Marketing with handout type flyers is always a hit for my type of businesses growing up. I enjoyed making them too. Trying to figure out what to put on them to make the client call was always fun to me. What is it going to take to get them to call.
With the shoe shining business, the lawn service and the pine straw business, I found that by utilizing the paper boxes in neighborhoods, I could very efficiently get the message to the client. Normally, I liked to use a full 8×11″ paper.
With my lawn service, I remember using color ink because I couldn’t drive at 12 years old. I wanted to use color to make the best impact to the 100 or so houses in my neighborhood. The riding lawn mower was a clipart mower that had color on it.
With the Pinestraw Plus business, I tried many different versions of flyers at different times of the year. During the fall, I would often put on there something about leaf removal. We had to remove the leaves before we could put the straw anyway…we might as well market it.
I also hyped up the part about me being a college kid earning money on spring break or fall break. During that time period, I would use the plain black and white paper. They worked really well and I would recommend them to any of these manual labor types of work.
I would strategically keep a list of target neighborhoods that I wanted to target. They were the ones that were the cookie cutter homes up to the mac-mansions. The mindset was that they HAVE to have pinestraw at least once or twice a year to just “keep up with the Jones.” My service was something that when they needed it, they called. I had to really hit them hard…like once a month or so during the spring and fall to make sure I was top of mind.
Those were good memories. I would finish my regular day of working and often roll down the windows, put on my flashers and drive until dark, going neighborhood to neighborhood…paper box to paper box in the wrong lane. I would have my magnets on my truck too, of course.
