Notes for owners · Digital marketing
Hyperlocal advertising for a shop: a radius, a budget and a test
Pamphlets, auto and apartment boards and local social ads compared by how you can tell which one worked, with a simple test a shop owner can run on a small, equal budget.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
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You have printed pamphlets, a building manager has offered a lift panel, an auto driver has offered the hood and a cousin says social ads work for shops. All four routes can bring people in, and you will not know which one did unless each gives the buyer a way to say "this brought me". Test two or three of them in three moves. Draw the radius from your own bills, give each route the same small budget and its own code, and read the codes at the till when the run ends.
Draw the radius from your bills, not an article
Take the last fifty or so bills that carry an address or a phone area, and mark them on a map. Draw the shape that holds most of them. That, not a three-kilometre circle copied from a blog, is your first radius. Our post on planning a hyperlocal advertising campaign treats this step at more length.
If you deliver, draw two shapes: one for people who walk in and one for people you deliver to. Test them separately, since a pamphlet suits the first group and a phone ad the second.
Four routes and how each can be proved
| Route | Reaches | How you can tell it worked | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pamphlet in the radius | Households and passers-by | A coupon strip, or a word to quote at the counter | Wasted in the wrong lanes |
| Apartment notice board or lift panel | Residents of named buildings | A building code such as "Tower B" | Approvals differ for each society |
| Auto hood | Anyone on the route | A phone or WhatsApp number used only there | Hard to say who saw it, so pair with a number |
| Local social ad | People in the mapped area on their phones | A WhatsApp click with a prefilled message | Reach inside a small area can be thin |
If you cannot invent a way to trace a route, leave it out of the test.
Running it
- Pick two or three of the four routes. On a small budget, all four leave each too thin to read.
- Give each the same amount of money and the same offer. If the offers differ, you are comparing offers, not routes.
- Give each its own code: a coupon word on the pamphlet strip, a prefilled WhatsApp text on the social ad, a separate number on the hood.
- Brief the till. Staff ask every new customer "how did you hear about us?" and tick the answer, even when no coupon is shown.
- Run them all at the same time, so a festival or a wet week does not favour one.
- At the end, count bills with each code and divide each route's cost by its count.
How big should the budget be? Small enough that you could lose it without noticing, and large enough that each route can bring a handful of bills. If one route's share is so thin that it may bring none, widen the radius or run the test for longer rather than raise the spend.
Compare cost per bill. Never compare the number of coupons handed in, because a cheap pamphlet printed in thousands will always look busy.
Gurugram: the count that said nothing, then something
This is an invented example. A pet supplies shop sits near the Sector 56 apartments in Gurugram. The owner wants dog and cat owners in the nearby towers to think of the shop for food, treats and litter, prints pamphlets, drops them across the lanes, books a notice board in two towers and puts a small ad on social media for the map area.
At the first count the pamphlets look busy, because a tenant mentions one every other day. But the till tick shows most visitors carried no coupon, and nobody can say which route brought them. The owner's judgement is a guess.
In the second round the owner fixes the tracing. The pamphlet strip says "bring this for a free sample of treats". The tower boards carry the tower name as the code word for the same offer. The social ad opens a WhatsApp message that already reads "Sector 56 offer". Now the count is clean, and the pattern is plain. Each route has ₹3,000 behind it, and every figure below is invented.
| Route | What the till showed | Cost per bill | Average bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tower boards | 6 bills | ₹500 | ₹900 |
| Pamphlets | 15 bills | ₹200 | ₹300 |
| Social ad | 4 bills, plus enquiries mostly about home delivery of heavy food bags | ₹750 | ₹600 |
By cost per bill alone the pamphlets win. Set against the size of the bill, the tower boards bring back more rupees for the same spend.
Most of the next round goes behind the tower boards, with a small pamphlet run for lanes with no apartments. The delivery enquiries become a question of whether the shop wants to deliver, which is a separate decision. The test was not free of snags: the second round cost the owner a week of till-side tallying, and six bills is too few to be sure.
Where the test will mislead you
A short run cannot judge routes that work by repetition, such as an auto hood or a standing board. It cannot judge a brand-new shop either, where every route looks good because nobody knew you. And it only counts people who respond to an offer: it will not show the quiet buyer who saw your board for weeks and then walked in without mentioning it. If most new customers tell you "I walked past", your real advertisement is the signboard, and the first test belongs there.
Also keep the offer honest. A free sample is a cost, so count it in the route's cost, or the cheap routes will look cheaper than they are.
After the count, three decisions
Decide which route you drop, which you keep at the same level and which you expand, and write the numbers on one sheet so that next season starts from evidence. This week, draw the radius from your last fifty bills. For the wider picture of shop marketing, the retail and shops hub is the place to look, and hyperlocal advertising is the service if you want the first round designed for your lanes. Tell us what you need.
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