According to Statista, U.S. businesses spent $21.23 billion on their marketing efforts in 2019 alone. That is a huge amount and surely not feasible for startups or medium-sized businesses. Especially in times of social media, marketing can seem intimidating.
In this article, we want to help you bring your marketing strategy back to basics with a super effective yet incredibly low-cost option: custom stickers. Yes, you heard right, the little adhesive backed pieces of paper or plastic you might have collected as a child.
Stickers have long been part of the world of advertising but in times of digital marketing, they have become a true secret superpower. We will talk you through the elements you need to create an amazing sticker campaign that not only increases your brand visibility but helps you smash those growth targets.
Marketing happens in the mind
Marketing efforts can surely be measured in spreadsheets and numbers. However, at its most effective, marketing unfolds in the customer’s mind. Purchase decisions happen subconsciously and are dictated by a gut feeling. When an individual makes such a purchase decision within your sector, your brand name needs to be the first thing that comes to mind.
With your brand name, a whole host of positive associations customers want to identify with should pop up. How can you influence what customers associate with your brand? It can be difficult to engineer these positive connections, but custom stickers can help.
A sticker should become a symbol for the values and beliefs your brand represents. Through stickers, your customers are not only constantly reminded of that but can actively become a part of your brand story.
True all-rounders
Stickers are not a one-dimensional advertising tool. Instead, you can use them for several applications. Most importantly, stickers are incredibly cost-effective, often costing you only a few pennies per sticker. This almost guarantees a positive return on your investment.
Remember Coca Cola’s ‘Share a Coke with’ campaign? Everyone was on the hunt for their families’ and friends’ names on the bottle. Coca Cola sales increased from 1.7bn serving per day to 1.9bn, all thanks to sticky labels. There is no reason you cannot leverage the same power. Stickers work for most business needs, ranging from packaging to product labelling.
The power of gifts
Stickers are also the perfect add-ons to include with every order or purchase and guaranteed to ignite positive emotions associated with your business. Received under the right circumstances, stickers are not seen as advertising. Instead, they are perceived as a gift.
Handing out gifts is long an established part of marketing. It plays with a psychological concept called the rule of reciprocity. The receiver of the gift feels this subconscious need to return to favor, which can take the shape of a recommendation, a purchase or even a shoutout on social media.
Gift-giving also forges positive associations with your brand. This not only increases the likelihood of a repeat purchase, but also means your customers will actually use your gift as phone or laptop stickers. Through that, you can not only generate extra visibility; more importantly, you can turn your existing customer base into true brand ambassadors.
Generate visibility on- and offline
This shows that stickers can help you expand your reach. As they are so cost-effective, you can use them in addition to the strategies you have in place already. This allows you to feed multiple channels of communication at once.
While stickers are great for offline marketing, and can actually catch your customers off-guard in this less saturated space, using them does not mean you cannot be online. When it comes to online marketing strategies, you can send these stickers out to influencers, and you increase your chances of being seen on- and offline.
Amazing offline strategies include guerilla marketing. Such campaigns center on non-traditional advertising strategies that encourage customers to interact with your brand. You do not need a huge budget to make this happen. Instead, guerrilla marketing depends on energy, creativity and time.
Stickers are an easy way to reap the rewards of such strategies. Through tagging, that means exposing pedestrians within a specific space to your logo or message, you generate offline visibility for your business. We recommend using vinyl-based stickers to achieve that. Maybe even a great transparent sticker to apply to windows?
If you keep an eye on all these elements, there will be nothing in the way of you and a successful sticker making campaign. We hope we could show you how versatile stickers are and why exactly they are a great marketing tool. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. Are you already using stickers for your marketing and have additional tips? Then please feel free to share them below.
