One of the most important aspects of planning a corporate event is making sure the right people are aware of it! Of course, there are many advertising channels you can use to create buzz around your event and draw in big crowds. Some organizations use radio, TV and billboards to advertise their event.

While effective, these channels are far too pricey for some smaller companies or nonprofit organizations. Email and social media marketing are affordable and can be a great way to attract prospective attendees, provided you know the ins and out of these two marketing strategies. Otherwise, even these affordable methods can cause you to waste ad spend.

One of the absolute best and most affordable ways to draw a local audience is to use flyers.

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What’s so Great About Flyers?

Now you may be wondering why you should use flyers to promote your event. After all, the method is so… old school… so… yesterday’s news. Nope, not by a long shot. Flyers worked 50 years ago, they work today, and they’ll work 20 years from now because they simply get the job done.

Here are some reasons you’ll want to consider using flyers to promote your next event:

Numerous Distribution Options

You can get your flyers into the right hands in multiple ways. Have them be included as a newspaper insert with the Sunday paper, use a door-to-door mail drop, have someone hand them out on the street or opt for instore distribution.

Flyers Allow You to Get Creative

There are really no limits to how creative you can get using flyers. From colors, text, folded finishes and more, you have a lot of options for how you can ensure your flyer stands out so your message lands.

Incentives

Flyers allow you to include incentives such as coupon codes and vouchers. This can work well for events where food and drink will be sold.

Trackable

No matter what marketing method you use, you always want to be able to track your campaigns to see how successful that particular channel was. You can easily add custom URLs and QR codes to your flyers to track them.

Flyers are Tangible

One of the biggest benefits of using flyers is that your message goes from being theoretical to something tangible in the eyes (and hands) of your prospects. Of course, how deeply your prospects interact with your flyer will have a lot to do with the flyer’s design. So let’s get to some tips that will help you create event flyers that will get attention and draw big crowds.

Tip #1: Make it Easy to Read

Let’s start with a tip you would think would be obvious but doesn’t always happen – and that is that your flyer’s text should be very visible and easy to read. You want to be able to quickly grab the prospect’s attention, but you won’t be able to if they can’t read your message.

A common mistake is to overlay light text over a busy image. Don’t do this as it makes your text next to impossible to read.

Tip #2: Visual Hierarchy – It’s a Thing

You’ve only got a few seconds to hook your prospect and get them to even consider attending your event. Be sure to make the most important information about the event (time and date, price, and call to action) more prominent than everything else. Using bigger font or having the font be in higher contrast will help it stand out for readers.

Tip #3: Make Sure It’s on Brand

Your flyer will most likely be one part of your larger overall marketing strategy. It should support the brand you’ve worked hard to build.

Tip #4: Get Professional Help if You Can

We understand that some organizations might be working with a very tiny marketing budget. In this instance, you can certainly use a free website like Canva.com to design your flyer yourself. They have some nice templates to choose from.

But in our experience, if you can afford to hire a professional graphic designer who specializes in flyer design, you’ll get the best results. A pro has the expertise to create something that will get you fantastic results. And you don’t have to necessarily pay a fortune to work with someone. Websites like Upwork and Fiverr allow you to connect with professional designers that charge a variety of rates.

Tip #5: Don’t Forget a CTA

What do you want the reader to do next? Should they scan your QR code? Visit your sign-up page? Give your office a call? Don’t make people guess, be clear by adding a call-to-action (CTA) to your flyer. And so as not to confuse anyone, just stick to one singular CTA.

Tip #6: Proofread It

Before you take your design and have 1000 copies printed off, be sure to proofread it. And get a second or even third pair of eyes to give it the once over. Remember, mistakes can be expensive in print advertising so be sure everything is correct beforehand.

Tip #7: Create a Flyer Campaign

Once you’ve designed an attractive event flyer, you’ll need to think about how you’re going to distribute it. We listed a few ways at the beginning of this article – you may want to distribute through your local newspaper as an insert or do a direct mail campaign. Then again, you can also hire someone to hand out flyers on the street or place them inside a few local businesses.

Something else to think about is to expand your core flyer design into something that can work across different media. For example, you could easily convert your flyer into Facebook-, Twitter- and Instagram-friendly sizes and share them with your followers.

The Wrap

If you follow these 7 tips you should be able to design a flyer that will grab attention and help you generate buzz and interest for your event. And if you need any help in the design process, just get in touch with us. We’ve helped a lot of organizations design flyers that created a lot of buzz for their event.