These days you see everyone talking about building websites and signing up to Facebook in order to promote their business. The world is changing and online is definitely something to consider, but when you run a small business you maybe don’t need to target the whole world. Maybe some tried and tested marketing techniques will still work for you. Flyers are a big one. Some people will tell you they are old news, but others are still having great success with them. People are using flyers to effectively bring people through the door of their business every day.

They build your brand awareness and sometimes it’s important for a potential customer to hold your business in their hand, rather than read about you on a webpage. There’s hundreds of ways you can use flyers and I’m sure you have carefully thought about all of them. But you want to design one that’s going to be effective for your business. You know what your customers will like. The person printing your flyer will be creative, but does he know your industry as well as you? Here’s some things you need to remember if you’re going to be the creative genius that comes up with the design.

Know what your message is

When you put anything in front of a potential customer’s face you need your message to jump out at them. Your flyer should have one specific purpose and nothing more. People don’t want to look at something and have dozens of thoughts running around in their head. When they look at your flyer you want them to remember whatever it is your message was. They definitely won’t remember if it was too complicated.

Keep in plain and simple

When was the last time you looked at something and had to squint your eyes to see what it said? When that happens to most people they will throw the flyer away. They definitely won’t spend hours working out what your words are trying to spell out. You don’t need something that screams in someone’s face. Plain and simple always works much better than being too complicated.

Choose the right colors

You want to choose your colors carefully. It’s cheaper to print black and white flyers, but does that really help anyone remember your brand? They will just think you are cheap. You maybe don’t have too much money to spend, so you can just choose a few colors that go well together. Having too much colors on the page will put people off, but having two colors that don’t go well together is just as bad.

Hook them in

Your heading should be short and sweet. You want it to hook anyone in when they look at it. Obviously it needs to be crafted so it makes the person want to read more and more. The idea is to get someone to consume all the information on the flyer, but to do that they need to be intrigued by the headline. You can test this out by looking at some flyers and seeing what ones make you want to take a second look.

A strong call to action

Everything you put out there needs a strong call to action and your flyer is no different. That means the you need to ask the potential customer to do something. When someone reads your flyer it might interest them, but if you don’t follow up by asking them to do something they could easily forget about it. If you want them to call you, tell them to pick up a phone. You get the idea. Just make sure you always have one and you’ll see better results.

The article is contributed by James William, who is an avid blogger. He writes blogs on graphic designing and printing. He works for Proactive Creative Media, which provides printing, graphics and brouchure design solution to their customers.