding people of your services and the location of your practice.

As most veterinary clinics offer emergency treatments, being at the forefront of people’s minds should be a real focus in your advertising.

Similar to a dental surgery, people will often need your services quickly. If everyone close to your location is aware of your practice they are likely to come to you first in the time of need.

In general, it is a good practice to do multiple deliveries throughout the year while mixing up the more general and specific types of flyers we’ve discussed above.

Specific ideas for veterinary clinic flyer tactics

Now let’s talk about how some of these campaigns can look in practice.

Emergency services

Even though we generally recommend our clients use the simplest flyer formats possible (most often a single page A5 flyer), veterinary clinics might have a good reason to experiment in this domain.

Since emergency services can form a large proportion of new business for some veterinary practices, it can be helpful if people keep your flyers on hand for reference or just in case situations.

People already do keep flyers quite regularly but if you can use particularly interesting or easy to keep formats you might want to do so. (You can have a look at more flyer delivery statistics on our blog here)

You can use folding formats, business cards that can be torn out of the flyer and more.
Have a conversation with your leaflet distributor about which options you have and when these more exotic formats are worth investing in.

Pet passports

If you offer services related to pet passports, you might want to create a flyer particularly focused on this.

When you do so, you can start focusing your deliveries on parts of London with a high proportion of people that often travel with their pets.

There are areas that, for example, have high numbers of people that come spend their summers in London. These are places like Knighstbridge, Notting Hill, Chelsea and others.

Any reputable flyer delivery company will be able to help you target these areas specifically. You can have a look at how our mapping system works on our tracking page.

When you combine this kind of service with at-home visits, you might be hitting a very lucrative market.

Use one side of the leaflet for pet tips

You can also choose to focus one side of your leaflet on providing helpful tips on subjects relevant to pets. You can talk about how to brush your dog’s teeth, how to give your cat eye drops, tips for pet nutrition, training and more.

This is another great way to attract attention to your flyers and potentially incentivise people to keep them at hand.

The other side of your flyer should be a traditional leaflet. You want to include all the elements we’ve discussed above. A quality photograph, your website address, your location, phone number, list of relevant services your offer and your qualifications.

This type of campaign can also benefit from repeated deliveries. This means that you can deliver your flyers to the same area and therefore households multiple times.

With modern stock management and delivery techniques you can do so with precise rest intervals between each delivery and use a different flyer for each drop.

This way, you can delivery a series of flyers to the same households sharing a series of tips for how to care for their pets. This way you can build mind-share in a way that would be difficult to replicate in any other way.

One-off events at your premises

If you are looking to get people through the door to your practice, you can organise events at your premises.

These could be free seminars on pet nutrition, pet socialisation classes and more.

You can collaborate with a local dog trainer or dog walker to do these. As this kind of event provides great exposure for them also, they might be happy to do this with you for free.

Flyers are excellent at advertising these kinds of events. Music venues, festivals, art galleries and theatres have been using leaflets to advertise their events with leaflet for decades if not centuries.

The physical format of the leaflet, the size of it and the ability to time the delivery carefully together build a great tool for event marketing.

Getting a physical piece of advertising into every pet lover’s home in your area and inviting them to a free event at your location can help kickstart a new veterinary practice in a way that’s hard to compete with.

You can read more on this on page dedicated to event marketing with leaflets.

Combine flyers with other marketing methods

The fact that you are using flyers to advertise your veterinary clinic doesn’t mean that you can’t use other marketing techniques as well.

Online advertising in the form of social media or search engine ads can also work very well. However, to get the most out of your advertising you want to try to synergise your efforts.

For example, you can time your flyer campaigns to run at the same time and in the same areas as your social media campaign.

This way, your target demographic will see you both in the offline and online worlds.

Being seen in both of these domains can create a real sense of familiarity with your brand and there is not much more a marketer could ask for than that.

Introduction

London is an international city. Just under 40% of the population of London was born outside the UK and over 300 languages are spoken here.

Other than English, you will find the most common languages that people speak here to be Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Chinese.

You can have a more detailed look at the exact statistics on the ONS website.

It is therefore not surprising that in an international city with a population from different backgrounds, speaking hundreds of languages, you will find many schools, companies and individuals teaching language classes.

You will come across everything from individual conversational classes to accredited programs aimed at achieving official certifications of fluency in a wide range of languages.

Here are some examples of language proficiency tests that are available.

Whether you specialise in teaching children their second language, polishing up some rough edges for business people or helping new immigrants develop their English skills, you will need to advertise in some way.

We’ll focus largely on leaflet distribution as that is what we specialise in at The Private Postman. However, to give you the whole picture of what is possible we will also discuss other methods of marketing like social media and more.

Why flyers?

Flyers or leaflets are one of the best ways to advertise language classes of all types in London.

The power of the leaflet lies in three main areas.

You can reach everyone

The great thing about leaflet delivery is that when you select an area in London you want to target with your campaign, your leaflets will reach every single household within it.

Some of the online platforms/social apps allow for amazing targeting but inevitably exclude everyone that doesn’t use the given app.

Flyers get your message through every single door in your target part of London.

If you are a tutor that travels to people’s homes, a school with a set location or even multiple locations, focusing on advertising in specific geographical areas is a must. There is nothing better than flyers for this.
We can help you identify your local area in a way that is similar to developing a flyer campaign for a restaurant,

Your local area is a cross section of places that are geographically close to you and places that include demographics you want to target.

For a restaurant, this generally covers their delivery area. For a language school or a tutor, this could mean areas that are within a walking distance or sub 20 minute commute.

To find these places we can look at public transport connections, driving options and
more.

At The Private Postman we can check which demographics are prevalent in these areas with our proprietary mapping system.

To find out more about how our mapping system works, have a look at our tracking and mapping page.

The leaflet is physical

The physical nature of the leaflet is one of its biggest strengths. People tend to often keep flyers they find interesting for later reference.

Even if they are not interested in your services they have to interact with your flyers in some way. As such, you can build mind share in your key areas over longer periods of time and when people finally need the services you offer they already know you.

This is especially true if you spend time carefully designing your flyers and making them look as good as possible.

You can find all the various statistics on flyer delivery in our blog dedicated to statistics and facts about leaflet distribution.

What you will discover is that people respond well to physical advertising. A well-made physical flyer delivered to every single household in your key area is a great tool to spread the word about your language courses and classes.

With leaflets you are in control of your advertising

When you look at online advertising you’ll be able to identify an issue that goes across industries.

In the online sphere, a few big players tend to dominate the market and control how most smaller companies can market themselves.

There are apps, websites and directories dedicated to connecting people to language tutors. However, these technology companies dictate exactly how you can present yourself on these platforms.

Everyone on the given website or platform has to use the same small image size and amount of text.

On top of this you will find that you are inevitably going to be listed together with all of your competitors.

This is perhaps the biggest weakness of these platforms. Everyone you are competing with is listed on the same page with hundreds of people or institutions fighting for the same clients.

This inevitably leads to you paying the technology companies that host your profile to move up in their listings. Ultimately you have almost no control or power over how you present yourself.

Leaflets are completely different. You get to decide what your flyers look like. The size of the leaflets, the design elements, the size of the images you use.

If you work with a good leaflet distribution company, you are also never going to have your flyer delivered together with any of your competitors.

At The Private Postman we make sure that there are no conflicts in any of our deliveries. This means that when you are targeting a given area you effectively have exclusive access to it for that week.

Flyers give you back control over how you present yourself, who you target with your advertising and they allow you to do so separate from your competition.

Social media

With all of that said, it would be unwise to completely ignore all the options the online world gives you.

If you want to, feel free to include your profile on an app or a platform. Just don’t rely on it exclusively. Some of the big ones are First Tutors, Talk Languages and Tutorful.

More interestingly, you can focus some of your energy on social media. You don’t have to worry too much about competing with every single other language tutor or school in the world.

You can create content whether it’s video, images or text that is relevant to your area and the people that can physically come to your location (if that is your focus).

You don’t need millions of hits on your instagram posts. Just make sure that when someone who is interested in language classes or is looking for a course you offer stumbles across your profile they find value what they see.

Social media can act as a kind of a proof that you are a real person or an institution. That you are active.

The tone of your posts can also illustrate the atmosphere in your classes. It can be serious and professional or playful. This completely depends on how you structure your courses and how you want to present yourself.

Ads

You should spend at least a little bit of your time playing around with the various advertising options on your social media app of choice.

In general, they will allow you to target very specific demographics. You can either make custom ads for specific courses or you can simply push your normal content to people.

Whether you decide to go with the hard sell of an ad or a soft push of your content over a longer period of time, try to do so in tandem with your flyer deliveries.

You can have 10,000 leaflets delivered in a specific area of London one week and follow up with a week of social media ads in the exact same location.

Combining marketing methods in this way works incredibly well. When a potential client sees you in the real physical world as well as online the effectiveness of each method multiplies.

Website

If you are going to be spending anytime working on your online presence, focus some of it on your website.

Many people will tell you that websites are not needed and that social media is all that matters online.

This is not the case for most businesses. Many of your serious potential clients will come visit your website when deciding whether to try your services.

You can include a great amount of information about yourself, your classes and courses in a way that is very hard to replicate in any other format.

Your flyers can be an incredibly effective way to get people to visit your site as well. Your flyers can give some basic information and then move people who are interested directly to your website via a clearly outlined URL or a QR code.

Driving relevant traffic in this way is one of the best ways to get people acquainted with what you do and to convert people into your students.

Introduction

Offline marketing campaigns are commonly targeted based on the proximity of a given area to your business or on demographics.

Another important way of targeting households that is unique to flyer deliveries is targeting specific types of properties. Flyers allow you to focus on areas with specific features to the houses themselves.

Targeting homes with gardens, houses with Sash Windows or households based on their proximity to a local park can all be very effective for specific businesses.

To a restaurant none of these would make any difference. But to a landscaping company, a dog walker or a sash windows specialist having the ability to focus campaigns with this level of granularity can be game changing.

Gardens

If you are running a gardening or a landscaping business, you might want to look at which parts of London have a high proportion of privately owned properties with gardens.

Some of the parts of North London with most private gardens are in Mill Hill, Finchley, Islington, Hampstead, Enfield, Hillingdon and Golders Green.

You will find that there are two types of areas here. Either places with a lot of open space like Enfield or historical parts of London with Georgian or Edwardian homes with large gardens from century or more ago.

Both are appropriate for leaflet distribution. When deciding on where we are going to target a campaign for a gardening company, we will combine the data we have for household incomes and properties with gardens in each area. In this we can find the ideal customer for most landscaping companies.

Together, we can make a judgment on whether you would like to focus on wealthier households that might be spending a part of the year away from London and need someone to take care of their large garden in the meantime.

Or if you’d prefer to target smaller properties and gardens for regular smaller jobs.

If you want to look at South London, you will find some of the best areas with a high number of private gardens in Richmond, Wimbledon or Twickenham. In general, the whole area around Richmond Park is great for targeting of this type.

Sash Windows

Another good example of a type of company that can benefit greatly from having the ability to target specific types of properties would be a Sash Windows specialist.

You can find Sash windows will most in Victorian and Edwardian homes.

Given the fact that the absolute majority of these will be privately owned residences, we can use leaflet distribution to a great effect here.

Some of the best parts of London for Victorian Terraced houses are in Camden, Balham, Chelsea, West Hampstead, Highgate, Enfield, Haringey and Twickenham. Many can also be found in East London areas like West Ham and East Ham.

These are some of the best areas for flyer deliveries in general. This is largely due to the demographics here and how clearly the streets are laid out.

Victorian terraced houses are some of the best places to deliver leaflets not only for a Sash Windows specialist.

Areas with parks

Dog walkers and personal trainers might want to focus their leafleting efforts on targeting places with easy access to a park.

In London we are blessed with an abundance of parks and green areas but you will find places that are more green than others.

The lack of green areas in a given part of London can offer an opportunity for a dog walking service with the ability to transport the dog to a greener part of London.

If this is something your dog walking service can offer, you might want to look at delivering your flyers to places like Pimlico, Camden, Westminster, Dalston or Camden.

On the other hand, you might want to target areas with easy access to local parks. This could be because you are a personal trainer that likes to do their training sessions outside in the summer.

If this is what you want to do, you want to make sure you are using a flyer delivery company that has a system that allows for this.

The right mapping system

Just selecting an area or a postcode is not going to be granular enough for you. You want to make sure that you can select mainly the streets and neighbourhoods that are within 5-10 minute walking distance from a park that can you can use for your training sessions.

At The Private Postman we have a system that does allow for this. Have a look at how our mapping system works here.

You need the right level of granularity. If you are selecting individual roads to target you are likely going to be paying a premium for your deliveries.

In general, you want to be using shared deliveries for your campaigns. Find out more about how shared deliveries work on our page dedicated to the topic.

This is possible only with a structured system. Our system works on Groups of approximately 5,000 households. This allows for shared deliveries in most areas and for granularity that allows you to select places within a 5-10 minute wakling distance from a park.

Council blocks

Local authority housing and council blocks are generally not included in leaflet distribution campaigns.

There are many reasons for this. These areas are often gated and not accessible without a code or a key. On top of that, their structure makes it challenging to navigate and the delivery itself is quite difficult as a result.

Each estate has a unique structure and without prior study of the layout a small number of deliveries can take a very long time to do.

This historically resulted in deliveries to council blocks, estates and local authority housing not taking place at all. Alternatively if a company could deliver to a council estate the cost would be very high.

At The Private Postman we’ve developed a different system however. We now run a dedicated council leaflet distribution system. You can have a look at how our council deliveries work on our page dedicated to the topic.

There are many types of businesses that can benefit greatly from delivering their flyers to council estates.

Introduction

Dog walking can be a very rewarding job. Spending time outside with dogs is, however, not all you have to do to have a successful dog walking business.

Advertising and marketing are a part of the deal. In order to have clients you must first somehow attract them.

This doesn’t have to be a daunting task. In this article we are going to discuss the most common and effective ways you can advertise pet sitting services nowadays.

We are going to have a look at how you can use social media in a practical way. We’ll talk about leaflet distribution as one of the best forms of local advertising and we’ll touch on other auxiliary ideas as well.

We’ll keep our focus local, which in our case is London. We are not going to discuss how you can build a multinational pet sitting business with billions of Instagram hits.

We’ll focus on practical ways you can advertise dog walking and pet sitting services in your local area.

How to use social media as a pet sitter

Making interesting and engaging content for social media can be a real challenge for most businesses.

As a pet sitter or a dog walker you however have a unique advantage. Content with pets and dogs is interesting and engaging just by the fact that the pets in it.

On top of this, pet owners are often open to looking up new training methods, places to walk their dogs in their area, nutritional tips and more.

You are going to be best served by using visual platforms like Instagram for your pet related content.

The biggest challenge in using social media, that everyone has to contend with, is the intense competition that takes place on these platforms.

Because of the possibility of reaching a huge number of people, some of the most creative minds in the world are paid a lot of money to focus on creating content that is meant to capture the attention of millions.

On top of this large brands spend tens of millions of pounds on social media.

You don’t have to feel like you have to compete with this.

You should mostly care about people in the areas you can serve with your services. If you are a dog walker based in West London, you don’t need a hundred thousand people from Australia watching your videos.

You can create informative and engaging content about pet nutrition, training or local walking spots and pay Instagram to serve these posts to people that live in the areas you are working in.

You can then combine these useful and interesting posts with ads for your services.

This way, you can get yourself on the screens of people that have pets, are interested in pets and live in your local area. You can do this without having to compete with everyone else in the world at the same time.

You can read about the largest social media platforms here and see which of these you want to be using.

How to use flyers and leaflets as a dog walker

Keeping in the spirit of mostly focusing on your local area, leaflet distribution is an excellent way to market a dog walking or pet sitting business.

Leaflets are one of the most effective ways of advertising locally in London. The physical nature of the flyer is something that digital formats can’t replicate.

You can have a look at the statistics about how many people keep the flyers they receive and how they interact with them in our leaflet distribution statistics blog here.

One of the best things about leaflet distribution is the fact that you can reach every single home in the area you select.

As long as the home has a letterbox, they will receive your flyers. This is very different to social media advertising. On social media only the people that use the particular app you are using will see your advertising.

Leaflets simply make it into every household that has a letterbox.

It is important that you have at least a basic understanding of how leaflet distribution works before you start spending money on it.

Please feel free to refer to our page dedicated to explaining all the important terminology and concepts relating to leaflet distribution here.

The idea could be summarised this way. Make sure to use a reputable company that has experienced working in your local area (in our case London).

Make sure that you can speak to real people in this company about where you are with your dog walking businesses and what you are looking to achieve with your flyer delivery campaign.

See if this company can help you or advise you on the design of your flyers, printing and storage.

On the more technical front. Go with A5 leaflets, shared delivery and try repeated drops where possible.

Should you have a dog sitting website?

Most businesses can still benefit from having a good website. Even though most of people’s attention online is on social media, clients that are seriously interested are likely to visit your website.

You can use your website to include testimonials, display any accreditations you might hold and give more detailed information about your services.

If you like writing in longer form, you can also keep a blog. If you have useful things to share in written form on your website, you can benefit from this as search engines reward websites with useful written content by better rankings in search results.

Dog walking and networking

Since the beginning of this article everything we’ve discussed has been focused on advertising locally to where you actually do business.

Your networking should take on the same philosophy. Are there any local pet shops or groomers in your area?

They might be open to cooperating with you. You can recommend your clients use the services of your friendly local pet groomer and they can recommend your dog walking services in return.

These partnerships can be very lucrative as an in-person recommendation from a trusted source is infinitely more powerful than any form of advertising.

With that said, make sure that the local businesses you are partnering up with are reliable and are doing a good job. Once you partner up in this way, you are tying your reputation to whoever you are recommending.

Local reputation is everything in the dog walking business. People need to trust you with their pets and sometimes even access to their homes. You need to care about the reputation of your pet sitting business and you must make sure it isn’t carelessly damaged.

It can also be very helpful to get to know the other dog walkers in your area. It’s good for you to have someone you can recommend instead of yourself when you get a call from a client you can’t serve.

What if you get ill? Can you have someone take over your duties for a while?

Having relationships with reliable and trustworthy local dog walkers and pet sitters can make the difference between you enjoying your job and being a slave to it. If you can develop a local network of people in your line of work – do it! You will not regret it.

Introduction

Childminding and early-years care is a lucrative businesses.

A considerable amount of money is being spent on child minding every month in the capital. Thanks to this, businesses are directing a considerable amount into advertising of these services.

This is true, especially in London where we are based.

There is a big variety in the types of companies that are competing for clients here. They range from small child minding businesses based in people’s homes to large agencies.

If you are running one of these businesses, you need to make sure that you can effectively market yourself. There are ways of doing so both online and offline.

In this article we’re going to discuss 5 of the most effective ways of marketing your childminding business.

Social media advertising

We are living in the age of social media. Having some kind of social media presence is pretty much a necessity for most businesses.

Some types of businesses benefit from maintaining an active profile. This would include a carpenter who regularly posts photographs of his work or a personal trainer who shows off daily work outs and his/her client’s results.

Childminding businesses will have to be more careful about posting. A childminder can’t be posting images of the children they are looking after.

Instead the activity on a childminders social media profiles should, for example, focus on posts about the latest research about child development or learning methods.

Discussing recipes for nutritious food children like or discussing quality books for children.

Ultimately it is good to keep your social media active but there is no need to spend too much time doing so.

How to do social media ads?

What you should be using social media for in the first place is advertising. One of the best things that Facebook, LinkedIN and others allow you to do is to target your ads very well.

You can target your ads directly at busy professionals in specific age ranges and locations. You can focus on groups based on their interests.

You can also tailor each of your ads to the specific groups you are targeting. You can make your ads different when targetting female and male demographics, for example.

If you are going to be spending time and money on social media most of it should be directed at you experimenting with ads. You can spend as little as £20 testing a new ad in a specific part of town.

You can think of it as developing a skill that will allow your business to thrive well into the future.

When you run enough ads over months and years you collect data and experience specific to your child minding niche. This is something that will allow you to always attract new clients when you need to in the future.

Leaflet distribution for child minders

As effective as social media marketing is, it also comes with some drawbacks. It can be challenging to stand out, you can spend a lot of money on ads with no response if you get some elements of the campaign wrong.

There are advertising tools in the offline world that don’t suffer these drawbacks and that can deliver results consistently.

Leaflet distribution is one of the most effective offline marketing tools that a childminding business can use.

One of the biggest advantages of leaflets over any other advertising method is the fact that you can have them delivered to every single household in a selected area.

This means that you don’t miss out on anyone because they don’t use a particular service or visit a particular site. You reach every single household in your selected area.

Developing local mind share with leaflets therefore becomes relatively easy.

This effect can be further enhanced by repeating your deliveries to the same households multiple times. These repeated deliveries can take place leading up to a crucial time of year to intensify the effect of your campaigns when you need it the most.

They can also be spread out over the whole year to keep reactivating your local area every few months.

Targeting

When you are deciding on where you should have your childminding flyers delivered, consider the immediate area around your location first.

Depending on your clientele, you will have a basic idea about how far people are happy to travel for your services.

In general it is best to cover the area immediately surrounding your address first and then branch out into the most lucrative adjacent parts of London from there.

You can see the areas The Private Postman covers on our page dedicated to this topic.

What to include on your flyer

You want your leaflet to include basic information about your childminding services together with details about the CCTV system you use, your accreditations and relevant qualifications.

Don’t spend too much space explaining every detail of what you do. You can include more information on your website or social media.

A leaflet should give people an idea of what you do and either get them to visit your website or call you directly.

Dealing with distributors directly

When you are planning and booking your flyer delivery campaign, you want to make sure that you get to speak to real people in your distribution company.

A good distributor should help you plan your budget, select the areas you should be focusing on and even help print and design your flyers.

Don’t settle for automated systems. Work with a company that gives you the ability to speak to an expert that can help you plan and keep you informed about the progress of your campaign.

Feel free to have a look at how our systems work on our Why Choose Us page.

Search engine marketing

Most people use search engines like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo to search for the services they need. You can have a look at the most popular search engines here.

Many people in your local area are likely going to be searching for child minders via one of these tools. It would be a mistake to completely overlook them. You can take a number of steps to increase your chance for people to discover you via a search engine.

1. Register yourself on Google My Business
   and connect your profile with your website. This is a necessity for any local business.
2. Pay for ads on Google search results.
   You can pay for your website to appear high on searches for specific keywords in your area. (For example “child minders near me” or “child minders in West Hampsted” etc…)
3. Keep a blog on your website and regularly add new content.
   This can help search engines in determining whether your website is a useful result to be shown to people searching for childminding.

Networking

Networking can help you in your childminding business in multiple ways. By keeping in touch with other childminders you can create a network of people that can support each other.

You can agree on covering each other’s clients when one of you needs to take a day off.
When one of the people in your childminding network is at full capacity but keeps receiving leads they can pass your details on with a recommendation.

Having a network of people in the childminding business in a specific geographical area supporting each other can be of great value.

You can look to network with other childminders online in facebook groups or in person.

Local publications

Even though most of the periodicals out there nowadays focus largely on digital forms of publishing, local publications and newspapers still print physical copies.

There are magazines being delivered all over the UK and even London that are made to serve and speak to specific areas. If you can find and identify these, advertising with a publication like this can be a great idea.

Try to locate these local papers and magazines in and around the area you are based in. Plugging into the life of a local area like this can bring a great level of awareness of your business and help sustain a stead stream of new clients.

Introduction

Gardening and landscaping businesses want to focus their advertising only on specific types of properties. There is no point advertising gardening services to a block of flats.

Gardeners and landscapers are somewhat unique in this compared to other types of businesses like restaurants, gyms or law companies. These businesses might focus on geographic areas or various demographic markers instead.

As such, gardening businesses can benefit greatly from an advertising method that allows for accurate targeting of curated areas consisting mostly of homes with gardens.

Leaflet distribution is excellent for this. In this blog we’ll talk in detail about how leaflet delivery works for gardeners and landscapers. We’ll also touch on other supplementary things like the design and importance of a landscaping website.

Why leaflet delivery

Like we’ve already mentioned, one of the great things about leaflet delivery is that you can target a specific area based on the type of houses and properties within it.

This means that your leaflets are going to be delivered only to the homes of people who might be interested in your services with minimum waste. In short, you are going to be targeting houses with gardens and no one else.

When you are looking for a flyer delivery company to work with, you want to make sure they run a mapping system that allows for this.

If their system is based purely on postal sectors you are unlikely to be able to do very granular targeting.

You want your distribution company to run a proprietary mapping system that is based on property type, allows for flexibility and is not tied to government numbers and postal sectors.

At The Private Postman we use the TPP coded walk system that works exactly like that. You can read more about it on our page dedicated to GPS tracking and Mapping.

In general, you want to make sure that the mapping system your company is using has an internal logic (postal sectors are arbitrary) and that it allows for some flexibility.

How do leaflets for landscapers work?

The pipeline for getting from zero to getting a leaflet distribution campaign under way looks something like this.

Find the right distribution company, decide on a budget, design a flyer, print your leaflets, select your target areas and move on to delivery.

Find the right distribution company

We’ve already mentioned the most important thing to focus on when selecting your distribution company. Gardening and landscaping companies need a distributor with a flexible mapping system that allows for good targeting based on property type.

You also want to make sure that you can talk to an expert when planning your campaign. Some delivery companies have automated their systems and employed call centres to answer basic questions.

You want to stay away from these. You need to be able to speak to an expert that can advise you on which areas of London you should be targeting. If you already have a leaflet design finished you want your distributor to have a look at it and give you feedback.

You also want to check whether the company you are considering uses agency workers or if they try to build long-term relationships with their workers instead.

Your flyer delivery campaign is going to be successful only if every individual distributor does a good job delivering your leaflets. You always want to pick a company that has good long term relationships with their workers.

You can have a look at some information about our workforce on our why choose us page.

Decide on a budget

Your budget will determine how many flyers you can print and how many homes you can have them delivered to.

A good distributor should be able to advise you on how many flyers you’ll need to target the best areas within London. You might find that your initial budget is higher than you need to cover all the households you want.

In that case, you can look at running multiple deliveries to the same homes with rest periods between drops. This technique can yield great results. In some instances it is better to deliver your leaflet to 20,000 homes twice than to 40,000 homes once.

Discuss your budget and the idea of repeat deliveries with your distribution company when planning your campaign.

Design a flyer and print your leaflets

The most important thing about leaflet design when it comes to gardening and landscaping businesses is to use a professional graphic designer.

If possible, try to liaise with your distributor about your designs also. There is a lot to consider when designing a leaflet and you want to make sure that you are not handicapping your campaign with bad design decisions.

Get your flyer designed properly and discuss the concept for your leaflet with your distributor. Thanks to their experience, they might come back with feedback opn elements you haven’t considered.

Keep your flyers to a basic A5 or A6 format and try to get your printing done through your distribution partner. They will be able to get better prices with printing houses than you’d be able to secure yourself.

Select your target areas

Targeting is the name of the game when it comes to leaflet distribution for gardeners and landscapers.

You want to be closely working with your distribution company and select only the areas with a high density of homes with gardens. This should not be a challenging task for an experienced distributor.

Examples of leaflets for gardeners

If you are focusing mainly on garden maintenance, patio building, hedge trimming and similar services, you can structure your leaflet similarly to this example.

You want the largest headline on your gardener leaflet to clearly communicate what your services are about. Your branding and company name are important but they come second.

It’s not a bad idea to include a list of services you offer. Try to keep the number of services on this lest under ten if possible. You want to make it clear that you can offer a variety of services but you don’t want to clutter your flyer.

If possible, always send people to your website for more information. A leaflet is meant to introduce you to the client. Sending them to another place where they can get more information about you is a good thing.

You can focus on getting people to call you directly or visit your website. Don’t try to include too much information on your flyer.

If you focus more on garden design and you specialise in larger projects, you can use your leaflet more to introduce your brand and describe what you do through a good photograph.

In this example, the image of a large garden is taking up most of the leaflet. It is also clear that garden design for larger projects is the main focus of the company in question.

Some more information can be included on the other side of the flyer but the general focus of what this landscaping company does should be clear from the image and branding.

It is again important to clearly display the website URL and contact information. A leaflet is not meant to give an exhaustive account of everything you do, your history and achievements. Your website can do this.

Work on your website

In a world heavily focused on social media, it can be easy to overlook your website. However, for gardening and landscaping businesses, quality websites are a necessity.

A good website is one of the best places to show images of your work in high resolution. You can get into the intricacies of the services you offer and the kinds of work you can do.

You can display awards, accreditations and testimonials. It is difficult to do all of this in any other medium. Especially in a way that you curate yourself.

Even though social media is important, many of the potential customers who are seriously considering using your services will visit your website at some point.

Develop a great website for your company and link to it from all of your flyers. You can start looking at some basic web design rules to get more informed in this article.

Introduction

There are multiple techniques you can use to attract new landlords, sellers and buyers to your agency. The trick is to find the right combination of methods for you and keep them in the right proportion.

This way, you can collect the most leads in a sustainable way and grow your letting agency.

Communicate your expertise clearly

You want to make sure that you understand the most common concerns, fears and motivations that landlords have. What do landlords worry about?

These are likely going to be issues like non-paying tenants, tax and regulations changes, or funding repairs and maintenance of the property.

Are you informed and current on these topics? If you are, make sure that you communicate your specific expertise in all the channels you are using to market and advertise.

Whether it’s on your leaflets, website or social media. Try to keep your references to these topics clear and brief.

There is no need to get into a great deal of detail about your views on intricate matters of specific tax issues on your social media or leaflets.

What is really needed is to make it clear to the landlords that will see your flyers, website or social media posts that you are aware of their biggest concerns.

Make sure you mention that you are aware of these issues and focus on them. If you hold any relevant accreditations, include them in your marketing materials also.

Keep yourself informed by following relevant sources of information like landlordzone.

Networking

Real world networking can create connections that are hard to replicate in other forms.

You will find that there are still many local business events happening around the UK that you could attend and where you can speak to landlords and investors.

You can also go to property auctions that are often attended by landlords. If a landlord is attending a property auction, it is more likely that they have multiple properties in their portfolio.

The more properties they have, the more likely they are to need your services.

If you are particularly proactive in this domain you can also create and host your own landlord advice event.

If this is your forte you can hire a venue, invite a few experts to speak. If you are personable and a good host you can develop some connections that are going to be considerably more personal than what you can do via other methods.

Social media for letting agencies

Almost all businesses nowadays have at least some social media presence.

When you are thinking about using social media as a letting agency, you want to first think about why you’re doing so.

As a letting agency, you likely shouldn’t be aiming for organic growth and mass engagement. You are not a fitness or a makeup influencer.

Social media can play a different role for a local letting agency. It can act as a place where you discuss your current projects and general topics of interest we’ve mentioned earlier.

Social media can act as a tool to show that you are an active and a trustworthy company. When a landlord or a seller finds your website or looks at your leaflet they might first look for you on social media.

If they can see that you are actively posting (maybe once a week) relevant content, you are helping them make the decision to contact you.

But which social media platforms should you be on? Select one or two that you find the easiest to use. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and try to keep up with posting on too many platforms.

The most useful platforms for a letting agency are going to be Facebook, Instagram and LionkedIN.

Facebook

Facebook has great tools for businesses. The Facebook advertising tools can be very effective across platforms.

Facebook also allows for new ways for clients to contact you or quickly find relevant information about your letting agency.

When it comes to content people on Facebook respond well to a combination of one or more pictures with a medium length blog style post.

This could be a few images of a property you are managing and a 200-word post about some of the challenges you’ve helped the landlord or seller handle.

Instagram

Instagram is going to work great for you if you like making shorter videos or sharing pictures.

There is no need to write long and thoughtful posts on instagram. If you have a few good pictures from a new property you’ve managed to help sell or are currently managing, post them.

LinkedIN

LinkedIN offers fantastic targeting options in terms of advertising to letting agencies. You can find demographics to target that are quite unique to this platform.

Longer blog-style posting also works very well on LinkedIN.

LinkedIN is all about targeting the right people with your ads and content. Have a look at the types of companies and individuals you can pinpoint on LinkedIN. Consider whether doing so would be worth your time.

Make videos

The current internet culture is very visual. The majority of online content nowadays is consumed in video format.

Whether it is just you talking to a camera in your office or showing some of the properties you manage, videos are going to help you reach people.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to over-deliver in terms of production value. Don’t get into video production, editing, lighting and get lost in it.

You can use your mobile phone in decent natural light to make basic videos discussing topics you are confident in.

If you want to ramp up the production value of your videos, make sure to hire an external videographer. There are many competent people that can do this job well.

You can hire them on a per-video basis with no large commitments. A good videographer will be able to deliver a product for £800 that you wouldn’t be able to produce yourself no matter how hard you’ll try.

Use these videos on your social media and equally importantly on your website.

Having video elements in your blogs and individual pages will help with how search engines see your website. They will also greatly improve the way landlords, potential sellers and buyers interact with your site.

Use leaflet distribution

Leaflet distribution is an advertising method that has been with us in its current form for many decades. Based on how it is performing at the moment, it will remain with us for many decades to come.

You will struggle to find an estate agent in London that doesn’t use flyer delivery in some form. Many of the reasons for why estate agents love leaflets apply to agencies as well.

Leaflets can be used in a very targetted way to deliver to homes around a recent sale or close to a home that has been successfully let out.

Flyers can also be used in the context of a larger campaign to target hundreds of thousands of homes in London within a couple of weeks.

Campaigns of almost any size between these two examples are also possible and are regularly taking place all over London.

We work with estate agents and letting agencies on a daily basis and use leaflets to find and advertise to landlords, buyers and sellers consistently.

The physical nature of the leaflet provides an advantage flyer delivery that online advertising struggles to match.

You can have a look at how combinig your social media efforts with leaflet distribution can benefit you in our blog here.

The fact that you can have a physical piece of custom advertising delivered in to every single household in a selected area is not something you should be underestimating.

You can read up more on leaflet distribution for estate agents on this page.

Online marketing portals

The largest marketing portals for buyers, sellers and estate agents in the UK currently are Rightmove, Zoopla and Primelocation.

As everyone in this space spends a considerable amount of their time on one of these portals, you need to have a good understanding of how they work and what is going on on them.

You can use them to advertise, learn about your competition or simply to gather information about the market.

Even if you’ve made the decision to stay away from online marketing portals as they tend to be very saturated you can use them to develop and update your understanding of the market in areas you care about.

Focus on your website

Most companies in today’s world focus their energy online on social media. In many ways spending a lot of energy on social media makes sense. But it shouldn’t be done at the expense of your website.

Your website is still a crucial element of your online presence. It can deliver information in a way that no other medium can.

For landlords that are seriously considering using your services, your website will be the best tool to find more information at their own pace.

This is not to be underestimated.

The way you structure your website can help you present your letting or estate agency in a way you can control.

For example, you can present a well thought-through video describing your services on the home page of your site.

You can then silo other information in sections that logically deliver exactly the information a landlord would be interested in.

The visitors to your website are in control of which parts of your site they read and how much time they spend on it. The way this information is structured and connected is completely in your control though.

You can present more information and details about what you do on your website than in pretty much any other medium.

Do not underestimate the great benefit that a well-designed website can have for your letting agency business.

Work on your SEO

If you are putting energy and effort into designing and structuring your website you will also want to spend at least a little bit of time on SEO.

SEO means Search Engine Optimisation. The way your website is built and the type of information that it contains helps Google and other search engines decide whether they should serve it up to people first.

You can have a look at which search engines you should be looking at and considering here.

In short, the type of content you are putting up on your website will determine whether the position you come up on when landlords search for relevant topics.

One of the best ways to build a good SEO profile and allow landlords to discover you naturally via search engines is posting high quality articles via your blog.

Select the topics that are most likely going to be of interest to landlords and write informative articles on these. Regularly post these articles on your site.

It is a simple process. However you have to make sure that the quality of your articles is high. Try to do your best to really answer the questions that people have.

Write clearly and don’t overuse keyword you think people might be searching for.

When you have a number of blogs posted try to find reasonable ways to link between them.

If in one article you are talking about solutions to leaks and burst water pipes, you can naturally link to another article you’ve posted focused on protecting electrical systems from damage.

This kind of linking between relevant article on your site is also something Google and other search engines look for.

Introduction

Leaflet ads are a great way to reach people in local areas of London.

Leaflet ads have consistently remained a considerable part of the advertising efforts of most successful London companies.

No matter which technological changes in the advertising landscape have shaken up the industry, leaflet ads have remained.

This is mainly because leaflet ads guarantee that you can get your advertising materials to every single household in your chosen area. This is not something that is available through any other method.

The physical nature of the leaflet ad is also an important element in this. You can read up on some statistics relating to how long people keep physical leaflets are more in our blog devoted to the topic.

Introduction

There are multiple ways we can get our flyers into the hands of our potential customers.

Some of these methods are more effective than others though. Time and effort are precious commodities and wasting them is not something a good business does.
If you are going to hand out flyers the logical question would be. How to hand out Flyers Effectively?

Let’s have a look at the different ways we can hand out flyers and you can make a decision on which of these is right for you.