Design and effective marketing go hand in hand. Whether you’re creating a design for a campaign from scratch or using that of a graphic designer, you should consider your design’s impact on potential customers.
However, knowing how to design the perfect door hanger can be challenging. In this blog post, we’ll explore the importance of good design and share tips and best practices to help you create door hangers that get noticed and drive results. As such, whether you plan on outsourcing a graphic designer or creating your door hanger in-house, this comprehensive guide will provide you with all the details you need to develop and elevate your door hanger design.
What is Door Hanger Marketing?
Door hanger marketing is a strategy that meets your customer without needing to leave their home; it’s simple, cost-effective, and has consistently yielded excellent results for businesses of all sizes. Moreover, door hanger marketing is unique, and in a world where you can find information around every corner, this is a huge bonus. Rather than navigating the busy world of digital advertising, you can speak directly to your customer, getting your message across in a straightforward manner.
Door hanger campaigns are conducted by placing the hangers on the doorknobs of residential or commercial properties. Door hangers typically feature promotional messages, including discounts, offers, or new product announcements, and target people as they enter or leave a building. This form of marketing can be a targeted strategy, as door hangers can be distributed to specific neighborhoods or buildings to reach a particular demographic.
The Importance of Knowing Your Audience
Your target audience should shape your entire marketing strategy; the audience plays a fundamental role in the success of your campaign and the popularity of your product or service. In turn, it is imperative that you have a solid understanding of your desired audience before creating your next door hanger campaign.
There are several ways to determine your target demographic:
- Carry out client interviews
- Identify industry trends and analyze competitors
- Utilize Google and social media analytics
- Create a reader persona to target blog content
- Engage with your current clientele
By understanding your audience and what they care about, you can position your brand and campaign in a way that resonates with them. It gives you the power to create relevant messages and content, resulting in greater trust, an optimized marketing budget, and an increased chance of converting prospects into customers.
Say your business is a local retail store, and you’re looking to attract customers from the local area; a relevant design may include a map with your location highlighted. It may also feature exclusive offers, sales information, or seasonal promotions.
Once you have found your audience and assessed their geography, behaviors, and trends, it’s time to create your custom door hangers.
Custom Door Hanger Sizes
Door hangers come in various sizes, including mini, standard, and jumbo. Each size has pros and cons – for example, jumbo door hangers work well in commercial settings like restaurants, retail stores, and beauty salons, whereas the mini is perfect for short messages such as an invitation or an announcement of a sale.
Consequently, the right door hanger size for you depends on the purpose of your campaign and the audience you plan on targeting. These factors are essential to consider as they both play a role in the success of your door hanger marketing strategy.
Simplicity Is Vital in Door Hangers Design
What’s more, the size of your door hanger significantly influences the design. If you’re using mini door hangers, lean into minimalistic designs and include less information; this avoids clutter and means your door hanger is ultimately more powerful. Opting for jumbo door hangers gives you more space for creativity.
Indeed, in door hanger design, simplicity is fundamental. Whilst there is room to include all necessary details, door hangers are narrower than a full page and have less space than letter-sized paper.
How to Utilize Graphics
Good graphics are a way to grab and hold your audience’s eye immediately. These are the first things your audience will see when viewing your personalized door hangers; henceforth, graphic design is important in this medium. Consistent graphic design can boost a brand’s sales by around 33%!
Whatever you choose to include in your design depends on the context; a landscaping company may use earth tones and images of a well-manicured garden. Contrasting this, a door hanger advertising a luxury fashion store may use monochrome colors and images of the store or the stock.
The images used must be relevant and on brand, but they must also be high quality. Once again, resolution and DPI play a role in the look of your door hangers, and as a result, these elements must be addressed. This issue can be avoided without hassle by avoiding smartphone photos and using professional, sleek images, even if this means using stock photos. Quality exudes professionalism.
This is also the time to include all company logos. When producing your design from scratch, you have the power to create something that truly highlights your brand, and the best way to do this is by ensuring that all logos or identifying factors are at the epicenter of the design.
Why is the Right Color Scheme Important?
Color is the uniting factor between text and images; without a defined color scheme, there will be no cohesion in how the door hangers look. Many editing and design platforms offer a range of set color palettes, which can make choosing the right colors much easier. If your company has set brand colors, these should be used in the design. After all, it would be best if you wanted your marketing to reflect your brand’s identity.
What Font Is Best?
Due to the smaller nature of door hangers, it is vital that your text is a good size, not only because this makes it easier to read but also because smaller text may appear blurred. Whilst this issue can be rectified through a higher print quality, you must consider factors like dots per inch (DPI), which can alter the final look. The higher the DPI, the sharper the image.
Additionally, all fonts used on your door hangers must be clear and easy to read for everyone. Accessibility can no longer fly under the radar or be an afterthought. By making your door hangers accessible and intelligible, you are opening your business up to a broader audience and prioritizing inclusivity, which is only a positive.
Font Suggestions
When looking at your door hanger, it can be assumed that the viewer will be ‘glancing’, meaning they will read one or two words while completing a separate activity like walking or shopping. Glanceable reading often occurs in under 15 seconds and involves quick information intake. As a consequence, you only have a short amount of time to grab your audience’s attention.
A study by the Nielsen Norman Group found that large, wide, and capitalized text outperformed small, narrow, and lowercase text, partly because larger text is more legible. The study uncovered that Lowercase lettering required 26% more time for accurate reading than uppercase, and condensed text required 11.2% more time than regular.
No matter what design platform you’re using, many fonts fit these criteria, including the classics like Arial, Times New Roman, Bodoni, and Helvetica – the world’s most popular font. These examples are readable and clear whilst remaining aesthetically pleasing.
Good Copy is Key
When it comes to copy, it can be tempting to overload the door hanger with information; after all, you want your prospective client to understand your product completely.
In all actuality, this can be detrimental to your campaign. You want to make sure your audience is engaged. Too many words can be verbose, unnecessary, and hard to read.
Copy should be catchy, short, and concise, with a focus on being memorable. The customer should be able to discern your business and your offering within a few words; in essence, your custom door hangers only need to cover the key points.
These key points may include the following:
- The business name
- The company’s opening and closing times
- Contact information
- A number of the company’s services
- A call to action
For instance, copy for a real estate agency may read as follows:
Attention Homeowners: Sell Your Home Hassle-Free with [company name]!
Our experienced team is committed to providing a premium service to make selling your home quick and easy. From setting a price to negotiating offers, we’ll be with you every step of the way.
Don’t wait any longer to sell your home! Contact [company name] now and let us help you achieve your real estate goals.
What is a Call to Action (CTA)?
A call to action is a term to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate action from the reader – e.g. “book now” or “join us today” – can capture your client’s attention as it invokes a sense of urgency bolstered through the inclusion of special offers or sales. Your call to action has to be bold, bright, and eye-catching, and it must stand out from the surrounding copy.
There are several kinds of CTA:
- Direct and Specific CTAs: A clear and direct CTA will be more effective than a vague one. For instance, you should use ‘visit our store’ or ‘call us now.’ It lets the client know what they’re involved in and creates a sense of familiarity.
- Urgency-based CTAs: This form of CTA is anchored in using words to get people to act quickly. Creating a sense of urgency prompts people to act sooner as they don’t want to miss out on a good deal – think ‘limited time offer’ or ‘act now.’ The fear of missing out (FOMO) is an important and often underrated tool when it comes to client acquisition
- Benefit-oriented CTAs: By highlighting the benefits of taking action, you can motivate people to act, e.g. ‘save 15% on your first order.’
- Personalized CTAs: Establishing a connection with the viewer by using pronouns such as ‘you’ and ‘your’ creates a sense of personal connection, which as a result, encourages people to interact with your brand.
- Proof-based CTAs: Social proof – which covers reviews and testimonials – is an effective way to both highlight your business and encourage people to take action. Adding phrases like ‘join thousands of satisfied customers’ is an easy way to leverage social proof and increase conversion rates.
The best CTA for your campaign depends on the context: who is your audience? What are you advertising? What actions do you want people to take? Their power should not be underestimated – a relevant CTA can increase revenue by up to 83%!
Effective Measurement Options
When designing your door hangers, it’s necessary to include a way to measure their success, as this feedback can help you improve and optimize future campaigns.
One such example is that of a QR code. Marketers are increasingly turning to QR codes to track site visits because of their simplicity, popularity, and ease of use. It has become apparent that consumers are big fans of QR codes – according to Statista, in 2021, 75.8 million smartphone users in the United States scanned a QR code on their mobile devices, up by 15.3 percent compared to 2020. This number is expected to increase to approximately 99.5 million users by 2025.
Coupon codes are a fantastic way to measure success as they highlight the conversion rate through the number of times they’re used. Data shows that around 45.3 million adult Americans used coupon codes for shopping in 2021, showing a 21.29% rise from 2015.
Including one of these options within your design can help you track key metrics, including response and conversion rates, reach, and cost-effectiveness. Without these important figures, tracking the efficacy of your campaign can be incredibly difficult.
Let’s Recap: Design Best Practices
Designing an effective door hanger campaign involves far more than just selecting a few flashy images. If you want true success for your strategy, you must consider the following:
- The Audience: Your target audience plays an important role in the design – your door hanger must be created in a way that appeals to the target market.
- The Message: The message must be concise and easy to understand; you have limited space, so make every word count.
- Eye-catching Visuals: The graphics need to catch your audience’s eye. Use high-quality images and graphics to make your door hanger aesthetically pleasing.
- Brand Consistency: Your door hanger should represent your company, and therefore, it should be consistent with the branding of the business and your other marketing materials.
- CTAs: Include a CTA – it can encourage the viewer to take immediate action. This could include a phone number to call, a website link, or a coupon code.
- Printing: The quality of the printing can have a momentous impact on the overall look and feel of the door hanger. Make sure that the printing is of high quality, as this makes the door hanger look professional.
- Distribution: How do you plan to measure the success of your campaign? You could use website visits, QR codes, or discount usage to track how your door hangers impact your customers.
Conclusion
When done well, door hanger marketing can be a great way to onboard new customers, even during this era of digitalization. Door hangers are an affordable way of meeting your customer on their turf without the intrusiveness and persistence of digital advertising.
Subsequently, color, font, copy, size, and images are all critical in equal measure. If even one of these elements lacks quality, it can negatively impact the entire door hanger advertising campaign – and no one wants to lose potential clients. For that reason, you must prioritize design and ensure that your creation is as good as possible.
Next steps
Like all offline marketing campaigns, door hanger marketing is a serious investment. Of course, your ideas are valuable, and the design is important, but so is distribution. Reaching your customers should be straightforward.
So, why not work with an experienced team to get your campaign off the ground? Contact our team for free and discover how Oppizi can help you scale your business!
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