Vinyl stickers stick around long after other traditional advertising – such as flyers, posters, postcards and paper stickers – fade, tear and succumb to water damage. Traditional advertising is not dead because there will always be a place for promotional stickers, decals and advertising specialties, which this article at bizmov.com explains.
Why Use Vinyl Stickers?
It’s not all about digital marketing. Traditional promotional materials have become collectibles, and your business stickers could outlast your business as examples of the golden age of vinyl advertising. Using vinyl stickers for your business generates the following seven benefits:
1. Providing Customers with Something Substantial
Offering a free download in return for signing up for your mailing list is a common digital strategy, but what about your brick-and-mortar customers? Do you abandon them in favor of digital marketing? Of course not.
Providing your customers with stickers allows you to promote your business, special event or product launch with something substantial that people can post on walls, windows, buildings, car bumpers and notebooks. You can offer your customers vinyl stickers as incentives, freebies or even paid products such as cool bumper stickers.
You can also change things up by offering your online customers a sticker instead of a free download. Another great way to cross-promote your business is to sponsor a contest in social media for sticker ideas using user-generated content. Your customers and followers can submit selfies wearing your brand and other creative ideas. These ideas include catchy phrases, creative graphics, funny bumper stickers and great photos of all types.
2. Creating a Different Take on Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising today usually refers to mobile phones, but all styles and models of vehicles sport ads, messages and creative bumper stickers designed to entertain. Customers might pass briefly by a billboard ad that costs $2,500 – and ignore it or quickly forget it. However, they could be following your ad on a $1 bumper sticker for hours on the freeway or see it every day on a wall during their commutes.
Vinyl stickers get into the strangest places. You can find them in libraries, on clothes, in bars, at strip clubs and on every exterior surface imaginable. Kids put them on notebooks, bicycles, toys, teddy bears and secret clubhouses. Adults put them on their cars, trucks, motorcycles, hand trucks and equipment.
3. Branding Your Business
Vinyl stickers have all sorts of advantages over flyers. You can use them as geolocation advertising without the GPS. Stickers don’t end up in the trash like flyers, so you can brand your business in highly desirable locations and special venues such as local fairs and festivals. You can stick them on custom signs and sandwich boards to take anywhere and change them when needed just by pasting over the previous sticker.
Seeing stickers can boost staff morale as they realize that where they work is an important place in the local community. Stickers create a long-lasting impression and reinforce that impression time after time.
4. Deploying a Kinder, Gentler Kind of Advertising
Despite the high-profile image that vinyl stickers enjoy, stickers are passive types of advertising that don’t get in customers’ faces or annoy people the way that other advertising does. People don’t like advertising – or so they say – and complain about television ads, radio ads and popup ads on the internet. Stickers are non-intrusive and don’t attract that kind of backlash.
There’s a lot of talk about how marketing has changed because of digital technology. Most conversations focus on social media and how advertising is no longer so heavy-handed. Stickers can get attention for your company without annoying sales prospects and existing customers. You can get all the benefits of geolocation advertising without GPS technology. Just place a sticker where you want to engage potential customers.
5. Enlisting Customers as Brand Advocates
There is a powerful connection between your company and the marketing stickers that customers want for personal use. These stickers show a degree of product or company commitment that impresses strangers more than any form of paid advertising – just as online customers are impressed by real-customer testimonials.
Stickers are fun to give as promotional incentives, and customers of all ages love them. Instead of depending on your online customers sending referrals, you can get 24/7 referrals from a strategically placed sticker.
Stickers show that your customers like your brand and are proud to apply your name to their car, personal possessions and other surfaces in their businesses and homes. Brand advocacy also extends to the nuts-and-bolts of sticker design. When you do a great job – in designing graphics, developing a color scheme and writing humorous content – people are happy to display it on their stuff.
6. Generating a “Cool” Factor
Custom stickers have long been at the top of the list of cool ideas. It’s possible to follow history through the use of stickers and decals. What’s the difference between decals and stickers? The terms are often used interchangeably, but the best definition seems to be that decals are prepared on specialized types of paper to transfer to a glass, porcelain or metal surface. Stickers are paper or vinyl with a sticky glue backing to apply to those same surfaces.
How cool are stickers? Just take a quick look at this article about stickers and decals in the 1960s. 1960s stickers were applied to cars, bicycles and motorcycles in an explosion of commercial advertising never before seen at such levels. Vintage STP stickers, drag racing cars, the “Bullet” Mustang and the “Easy Rider” Harley motorcycles in a Captain America motif are just a few of the reasons that 1960s sticker advertising was cooler than most of today’s marketing. Ramp up the cool factor for your business with creative vinyl stickers.
7. Marketing Cheap
Vinyl stickers cost a bit more than paper stickers, but when you analyze the cost-value benefits, vinyl clearly wins. The durability of vinyl stickers ensures that your marketing messages will last for a long time. Vinyl stickers are cheaper in large quantities, but small batch printing makes even limited runs cost-competitive.
You can promote a signature restaurant dish, your product brands, special events at your business and even your political philosophy. Stickers are highly mobile for mobile-friendly advertising. They go everywhere people go – to classrooms, gyms, concert venues, country clubs, shopping malls, libraries and bars.
Incorporating Stickers into Your Marketing Campaigns
Boring marketing campaigns are more common than they’ve ever been. Part of the reason is that consumers have access to far more businesses through digital marketing. It’s hard to distinguish among thousands of the same businesses promoting the same products. This article on marketing creativity explains some of the challenges.
Sticker campaigns, however, give you great visual and graphic creativity. You can promote local, regional and national products with media that could last a century or more. Vinyl stickers have proven their durability, creativity, flexibility and appeal for generations.