Printing! Cold, hard cash going towards cold, hard posters and flyers. Also known as marketing materials or collateral, these are the bits of paper, big and little, that can be used to advertise your show. There’s many different ways to get the word out, and as humans sometimes we just love to get a little thing to put on the fridge, glance at in cafe, or put in our coat pocket only to find it again, next Fringe.

Below are some FAQs and tips on how to use your marketing material and some excellent printing company recommendations.

Printing FAQs

They’re asking what GSM I want? What’s a GSM?

Paper weight or GSM stands for 'grams per square metre' and refers to the weight of the paper. The weight of the paper can give your posters, flyers, business cards and other items a more expensive, or more light ‘throwaway’ feel. 120gsm is a good in between ground if you’re not sure!

Matte or Glossy?

Same answer! It’s up to you and what you want the feel of your flyers to be - a lot of printing places charge more or less for matte or glossy, so it’s also up to your price point, both are good!

How many flyers do I print?

The answer to this is another question - how many would you expect to make it into the hands of your audience? Flyers, unfortunately, despite mammoth leaps in modern technology, do not hand out themselves. Also, flyers have become a reduced medium for marketing your show - the recommended number of flyers to print has dropped over the years with social media advertising rising as a way to reach your audience. Flyers also are littering!

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The City of Melbourne waste plan dictates the all printed collateral in Melbourne Fringe (posters and flyers) must have “Do Not Litter” in at least size 10 font printed on the material.

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Be realistic about how many you would have to give out, to avoid unnecessary waste. to print double to triple what your capacity is for your entire season. If you have 5 shows in a 50 seater, that’s 250 seats, so 500 - 750 flyers. However, for your show, if that feels conservative, get more. If it feels like a lot, get less. It’s really up to you and how you would want to distribute those flyers.

Where do I put them?

If you want more advice on where to distribute flyers, check out Step 4: Collateral Types in our Putting a Marketing Plan Together resource. Some examples would be

• Street flyering - with the right pitch, hand-to-hand flyering can convert audiences. It also depends on the culture of the festival - Edinburgh Fringe has a strong flyering culture! But that also can be time and energy consuming. If you have budget to hire a flyerer, a person that can hand out flyers for you, for an hour or so before your show starts, it can be valuable to pick up last minute spontaneous audience members! If you’re looking for one, you can always post in the Fringemaker’s Facebook Group.
• Identifying businesses that your target market goes to, or that your show speaks to. Cafes, bars and are great, but think outside the box: has your show got a costume? Approach costume shops! Is it about music? Drop flyers in record shops! Just remember to approach business owners with respect and maybe a cheeky offer of discount or free tickets so they can do the work for you when you’re not there and tell customers about your show!
• Using distribution. Distribution is when a company places flyers in venues that they have a pre-existing relationship with. Usually they have worked out the placement of a stand of flyers that they have exclusive access to. A lot of printing places offer distribution as an add-on, which means they will print your materials and then distribute them to their locations.

Printing places in Melbourne

Plakkit