Digital marketing has made business promotions instantaneous.
However, direct marketing with traditional approaches, like promotional stickers, still hold an emotional value that is sorely absent from digital advertising campaigns.
In fact, a neuromarketing study conducted by Canada Post has established that direct physical marketing requires 21% less thinking to understand and they have a higher brand recall value. In essence, direct marketing is purely more persuasive.
Moreover, according to the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi, direct marketing with custom stickers is the most effective non-traditional marketing trend right now.
5 Tips for successful marketing with custom stickers
Stickers take the advantage of micro-moment marketing.
The entire focus is on creating immediate interest and increasing the chances of word-of-mouth marketing.
The trend is targeted more towards the Gen Z generation who are going to be more susceptible to actively consuming stickers as fun gifts. They sport them on their phone cases, water bottles and bags almost like a badge of honor. In the process, they continue to promote your brand incessantly.
The effort you invest in design and placement of your stickers can increase the power of the brand positioning while giving your brand more recall potential with a wide range of audiences.
Unlike digital marketing, custom stickers can directly reach your audiences physically and continue to be more visible to cross sections of your customer base.
However, if you think this is the only advantage of adopting a custom stickers marketing strategy, you cannot be more wrong. In fact, the idea has quite a list of merits.
Here we have curated a list of five tips on using stickers in more innovative ways for maximum marketing returns on your investments.
1. Make the graphics stand out in your stickers
If you intend for the customer to pick out your stickers out of the many options in the bunch, focus on improving your sticker graphics.
Customers will most obviously be attracted to more visually appealing products. The sticker design is critical in adding this element of visual component.
Think of the information that you want to convey through your design. The company logo and brand colors have to be displayed for maximum visibility. The prospective consumers will also influence the pallet for the design.
This means that if you are targeting teens and young adult women as a cosmetic brand, your palette cannot comprise corporate office colors. The most common themes that will find purchase in this sector will have a brighter color palette and themes of girl power, makeup illustrations and popular girl anime memes.
Die-cut stickers with potentially empowering quotes for women will be sought out more and shared often by your target audience.
If you stick to this strategy, you will see significant growth in your marketing ROI as compared to choosing an off topic, theme or colors that fail to attract the audience as a group.
2. Stick to simple ideas
When planning a theme or content idea, always keep the limitations of your product in mind. A sticker is relatively small and it has a few moments to grab customer attention.
If you intend to have your entire brand story reflected in the sticker, you are off the right track.
Confusing ideas will fail to come across within the first few seconds of impact, which is the only time that stickers have to catch audience attention. You will lose your customers’ attention to your competitors if you do not adjust your strategy.
Instead, streamline your vision towards simpler ideas that can be conveyed at first glance. Use colors and creativity to bring attention to the idea. The overall quality of the sticker will be the final stroke to retain customer attention.
Simple sticker campaigns have a much higher chance of going viral.
A great idea is to build stickers around an ongoing pop trend in your niche. This will help leverage the popularity of the trend through the micro-moment marketing potential of the stickers. The effect will be immediate and profitable.
3. Shift to soft-selling
A focus study on media usage has revealed that on average, adults are exposed to over 5 thousand advertisements per day.
Imagine trying to make an impact in this sea of marketing contenders. Most often marketers make the mistake that hard selling is the only way to elbow your competition out of the way. However, this might actually harm your marketing campaigns more than ever.
Customers are quite market perceptive these days. They are likely to block out the bulk of the advertisement chatter every day.
In your face, marketing and hard selling content like “Free, Free, Free!” or “Buy Now!” will be treated as spam at first sight.
As content marketing is evolving, creativity will always find a soft corner in the audience’s heart. Soft selling focuses the marketing strategy on the audience emotion. That is the major difference for its success.
Use creative quotes, funny memes and meaningful messages to carry your sticker marketing. That will add to your brand value. Most importantly, your audience is more likely to value a sticker that conveys a positive intent or a significant attitude that distinguishes their personality.
Subtle and poignant sticker content will be much more effective as a campaign.
4. Use custom stickers strategically
Once you have a clear idea of the content and design driving your stickers, you have to shift focus to your distribution strategy.
Custom stickers help engage your brand value amongst customers. The very impression that custom stickers evoke is of brand loyalty. If your current customer chooses to display your custom sticker, it is tantamount to a physical approval of your brand. Prospective customers are going to subconsciously react to this intent.
While custom stickers are a great personal endorsement, you have to first invest in creating the hype around the stickers to make it worth it for your customers.
Start by propagating the stickers for multiple product use. Make sure your brand sticker is on all your products to personalize the feeling for your audience.
Use your customs tickers on product packaging to make an impact right from the first contact with your customers. You can also use brand stickers as souvenir seals on packages, envelopes and gift boxes from your brand.
Throw in some cool quotes stickers with every product that you ship out so that they become a part of the customer delight experience. You can also create special stickers for privileged customers or part of a reward protocol.
Ensure that your brand logo is prominently displayed on such stickers to retain audience attention and increase your brand value simultaneously.
5. Think out of the box
Ultimately, stickers are a nontraditional marketing move, so it is only natural that at some point you have to think in nontraditional ways to make a serious impact on your audience.
This can be challenging but if you apply yourself to innovative thinking, you can generate more viral interest around your brand stickers. That is the gold standard for any marketing campaign.
For instance, imagine the planning phase of an ecommerce website launch that centers on a catchy slogan or tagline. You will be using this tagline in almost all marketing collaterals and display ads. However, nothing can compare to the most popular vehicle for slogan marketing as stickers.
You can incorporate a custom sticker campaign as your pre-launch marketing campaign to generate more buzz around the brand even before it has been launched.
However, how can you apply creativity to this idea to amplify the results? Since the content on all stickers are going to be focused on the tagline, you have to depend on design ideas to carry your marketing interest.
You can focus on custom shapes to increase the design impact of your stickers. Make it a point of interest for your audiences to invest in collecting more crazy-shaped stickers for their collection.
You can also talk about converting your business card into a custom sticker. Think about it!
Add custom stickers to every package that is shipped from your ecommerce venture. Only it is not just a sticker but also a business card with all of your brand information, rewards for collecting the stickers and a QR code that can redirect your audience to the latest brand initiatives or a mobile app to continue shopping.
This will just ensure that you are capturing the attention of your audience coming and going through the marketing funnel.
Conclusion
A sticker camping might be leveraging the momentary attention from audiences, but once a sticker is placed with your customer, it is not an advertisement anymore.
As your customer sports your brand stickers, it becomes a personal endorsement, which will invoke similar loyalty amongst your prospective customers.
The trick is to apply data-driven insights and a concrete strategy to fuel the sticker campaigns.
Probably, the most glaring mistake that most brands make is to trivialize the stickers and thus put minimal thought in the campaign.
If you understand the power of this tool for your branding strategy, you will find it much easier to adapt and control the marketing results from your stickers.
About the Author: Atreyee Chowdhury (LinkedIn) works full-time as a Content Manager with a Fortune 1 retail giant. She is passionate about helping small and medium business owners and agencies achieve their content marketing goals with thoughtfully crafted SEO content. Be it long form articles and blog posts or website copywriting, email sequences or press releases, she has worked on every kind of format. She loves to read, travel, and experiment with different cuisines in her free time.