According to digital marketing experts, Americans are exposed to 4000–10,000 ads every day. As consumers of these ads, we have developed a screening process to ignore most of the advertising messages. There are, however, some ads that we retain, like acknowledging a brand for its creativity in its marketing campaign, ads that offer an emotional connection, or ads that are simply too engaging to ignore.
Make Your Branding Outstanding
In the brand development process, a company or interest group needs to promote its products and services in a way that is captivating & resonates with its target audience. Often small groups, new start-ups & small businesses are on a budget, and they simply cannot afford to find a PR or creative agency that can carry this out for them in a cost-effective way. If you can relate to this problem, one budget-friendly way to promote effectively is through stickers.
Sometimes Easy is Effective
Don’t let the ease of creating and executing a sticker marketing campaign make you complacent. Even in its simplicity, stickers can make you stand out. They also tend to have a longer shelf life than a lot of other marketing materials that you’ll use.
Promotional stickers come in different shapes and sizes and have been used for decades for various promotional purposes. If a company, school, small business, or politicians have short messages or information that needs to increase awareness or influence a mass audience to urge them to perform in a certain way, they use stickers to get their message across. Even the simplest of stickers like ‘I VOTED’ can have a huge impact and lead to change where more & more people are urged to vote. Another amazing thing about the sticker marketing materials is that it can be placed virtually anywhere. It can be on cars, laptops, backpacks, sidewalks, machines & more.
You don’t always have to come up with something new; sometimes it’s good to cherish the ‘old is gold’ stuff. Even though promoting your brand with stickers is nothing new, a sticker marketing campaign is a proven tool to spread your business message. The trick here is to focus on a few simple ideas that you can implement at various stages of your sticker design & marketing process that will help to enhance your success:
A Clear Motive with a Good CTA
Just like with any other campaign, before implementing a sticker campaign you need to decide what you would like it to accomplish. Do you want to increase brand exposure? Distribute a coupon code that people can use to increase sales? Drive people to your meeting or fundraiser? Whatever your goal is, make sure you design your custom sticker to achieve your desired result. In essence, your sticker should have a call to action that will urge people to respond to your campaign in a way that is favorable for your brand.
Be Precise
If you want your sticker campaign to be a winner make sure you keep it precise and to the point. Don’t bother putting in long email addresses or lines which no one will notice. A simple sticker like ‘I VOTED’ houses only two words but is so effective because its readability time is just a second, it is easy to remember, and combined with a logo (usually the American flag) gets across a vital and motivating message. This is exactly what you want your sticker campaign to be like because with so many ads everywhere, the attention span of your audience is not more than a few seconds.
Stick Them Yourself
Placing your stickers in the right place is very important and it will be the ultimate decider on whether your sticker marketing campaign will be a success or not. Just like with any campaign, the placement and positioning of the campaign need to be well thought out. The good thing about stickers is you can control some – if not all – of the locations where your stickers will be found. Taking full advantage of this is key because it’s an excellent way to get the word out about your business.
By placing stickers in locations that you control, such as on the packaging of your products, on volunteers or members, or on recently signed-up or satisfied customers, you are essentially increasing your brand’s visibility amongst the audience of your choice. This is also called claiming your real estate.
Customize Your Stickers
Your sticker design needs to strike a chord with your audience. It needs to be something they relate to or understand immediately. If they don’t connect with your stickers at first look it will be hard to get them to “pass and play” – which is essentially what you want your sticker campaign to do. Though you need to stick them in meaningful places, in a lot of ways, the success of the sticker campaign can be measured by how your audience responds to the sticker design. If they’re excited to stick them on their personal property or pass them along to others, this is a good indicator that the campaign is on its way to be a successful one. Hence it is always a good idea to customize your stickers in a way that will resonate with your audience.
Give Incentive
Giving an incentive to your audience to engage with any marketing campaign might be the oldest trick in the book but it is one that works to this day. Simple incentives like Buy 1-Get 1 Free, Win a Free Dinner/Trip, etc. are great examples of effective incentives for any campaign. Implementing the same messaging for your sticker campaign can potentially reap tremendous rewards. For instance, you can run a contest where people stick your stickers in creative places, take a photo, and send it in. Contests such as these are a fun way to stimulate engagement by driving social media participation.
Final Thoughts
In order to grow you need to start using creative marketing. In the digital era, companies are interested in investing heavily in the online market and usually tend to neglect the traditional marketing strategies that actually work and have a proven success rate. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate your company’s needs and develop campaigns that compliment both the offline and the online consumers. Try to blend in your offline marketing campaign with your online campaign; one such example of this is if you ask your audience to take pictures of your sticker campaign in creative places and share them on their social media channels.
Sticker marketing is ideal regardless of the products, services or the size of your business, organization or group. This cost-effective marketing strategy helps to boost success and is loved by companies around the world as it is one of the easiest ways to reach your audience.
