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Marketing is the backbone of any business venture. Your marketing strategy and its execution alone can make or break your business regardless of how good the product itself is. It is the marketing that communicates your message to the customer, convinces them to buy your product and helps in building your brand. For this reason, most businesses allocate a huge chunk of their budgets to marketing. Entrepreneurs usually believe that a great and useful marketing campaign demands the considerable budget and not everyone can afford it.
Interestingly, fancy brand activation kiosks and graphically advanced prime time advertisements on television at times fail to provide you the brand recognition that a simple, low-cost method can pull off smoothly. Gone are the days when the audience was attracted by fancy advertisements and celebrity brand ambassadors enough to believe in a brand. The 21st-century consumer is more aware and educated with greater tech exposure and therefore brands need to focus on more content driven messages if they want to communicate their message to a larger audience.
Therefore, you should not ignore the power of any marketing tool just because it does not appear to be fancy and expensive. One of the most powerful marketing tools of all times, yet the most underrated ones are custom stickers. Remember those branded stickers beyond car bumpers that were considered cool back in the 90s. These stickers play a huge role in triggering brand visibility, to a great extent. Here are some key reasons why you should not ignore the power of labels for your brand.
They Are No More Restricted to Car Bumpers
Back in the 90s when human life was a bit simpler, just sporting a brand’s sticker at the back of a car gave made an enormous contribution to a brand’s recognition. Every person who spotted a vehicle carrying a label on the move retained the brain in their memory. If a sure sticker was witty or trendy, everyone wanted to have it on their cars. Multiply the impact that labels can have today when the placement is not limited to car bumpers. Kids and young adults carrying laptops, backpacks, cell phones, and iPods can sport these stickers on their gadgets. These stickers attract attention and increase your brand’s visibility and recognition.
The Power of Endorsement
There is no doubt that word-of-mouth and personal endorsements are one of the most potent marketing tools for any brand. Studies have proved that customers own reviews, endorsements, and word-of-mouth, more than any other advertisement. It is a general consumer psychology that people tend to trust references and reviews from first-hand experiences more than they believe in the branded advertisements.
When anyone carries your brand’s stickers on their car or laptop, they are giving out a message that they have used your product or service personally or they believe in your idea or message. This is a form of strong endorsement for your brand. This adds more weight and reliability to your brand, and more people will be willing to try it.
Easy and Practical
The best thing about stickers is that they are not only very cost effective, but their small size makes it very easy to use and distribute these stickers. You can use them as a standalone giveaway and can be an excellent tool to communicate brand affiliation and strategic partnerships. They can be put up anywhere and anytime. If you can get creative and smart with the placement of your labels, then it can help in strengthening your marketing campaign and draw more attention to your brand. You can place these custom stickers on other company branded promotional items and packaging materials. This will not only create an instant impression if the placement and content of stickers is smart and visually creative, but will also help to bring down the marketing and packaging costs.
Alternate to Social Media
No brand today can deny the strong ripple effect that social media creates on brand recognition. Facebook users sharing and tagging branded memes, posts and other content provides an unparalleled exposure to any brand. This is why all brands today focus on content generation as people today focus on the quality of content and not a heavily branded message. Unfortunately, there are certain types of businesses and a certain type of target audiences that cannot make much use of digital platforms such as social media and brands need an alternate strategy to tap that space. This is where stickers come into play.
Stickers when designed and placed creatively, following the principles of social media marketing, can create the same ripple effect in spaces where social media is not reachable. A witty one-liner printed on a sticker with the brand message embedded subtlety can create a huge effect in spaces not reachable by digital platforms. Many people would want to sport such stickers on their belongings just for the sake of the message it spreads, and the brand gets to enjoy the attention and recognition automatically.
Stand Alone Marketing Tool
One of the myths regarding stickers is that they can only be used in small sizes. Contrary to myth, brands and advertising experts can actually play around with size, color, graphics and placement to use as a standalone marketing method. Many companies have even ditched billboards and have switched to using creative custom stickers as an OOH advertising method. Apple had used a full-sized custom sticker showing a broken glass and pasted it on the storefront to create an effect of a broken screen. The idea was to communicate a visually string message that indicated the shock resistance of their product.
Another great example of creative custom stickers that attracted a lot of attention and appreciation was by Folger’s Coffee in New York. The brand pasted custom stickers showing top shots of latte cups over manhole covers of New York. The stickers create a visual impression of a steaming cup of coffee every time the manhole emits smoke. This is a great way to attract attention from potential consumers who would otherwise not take the brand seriously.
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This content is sponsored by Ryan Holman.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash