Door to door results

If you had the time to walk the neighborhood, shake everyone’s hand, and pitch your business, would you do it? Probably, but in a world of finite time, we have the next best thing: door hangers. They’re unobtrusive, proven to be highly effective, and because people MUST walk through their door, they are guaranteed to be seen by 100% of the people.

If you’ve read our guide to designing the perfect door-hanger, you also know that they’re shockingly simple to create. But the question remains, how does one actually go about targeting them?

It’s a good question, and one that we’re here to answer today. As with so many things, the answer is “it depends.” It depends on your business, your customers, and what resources you have available to deliver them. Here’s our guide to targeting the right audiences for you:

Targeting for consumers

If you sell to consumers, you’ll typically want to target neighborhoods but, in some cases, it can make sense to target businesses. After all, is there truly a real-life distinction between business to business (B2B) commerce and business to consumer (B2C)? At the end of the day, it’s all just people (business to people; B2P perhaps?) and you can effectively market to them in both their professional and private roles. If you’re offering food delivery, expert landscaping, or handyman work, targeting businesses and office parks could be a great way to go because you’ll catch hungry and tired people leaving the office after a long day and in exactly the right mindset to pay someone to handle their errands or cooking for them.

Otherwise, you’ll want to go for the most receptive neighborhoods. If you have a targeted list of current customers, or data left over after your last postcard campaign, focus on the hot-spots, which are neighborhoods where customers already exist. Perhaps there’s a reason that people in that area gravitate towards your business, and you can use this criteria to select other compatible neighborhoods. If you offer pool supplies or landscaping, maybe it’s gated communities and neighborhoods with large enough houses to be a fit. If you’re a bakery advertising cakes, focus on suburbs and new developments were young families are likely to have lots of kids. If you’re a dental practice, play up your “local” presence and even use the name of that development in your door hanger ad. Find the neighborhoods with proven success, double-down on them, and then look for other similar neighborhoods.

Targeting for businesses

If you sell to other businesses, there are rare occasions when you might want to canvass neighborhoods. Again, it’s still just business to people. If you offer IT services, office supplies, security services, or business insurance, you can have great success giving people discount offers for their company that they can bring in and look good for having helped their boss save money.

Outside of these scenarios, you’ll want to select your businesses wisely. Make sure you’re delivering door hangers to people who can actually afford or actually need your services by sticking to specific zones:

• Main street: best for targeting boutique shops, retail businesses, coffee shops, convenience shops, hardware stores, and restaurants.
• Office parks: best for targeting software and technology companies, law firms, architects, construction companies, insurance companies, and larger corporate offices.
• Commercial zone: best for targeting transport companies, warehouse operators, outlet stores, and manufacturers.
• Co-working spaces: best for targeting small startups, satellite offices, and sole proprietors.

Put your targeted areas down on an interactive map:

You could circle regions on a paper map, if you prefer. But we recommend you use Google’s My Maps service, which is free and fairly hassle-free to create. You can name your own map, search addresses, drop pins, and draw lines to demarcate where you’d like to canvass. You can then share this map with other contributors who can access it on their smartphone. For android devices, they can download the app here and for iPhone devices, they’ll have to access it via Safari.

Delivering those door hangers

Now, where the rubber meets the road, who’s actually driving the car? Somebody will have to hand these things out! You’ll want to arm them with very clear instructions for which neighborhoods, businesses, or areas to cover, and here are some options for finding the person to do it:

• Volunteers. This is by far and wide the best option, as you can reward them with non-monetary benefits, depending on what your business offers, or you can take everyone out to dinner and a few drinks afterwards. It’s practically free, and can be a fun exercise for friends and family.
• Pay your employees to do it: There’s a chance that you have a few people you can spare, but it’ll cost you money as they’re on the clock during this. The upside is that they’ll probably do a great job.
• Outsource: Welcome to the gig economy! There are countless services where you can pay people for odd-jobs, and many of them are mobile phone apps, making it easy to manage. Try looking at TaskRabbit, Agent Anything, or if you’re in no rush, good old fashioned Craigslist.

And with that, your door hangers are on their way! And of course, as with any marketing, a multi-pronged approach is best. Order a postcard campaign to accompany your door-hangers, either preceding or following, with a clear call to action and how they can follow-up!

We’d love to hear how your campaign goes, and if you have any questions give us a call today at 1-800-877-6010 and chat with a local marketing expert!

Need help fitting this into the rest of your marketing?

Opportunity Knocks marketing helps connect you to your best customers, and they have access to data on who you should be marketing to. Shoot them a call at 1-866-319-7109 and put your plan in right away!