Advertising

A couple of years ago I took over the running of our newsletter, which at the time was a single a4 piece of paper, formatted using tables giving practically the same information each time. Predictably it was hardly read and often went from the door to the bin.These days it averages 6 pages, full of news, photos, features etc. and after it goes out residents are talking about it.I was sent a link to website aimed at charities, community groups etc to create professional looking newsletters. I won't be using it for that because it cannot cope with the layout we use, and currently they only print to A5. However we will need to produce a residents pack at some point, and I will consider using this service.So what does all this have to do with landscapers/gardeners etc.One thought did occur to me, and that was the discussions on here about leaflet drops and the poor response they produce. In general the response rate is poor. For less than 5p a copy you can get 5000 (£233.20) 'newsletter' style flyers that can grab the persons attention and increase the likely hood of getting a possitive response.I appreciate this is more costly than your normal flyers, and possibly not for everyone. Plus it will need more thought on your part than putting a flyer together. But potentially there is a lot more that you can do.An article on a recent job, including photo, quote from client. Displayed at a recent show and have photos to share? Want to remind people what jobs should be done in the coming months? Share some information about a plant, provide more information about the service you provide, the scope is limited to your imagination.Article and photos are uploaded, and then fitted into the newsletter. So even if you could not produce a newsletter at present, registering is free, so you could build content over time before publishing. Not forgetting your contact information.If the cost is a little prohibitive and you use a local nursery why not team up and co-produce the newsletter, with articles from both of you, and contact details for both companies on the back? This way you half the cost. Or you could sell advertising space, local florist, or other non competitive businesses may be interested. Again this could offset the cost.If you have a website they also provide you with a website to publish your newsletters to. Creating a regular online newsletter and linking to it from your site is one way to change someone from surfing your site to regularly returning to see what is new, keeping you in potential clients mind and increasing the chances of someone sharing a link to you. This also has the potential of creating a series of articles which build up to a useful resource.Or as suggested above you could develop your own information leafletsBefore I forget, if this is something you might be interested in check out http://www.sweeble.comAnyway just a thought.