Flyer and leaflet copy

What flyer and leaflet copy is

A flyer is one sheet with one message and one instruction on it. It is read standing up: pulled out of a letterbox, taken from a hand at an event, seen on a community board from a metre or two away, or found under a windscreen wiper. Six seconds is the honest assumption, and a good deal of the time it is less.

That is the whole brief. In six seconds a reader can take in a headline, one supporting line, one instruction and a phone number. Anything else on the sheet competes with those four and makes all of them slower to find.

It is not a sales sheet, which is handed over in a meeting, carries a price and specification, and gets thirty seconds of scanning in the hand. It is not a brochure, which is several pages read sitting down and kept for months. A flyer is thrown away within a minute either way. The only question is whether the reader acts first.

When you need one

You need one when you are putting something in front of people who were not looking for you and are not going to read: a door drop around a new location, a table at a fair, a sheet in a neighbour's shop window, an insert going into somebody else's delivery.

You need one when something local and dated is happening. A new branch opening, a clinic taking new patients, a service starting in a suburb it did not cover last year.

You do not need one if what you are selling cannot be said in a line. A complicated service with conditions attached will not survive six seconds, and the sheet becomes small print nobody reads. That is a page for the hand rather than the letterbox. You also do not need one before the offer exists: if what a reader gets and what it costs are still unsettled, the offer itself comes first, and it is the cheaper job.

What goes on it

Four things, in this order of importance, and the design has to follow that order rather than fight it.

• One message. The single thing you want a stranger to know, in the largest type on the sheet, in a form that is legible from an arm's length away. Not a slogan and not the business name; the name is not the message.
• One line that makes it believable. Who it is for, where you are, how long you have been doing it, or what it costs. One line, not three.
• One instruction. Call, text, book, bring this in, come on Saturday. One verb. A flyer offering three ways to respond gets fewer responses than one offering a single way.
• The practical detail. Phone number, address, hours, web address short enough to type, and the date the thing ends if there is one. Small type is fine here; this is what the reader comes back to on the counter an hour later.

What comes off is usually more work than what goes on: the paragraph about the company's values, the second offer added by somebody who did not want to waste the space, the terms that belong on a page rather than a sheet, and the logos of everyone you are accredited by.

What you get

The flyer copy, in reading order. Every line, marked by its place and size relative to the others, so the designer knows what has to be readable at two metres, at arm's length, and on the counter afterwards. Both sides if you are printing both.

Two headline versions. A drop is usually split across streets or days, and two headlines counted separately tell you more than one headline does. The counting itself is direct response work, and I will set up the simple version of it with you.

A response line that can be counted. A code to mention, a number used nowhere else, or a short web address of its own. Without one, a door drop is a cost with no result attached, which is why so many businesses believe flyers do not work.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A mobile dog groomer in Winnipeg is expanding into two suburbs she has never covered and plans a drop of about four thousand sheets over three weekends. Her existing flyer carries the business name in the largest type, a list of nine services, two photographs, a price list, and an email address.

The rewrite puts one line at the top: mobile dog grooming that comes to your driveway, now in Charleswood. Below it, one line saying the van is fully fitted and no dog waits in a cage. Then one instruction, to text a number for a Saturday slot, with the number in the second-largest type on the sheet. The nine services become three words. The price list comes off entirely, replaced by a starting figure in CAD. Two suburbs get two different numbers, so the tally says which one answered. The decision that came out of it was to stop dropping the third suburb and put those sheets through the same streets a second time.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is being dropped, where, how many, and what a single response is worth to you. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. One flyer or a set, one side or two, the headline versions, and the revision rounds, agreed before anything starts.
3. The response line. A code or a separate number set up before printing, because it cannot be added afterwards to forty thousand sheets.
4. The draft. Three to five working days after the call. Short pieces are not quick to write, but they are quick to read and to revise.
5. Final copy and the count. One round of revisions included, plus a one-page note on what to record during the drop and for how long afterwards.

One week from first call to print-ready copy is typical for a single flyer.

What it costs

Flyer and leaflet copy is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. It is one of the smaller jobs on this site, and the price depends mainly on how many versions are being run against each other. Design, printing and distribution are not included. The pricing page explains how quoting works for services without a published band.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The web address on the sheet needs somewhere worth arriving at, which is a genuine local page rather than the home page. The same news gets said online and in the shop at the same time, which is promotional copy. And the wording of the instruction itself, which does more of the work than anything else on the sheet, is worth testing on its own as a call to action. This job is complete when the copy goes to the printer, and nothing further is assumed.