Crafty Lifestyle is our main web site magazine. However, it isn't our only publication. I've created multiple mini-magazines for What's On, Big Whip Round, and community magazine called The Wood and The Green  and I'm currently working on a new magazine called Staycation.

You might start off with your page being within the Crafty Lifestyle eMagazine, promoting your business, product or service. And then, later in the year, you might want to help promote a fund-raiser for a local concern, and moving your 'Page' to the Big Whip Round might suit your particular needs

A digital magazine, designed to promote live acts and the venues they perform in.  I've added an online event calendar and with social media sharing builtin, its a wonderful promotion tool for venues and performers alike.

We use our Postcards to promote activities within our communities, to engagement with our audience.

In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for the purposes of a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” when they have clicked on a Google AdWords ad, Facebook Ad  or similar. 

Landing pages are designed with a single focused objective – known as a Call to Action (CTA)

To fully understand the difference between a landing page, and the other pages on your website, such as your homepage, it’s important to consider the differences between organic search traffic and paid search traffic.

Consider the following diagram, which shows a homepage and a landing page. The orange areas on each diagram represent links on the page. As you can see, the Homepage (on the left) has 43 links, and the landing page (on the right) has only 1

Homepage (left) vs. Landing Page (right)

Having fewer links on your landing page has been proven to increase conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising, as there are fewer available distractions. Which is why expert marketers doing paid advertising always use a dedicated standalone landing page as the destination of their ad traffic.

There are two basic structural types of landing page.

Lead Generation landing pages (sometimes referred to as lead gen or lead capture pages) use a web form as the Call to Action, for the purpose of collecting lead data such as names and email addresses. This is the primary type of landing page used for B2B marketing.
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Click-Through landing pages are typically used for e-commerce and have a simple button as the Call to Action.

The diagrams below show the difference between a lead gen landing page and a click-through landing page.

When it comes to your business, marketing is just shouting about what you do to as many people as you can, but if that is what everyone is doing how do you differentiate your company from other’s and make it heard through the noise?

First you need to know your USP (unique selling proposition), this is what makes your company different from your competitors and then is your USP enough? Most companies don’t give enough time to their marketing activities; they put out as many messages as possible without testing their responses, all marketing works! Some think – No, it’s a case of how do you work the ways of marketing, from leafleting to online social media to newspaper ads, then it’s the time of year, people buy certain products at certain times, it’s better to market when people are buying than when they are not, this is prudent planning to drive traffic to your phones or websites.

Marketing is really and truly forward planning to offer value to customers when your product or service is needed and conveying the message in the best way appropriate.

Now you know what marketing is, but how do you use all the different media that is out there effectively? This is where talking to professionals in each industry is important; Providers who know their service know how best to use it for your business, don’t get caught in a numbers game – It is far better to focus a product or service to a demographic than to blast a message to a random audience. Consider carefully who might be interested in what you are offering and run a test campaign in a particular area or to a specific audience.

Carefully monitor the response and where you achieve a good result run the campaign again with minor modifications. Where you didn’t achieve a good result is probably not a suitable audience for your product but you could try a completely different approach with a completely different theme to see if that changes the outcome.

For example: A computer company promotes that it solves a network problem, customer has downloading issues? A suitable message might be; Computer Running Slow? Or Is your PC Misbehaving? A builders workmanship covers; roofs, walls, guttering, groundwork, fences, if house owners experience leaky roofs in winter, focus your headline on this problem i.e. Local Builder Can Fix your Leaky Roof!

The more client orientated or focused your message is to the product or service, the better the response will be, but you have to test what will work! With the internet being as it is, this makes it easier to test and build messages that matter, and then use offline messages to hit a broader audience or a more relevant market for your product or services.

Club Maximus are specialist offline marketers, with knowledge and expertise to help you target and make better messages. We want to put your name in every house in your targeted area, your front page advert on every doormat. If your catchment area is local or covers a wider region we can help you to get the clients you need. Whether your budget is large or small we can provide result that will give you a worthwhile return on your investment.

Club Maximus offer a free consultation to get your business marketed and understands your marketing needs. Leafleting can be used in so many ways from targeting to brand building, leafleting can be a cost effective sales tool for your business. Why help promote someone else’s business in a shared media when you can have your winning headline on a leaflet on every doormat.
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Give us a call today and give your business the front page targeting it deserves!

I admit it, I know very little about Event Marketing. But you know what, I'm a creative soul, so I'll learn as I go. I'll make mistakes, for sure! I'll learn from those mistakes and as sure as eggs is eggs, I'll create something worth your time.

But it isn’t just about putting leaflets through letterboxes, much more goes into a successful campaign than simply putting colourful pieces of paper onto doormats.

At Club Maximus we provide an honest, reliable, professional and unique service. We have the knowledge and ideas to ensure that your leaflet distribution campaign achieves the best response and generates a maximum return on your investment.
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We know each customer is different, so we’ll work together with you to develop a solid strategy and put a plan in place to create a campaign that has the best chance of success for you.

Why Door Drops Work, And Why People Like Them

Many people have been prophesying the end of printing as a medium for delivering sales and promotional messages to customers and potential customers.

The mantra has been, ink and paper is old fashioned, and the electronic age will soon replace it.

Printing as medium for delivering sales information will soon be discarded into the dustbin of history.
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However, what the disciples of the digital age have misunderstood, and those who are involved in the ink on paper method of advertising have discovered, is that people like to be part of the advertising process; and they do not believe they are part of the process just by looking at a message on a screen.

​People want to feel the message

When they are reading advertising messages, many people want to use their hands as well as their eyes. They want something to hold and touch; something tangible.

Tangible means something that can be touched or felt, but it also means something that can be grasped by the mind.

This is how door drop leaflets can reach out to prospective customers and make them feel they are some way part of the advertising process.
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By reading a leaflet while they are holding it means the message will have more impact.​

Door drops are not “Junk Mail”

​Over recent years the direct mailing industry has been subjected to a lot of negative criticism from certain branches of the broadcasting media.

Much of this criticism comes from people whose salaries are paid from tax payers money, and who have little or no knowledge of a how competitive the world of commerce is.

Despite being totally unfair on legitimate businesses the term “Junk Mail” is synonymous with much of the direct mail industry.
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However, this derogatory term has not been directed at door drop leaflets.​

Door drops are not seen as intrusive.

Unlike direct mail shots, door drop leaflets do not carry the householders name and address, and therefore do not seem as intrusive as a direct mail letter.

Many people feel that their privacy has been invaded when they receive a letter with their names on; especially if it is an offer they have no interest in.
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A direct mailing will often come from a company or organisation far away from the person it is addressed to, and therefore gives the impression of being remote and distant.​

Friendly, accessible and trustworthy.

Door drop leaflets come from companies situated in the same locality as the area they are covering, and are thought as local businesses and therefore perceived as part of the community, accessible and trustworthy.

A well targeted door drop will be offering goods and services that the householder is likely to need either now or in the future.

There is always a need for tree surgeons, double glazing, garden maintenance and many more products and services.

People like this and it is why they keep door drop leaflets for over a month.
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And this is why door drop leaflets are the best way for a business to reach its local market.

Over 40 million people around the world have already used Weebly’s website builder and advanced eCommerce tools to create the perfect site.

The freedom to build what you want, the way you want. Our esponsive, professional website theme let you create a website that looks amazing on any device. A complete set of advanced design features make sure your site stands out, no design experience required.

Easy to use online slideshow maker and photo gallery

Grow your idea with features beyond the builder.  The App Center brings a wide range of new functionality and services directly to your website, while custom domains and a full suite of SEO tools help your content reach a wide audience.

Flexible drag and drop blog creation lets you build a beautiful blog and focus on your best content.

Powerful design elements make it easy to connect with your readers. Free, dedicated hosting infrastructure ensures that your site loads fast and gives visitors a great experience.

Drag and drop tools makes starting a blog easy

Is your blog a photo journal, video diary, literary review, or maybe all three? With a range of media options and integrations available in your blog dashboard and the app centre you can make it all work with ease.

Create custom forms and manage submission

Customise a form by dragging and dropping new fields (such as text boxes, drop down menus, and check-boxes) into any configuration. Fully customise questions and response types to create the specific form type you need. Control the settings for each field and add different elements to craft a customised contact form experience.

Customise a form by dragging and dropping new fields (such as text boxes, drop down menus, and check-boxes) into any configuration. Fully customise questions and response types to create the specific form type you need. Control the settings for each field and add different elements to craft a customised contact form experience.

Multiple video hosting options, powerful online business features and a dedicated dashboard for site stats gives you all the tools you need to track success and bring your vision to life.

Embed or host videos directly on your website.

Easily embed videos from YouTube and other video sharing sites onto your real estate. Adjust spacing and presentation elements on your live site with simple video embed tool, or utilise the YouTube feature for more advanced and fluid use of YouTube videos. Our video player options give you expert control over your website's media elements. You can also embed videos from other services like Vimeo.

You can also upload video files directly to Weebly. Direct uploads will automatically convert for playback straight from your Weebly website. Visitors won't have to download any files or open a separate media player to view your video. You can host the content through Weebly and serve up high-quality media confidently to your visitors.

The quest for lead generation is a simple fact of marketing life. Companies require personal data to fill their sales funnels and maintain momentum, and the data that they seek varies from the simple to the extreme.
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Informational requirements vary greatly depending on the campaign and the product or service being sold. But more than anything it’s influenced by the need (or greed) of the departments in your company.

Landing Page form threshold is the minimum agreed upon set of information requirements that still produce an acceptable conversion rate.

The design of a lead-gen form on a landing page always starts in the same place (simplicity), and grows according to the same law of information desire.

The following fictional dialog may sound familiar:

We’ve all been in those meetings right? And you typically have to defend your stance of minimalist design for the sake of user experience, or you have to put your foot down to get that all important extra field added to benefit your team and your work goals.

* These fields are totally not required dude…

Different people will have different opinions here. The User Experience expert will fight hard for the minimalist form and the sales manager will fight for more information and rightly so. But sometimes those extra form fields are perfectly valid. So how do you decide which one to go with?
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It’s all about balance. Your goal here is to balance conversions with the quality/quantity of the information gathered.

If you want to create the best possible lead-gen landing page form, then follow these 3 steps to remove the subjective debate from your decision making and company meetings.

Step 1 – Prioritise the form fields
OK, so now you have 7 fields instead of 2. Vote collectively on how important they are and assign a prioritised order to each “extraneous” field. You will now create 6 variations of your lead gen form: 2 fields, 3 fields, 4 fields, 5 fields, 6 fields and 7 fields, using your priority scale to dictate which field gets added to your primary form to create each extra variation.

Step 2 – Set up an A|B|C|D|E|F split test
So you have 6 forms, magically inserted into your overly complex testing tool (such as Google Website Optimiser) and you’re ready to go. At this point everyone from the original meeting is now sweating bullets, worried that it’ll be their extra form field that makes the conversion rate plummet. Now we get to sit back and watch the numbers to see how the conversion rate changes according to form length.

Step 3 – Analyse the results and choose a winner based on real data
Now comes the fun (or embarrassing) part. You have your manila-folder full of reports and you’re sitting round the boardroom table ready to present. The shortest form comes back with a higher conversion rate as expected, progressing downward to the longest form. One surprise exception is that adding the “how did you hear about us?” had no discernible effect on conversion, so it might be worth adding that into the best performing short form and re-testing.

Now you have to look at the conversion numbers and agree on a threshold of acceptable conversion. Once you have this, you can argue back and forth about how much conversion % you are willing to sacrifice to introduce the most important extra fields.

At the end of this process you will know 2 things:

1. Which form has the best conversion rate.
   
   
2. Which form produces the perfect blend of conversion and information capture.
   
   

So go out there and design and test your way to the perfect lead gen landing page form.

Happy lead capturing…

​An e-Article is like a blog post, only, one that can be downloaded, read at leisure and shared via social media sites.

An e-Article is a PDF, and can run to several pages long, include embedded Call to Action buttons, encouraging reader engagement without all the distractions associated with blog posts.

A6 and A5 Postcards: designed, printed and delivered. 

A4 and A5 leaflets, designed, printed and delivered.

Quarterly, full CYMK colour, 16 page, hand delivered

Crafty Lifestyle Magazine : Big Whip Round : Club Maximus : What's On

There is and has been for many years a Mail Preference Scheme (MPS) which makes it easy for individuals to get their names taken off mailing lists and thereby stop addressed letters they don’t want. This scheme is enforceable by law.

​A similar scheme to be called the “Door Drop Preference Service” (DPS), managed by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) would have been an upgrade of the currently existing “Your Choice” scheme which merely asks DMA members not to deliver unaddressed mail to properties on that list. The Your Choice scheme is not legally binding but DMA members have the moral responsibility to adhere to “Your Choice” householders wishes. The proposed Door Drop Preference service would have been binding on its members but not enforceable by law.

Without going into too much detail of the scheme, the basics of Government/DMA discussions were as follows.

The DMA would convince their members to join the (DPS) scheme, but only if the government could convince those direct marketing/leaflet distribution companies who were not members of the DMA also to agree to the ban. The DMA also wanted to create a new scheme (in tandem) whereby leaflets in magazines (on newsagents shelves, and delivered by subscription), were also limited. Such a scheme would be extremely difficult to set up and administer.

Not surprisingly the government realised the difficulties, so the scheme has been dropped, or ominously “put on hold”.
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Radio, Television and News media have a vendetta against businesses selling direct through the letterbox and continually try to whisk up a public hatred of letterbox media. The reason being because electronic and news media can’t get their clients anywhere near the return on investment (ROI) that letterbox media can. So their strategy is if you can’t beat it lets get it banned.

Direct mail and leaflet distribution is a legitimate way for companies of all sizes to advertise their goods and services to their customers. It works extremely well.

All of these companies employ people.
If direct mail and leaflet distribution were prohibited, the larger national companies may be able to afford the alternatives of press, TV and radio advertising, but the cost of these methods and the drop in response would surely damage their profitability and could lead to some reduction in operations and possible job losses.

But the loss of leaflet distribution would be disastrous for the small to medium sized businesses who are the main users of leaflet distribution.

Without this cost effective method of promoting their businesses could mean many of them would be forced to cease trading, and this would mean more job losses.

The job losses that would be incurred by the companies who use leaflet distribution could run into many thousands.

The knock on effect of a ban
But what about the ancillary industries that depend on the direct selling sector for much of their business.

Printing is one of this country’s largest light industries, and many of those printers rely heavily on the direct selling sector for their business.

With advent of the internet the demand for printing has been in decline. If the leaflet distribution and direct mail work was taken away from them, many printers would be forced to reduce their workforce drastically or close down completely and once again the possibility of thousands of workers thrown on the scrap heap.

The printing industry does not destroy rain forests.

The wood needed for producing paper has to be soft wood. Most of the rain forests are hard wood, suitable for furniture making.
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Paper is also one of the world’s most easily recyclable commodities. It can be used over and over again. It is planet friendly, much more so than the data farms that bring us website and email burning tons of coal at power stations across the planet.

The question that must be asked is why a government, who believe in a free market, and claim to support small business, consider passing a law that would stifle enterprise.

And are the people who clammier for the banning of “junk mail” aware of the consequences if they succeed?
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Are they willing to destroy small enterprises and throw thousands of their countrymen out of work?

Government and electronic media owners need to recognise the importance of paper in the world – it’s a wonderful form of communication, and eBooks should never replace real books.
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Paper the world’s truly wireless communication.

On May 25th, 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into effect and will drastically change the way digital marketing activities are carried out and how data is collected and used.
The great news is that this doesn’t affect leaflet distribution advertising. But first, let’s explain what GDPR is.

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation and it replaces the Data Protection Act.

The GDPR will take effect in May of 2018, that is May of this year and perhaps it would be a good time to remind ourselves if indeed we need reminding, who the act is protecting.

Every time anyone of us makes a purchase online, or uses a service, or pay our taxes, we have to provide a good deal of our personal data. Often, without our knowledge, this information is being captured by organisations and companies we have never consciously contacted. These organisations are then able to track us and use this data.
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The fact they are able to do this without our permission leaves us very vulnerable to cybercrime. Cybercrime can include credit card fraud and identity theft among other online crimes available to the cybercriminal.

The great news is that GDPR doesn’t affect advertising your business with leaflet distribution as leaflet distribution is delivering unaddressed mail meaning you don’t need any personal data to carry out a leaflet drop.

So, rather than viewing GDPR as a restriction, businesses should look upon it as an opportunity to increase their profile with a tried and tested, effective method of marketing products and services.

Businesses that have been using digital marketing to sell their products should be encouraged to use leaflet distribution as an alternative to either re-engage with their existing clients or to sell what they have to offer. 

Why? Because leaflet distribution works!
It is well documented that door drop leaflets remain in the home for an average of 38 days and can be shared and read by several people in the house. This compares well to an e-mail that is only read by one person and can be deleted within seconds, sometimes without even being read.

There are many reasons why you should use leaflet distribution campaigns to promote your business and if you contact us we will be able to advise you on the best way to sell your product or service safe in the knowledge that you won’t be breaking any GDPR rules.

“Should I put one product one side and the other on the reverse?”, “Can my friend advertise their business on the back?”, “I’d like to put all my contact information on the rear” etc.


My usual response is ‘no’. Of course this does depend on what you do, but in many cases it lessens response. We work on the principle that the recipient will initially read your leaflet for 3 seconds. It’s often hard to think of a header which will capture their attention in that time.  Printing on the reverse means that you either have to think of two great headlines or you risk loosing their interest. Putting one product on one side and another on the reverse, e.g kitchens/bathrooms, hair/beauty might mean that they never read one side get to it because they didn’t turn it over.  The same applies for two businesses on either side. You will definitely lessen response.


Another question I get asked is shall I repeat the same design on both sided. For me this is a definite no, no.  You work really hard to engage the viewer, excite them to react and then if they turn over they are confused because you’ve repeated the same message – they might even find it annoying. There’s nothing to gain by doing this.


National businesses, where the brand is well known use double sided because people know what they do and most of their leaflets are offer based. Double sided can also work well if you are a company with a lot of interesting headlines and Unique Selling Points or if you are producing a menu.


Getting leaflet distribution right can be an art and consultancy is always free with our service – even if we don’t print your leaflet!


4 FACTS you must know

• More than 8 out of 10 people in the UK are happy to receive a door drop leaflet if it is on a topic of interest to them.
• Over half of UK adults say door drop leaflets are useful for finding out about local information.
• With the footprints of local free newspapers in decline, door drop leaflets are sometimes the only way for people to hear about this kind of information.
• 89% of UK adults report remembering receiving a door drop communication in the last two weeks.