How Bad is Leaflet Dumping for Your Business?
Leaflet distribution can be a great promotional tool for your business if you can use it strategically. Experienced leaflet distributors are there to manage your campaign so that it delivers the desired results within your budget. However, one major thing that can affect your distribution endeavors is dumping, which is increasingly becoming a great issue for businesses that outsource distribution of their promotional materials. So, you must be very careful in hiring the distribution company. But before that, just check out how dumping can harm your business.
Wasted investment
When you are hiring a company for printing and distributing your leaflets, you are paying for every single leaflet. So, just imagine your loss if the leaflets are unscrupulously dumped in woodlands, bins and other areas that are lying unused! And not just financial loss, your marketing campaign also becomes less effective through dumping, making you lose out on potential customers, which again means potential loss of sales volume.
Lost business reputation
Dumped flyers can considerably ruin your business reputation. If the local residents or other businesses, out of which many might be your prospects, see your leaflets or flyers, lying here and there, they would definitely doubt about the integrity of your business. Nobody will know that it is the leaflet distributors you have hired who have done this unscrupulous job. Everybody would consider you to be responsible for this kind of dumping. This is so serious a matter that even a loyal customer might stop doing business with you and opt for a competitor of yours.
Loss of time in reputation management
You can really consider yourself lucky if cases of dumped leaflets are reported to you at the proper time. In such a case you have the opportunity to clean up the dumped materials and build your reputation, although some time will still be lost in clearing the mess and getting back your lost reputation. Often, tracking down the exact places where your leaflets have been dumped can be quite difficult; nobody knows whether the place reported to you is the only one used for dumping or there are other places too.
Being a victim of legal action
Yes, dumped leaflets can unnecessarily make your company a victim of legal action taken by the local councils. It is in fact illegal to dump any kind of business material, and local councils are increasingly taking steps to penalize people who are responsible for such acts. However, the council will not blame the distributors whom you have hired because the leaflets carry your brand mark, and therefore your company would be considered directly responsible.
In order to protect yourself from the menace of leaflet dumping, you must select a leaflet distribution company that has a good reputation and offers you proof of delivery. Choose a company that uses the GPS mechanism to track the distributors and shares the entire report with you. In this way, you can be confident that your leaflets or other promotional materials have actually reached the desired places.