Custom Flyers vs. Digital Ads: What Works Better for Your Business?

Stuck between choosing custom flyers vs. digital ads for business needs? Sure, your worry ends here. Both can work for successful marketing efforts and have their place.

But depending on your business type, goals and marketing efforts, one can give you better return on investment (ROI) than other.

In this blog post, we are going to breakdown major differences between both so you could easily choose the best decision.

Custom Flyers vs. Digital Ads

Custom flyers are like printable marketing advertisements used to promote product, service, event or any other business. They are normally distributed by hand, inserted in newspapers, or forwarded directly to potential customers.

On contrary, digital ads are opposite of flyers. Digital ads feature paid content posted on social media platforms, SERPs, websites and mobile apps. Some popular formats of digital content are Facebook ads, Google ads and banner ads.

Custom flyers are most effective for:

• Local store promotions
• Grand openings
• Sales events
• Community-based marketing

Digital ads are suitable for:

• Building brand awareness
• Driving traffic to websites or online stores
• Retargeting users who’ve interacted with your brand

Pros & Cons of Custom Flyers

Pros

• People hold flyers which can make a stronger brand impression than simple digital ad.
• Custom flyer features high local impact like attracting foot traffic to your physical shop or event.
• Freedom of managing designs, layout and messaging easily.

Cons

• Limited reach to a local & small audience.
• Designing, printing and distribution can be costly.
• It’s difficult to know how well your flyers are performing unless you add something unique.

Pros & Cons of Digital Ads

Pros

• Easily get targeted reach by doing analysis about who sees your ad by location, age, interests, and behavior.
• Scalable budget. You could easily set your own budget. There is no hard & fast rule to set fixed budget.
• Get instant feedback through clicks, conversions, impressions, and ROI tracking.

Cons

• You may face ad fatigue issues. This happens when users have seen your ads several times.
• To run effective campaigns for your brand, you should have an idea what to do.
• Huge dependency on algorithms and it heavily impacts how your ads perform.

Head-to-Head Comparison in the Form of Table

Feature	Custom Flyers	Digital Ads
Cost	High upfront cost	Flexible budget, pay-as-you-go
Reach	Limited to local audience	Global or hyper-targeted
Measurability	Hard to track	Easy to measure with analytics
Personalization	High through design	High through targeting
Speed & Flexibility	Slow to change once printed	Fast to modify or test
Brand Impact	Memorable and tactile	Visual, interactive, scalable

Which One Works Better & When?

It all depends on your brand’s specific needs, goals and budget. Local businesses like gyms, salons and restaurants opt. for custom flyers. Digital ads are better for service providers or online stores.

You can go with both for event promotions. The last one are B2B businesses that could also get benefit from both, digital flyers for online marketing & flyers for targeting foot traffic.

Final Thoughts!

It’s quite difficult to give one a competitive advantage over other when choosing between custom flyers vs. digital ads. Each choice has its own strengths and the right choice totally depends on your business goals, budget and marketing strategies.

For many small businesses, our final recommendation is to use flyers for boosting local visibility while running digital ads to expand your reach and track performance. If you want to go for custom flyers, do not hesitate to contact us at inquiry@kolaxoprint.pk or social media channels.