Even though everything has gone digital, flyers can still have a significant impact on your small business’ advertising efforts. Whether you’re advertising a company event or a seasonal sale, a flyer can help you get customers’ attention– as long as they’re designed the proper way.
Flyers can be an excellent promotional tool for you, but you must understand how to design them effectively. Today, we’ll go over some dos and don’ts for small business flyer design!
The Dos
Now, let’s start with the dos. The points below will show you what you should do when developing a flyer for your small business, including some tips for creating an effective design.
1. Have Your Audience in Mind
Just like a Facebook or Google ad, you want to ensure that your flyer reaches your intended audience. Assume you’re selling organic coffee in the middle of a business district. This suggests that your flyers should address a professional and energetic audience. If you are unsure who you should consider when designing, start by identifying your ideal customer.
2. Add a Solid CTA
Determine the specific action you want your audience to take after reading your flyer. Would you like them to make an order? Would you like them to subscribe to your service? Avoid confusing your audience with multiple CTAs. Instead, you have to choose one intended action and build the marketing piece around it.
3. Be Clear with Your Messages
In addition, your flyer must be able to convey a message to the audience in a matter of seconds. If it takes a little while for readers to understand what the marketing piece is about, you risk losing their interest, and they probably won’t see the CTA. So make your messages stand out by including eye-catching visual cues like bold, underlining, or highlighting.
4. Set Up a Brand Guide
Choosing between a thousand available typefaces and color combinations can feel a bit overpowering, but this won’t happen if you have a branding guide in place. It is a collection of pre-selected color schemes, fonts, and design elements that you can use when creating promotional materials.
5. Use a Design Template
A lot of things are involved in creating a flyer. You have to set up all of the elements in such a way that they appear balanced, and you must ensure that the important messages are highlighted. But it doesn’t have to be this complicated! PosterMyWall templates allow you to create effective small business flyers with just a few clicks!
The Don’ts
While knowing what to do when designing a flyer is important, so is avoiding common mistakes. Let’s look at the things you shouldn’t do when designing flyers for a small business!
1. Picking the Wrong Colors
Colors are said to attract attention, but they can also confuse readers. People may have trouble understanding your written content and backgrounds if you skip out on high-contrast colors. Thus, the general rule of thumb is that darker text on lighter backgrounds is easier to read. Using colors from the brand is also an effective strategy.
2. Using Hard-to-read Fonts
Poor color selection isn’t the only issue to consider when designing a flyer. Your flyers should be very readable, so avoid trendy, decorated fonts that may make your messages difficult to read. Fonts like Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri are some of the tried-and-true examples. You should also ensure that your text is easy to read from a distance.
3. Attaching Low-quality Images
To create perfect small business flyers, you must first check the resolution of your images. Zoom in three times to the printable size to get a sense of the quality you can expect when printing. Also, for a promotional tool like this, it might be better to stick with simple symbols.
4. Overcrowding the Design
While it is important to provide your customers with pertinent information, you do not need to tell a full-blown story in your flyers. Instead, describe what you offer your customers in as few words as possible. This will help them understand why they should choose your small business.
5. Failing to Proofread the Design
The name of your company, the specifics of the products you’re promoting, and how customers can contact you are all things that must be included in your design, but they often get overlooked. This is why you should never skip the proofreading step in the flyer design process.
The Takeaway
So, what do you think of your current flyer design? Do they have some of the mistakes mentioned above? Are they effective enough for you? Regardless of how you feel about your promotional materials, the tips above can help you improve your flyer design, allowing you to gain new customers and reach your small business goal!
