Marketing Flyers

One day, a loan officer asked me to assist in the creation of a marketing flyer. We talked for a little about the product that was to be marketed and I set about creating a marketing flyer. Before too long, I had a flyer ready. Not long after that, I had every loan officer wanting flyers to take on their personal marketing trips.

A typical flyer. I tried to avoid a generic look but because they were generally single use flyers, the development cost had to be kept low. (click to enlarge)

For a sales person keeping in touch with referral contacts, they didn't really need Madison Avenue quality. As long as a flyer looked decent and conveyed their message, they were happy.

More than anything else, the flyer gave them something to be holding as they walked into a contacts office. Having something to "give away", even if it is just a piece of paper can help calm the nerves of a sales person.

Once the referral source; realtor, builder, etc accepted, the flyer, the loan officer then had something to talk about, On and on this went as the loan officer either maintained presence of mind with existing referral contacts, or cultivated new referral contacts.

Tools

Because costs had to be kept low, tools and materials needed to be inexpensive. The basic tool I used was GIMP, an open source image manipulation program similar to Photoshop only without the price.

Images were usually obtained from search engine images pages, or taken by myself. Sometimes, a loan officer would provide images. Graphics for the flyers were typically created by myself.

We had a large Sharp color laser scanner/printer/copier which did a good job with paper sizes up to 12" x 18". Per service contract, color copies were about 8 cents per page regardless of page size. So, Rather than using 8.5" x 11" paper at 8 cent per page, I used 11" x 17" paper and cut it in half.

Flyer promoting FHA property rehabilitation loans. (click to enlarge)

For 50 flyers which was the typical quantity requested, the print cost was ((8 cents x 50 copies)/2 pages per sheet) = $2.00. Paper cost was a few pennies per page and it took about a day to create a flyer.

Because I had other things to do, I just couldn't continue to drop everything I was doing in order to create a flyer so, I had to begin the process of training the loan officers about how to create flyers for themselves.

The easiest way I found to approach the training was to create basic Powerpoint templates and teach them how to customize them. Training takes time and patience on the part of the trainor and trainee. Over time, some of the loan officers became proficient enough with the Powerpoint templates that I only had to assist occationally.

I had hoped to get one or more loan officers to a point where they could use an image manipulation program but such was not in the cards. Powerpoint was as far as we got. Never-the-less, the time spent training the loan officers paid off to the company in the form of giving the loan officers the self confidence to create their own marketing material.