One of the most cost-effective ways to advertise a product or a business is stickers; they are cheap to produce and have many advantages. Besides being fun and eye-catching, they are also very practical and useful. It’s rare nowadays to go to an event and not be given promotional stickers from the organizers or sponsors. Plus, we see them all the time in the streets and on our groceries, they are absolutely everywhere, and there is a reason for that.
Packaging
First of all, stickers come in handy in packaging. The first thing you see on products such as shampoo or wine bottles is the label with the brand name and other information on it; those labels are — you guessed it — stickers. They are usually the first thing you look at when you see a product, and they are very important. Labels are usually made by either offset or flexographic printing. And in fact, Prepress (our competency) produces flexo plates for flexographic printing. These are the plates that printing houses use for applying the ink to the stickers.
Similarly, stickers can be used for little details such as the QR code or information about the product. These might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of stickers, but they are everywhere; ingredients, instructions, warnings, “Made in Wakanda” and many more.
It’s often necessary to seal boxes or envelopes with tape but why use boring tape if you can seal it with a custom sticker. It can be branded, or it can be a different design. The choice is yours; either way, stickers are much more appealing than plain old tape.
Promotional stickers
Probably the biggest advantage of stickers is that people will promote your brand without even meaning to. People go crazy over some stickers even if they don’t care about whatever is on it; they just like collecting them — especially for their laptops. So stickers are essentially a free ad campaign; or maybe not free but whatever it cost to produce those stickers which likely was not a lot. But it’s a good idea is to make your stickers fun and unique. Make them cool-looking or colorful or anything that’ll grab people’s attention — in a good way that is.
Branded sticky notes for the office
You might want to spoil your employees with some top-notch branded sticky notes. Imagine you are sitting at your desk and you want to write something down so you look down and are reminded of your brilliant logo; now isn’t that a good feeling? Unless your logo isn’t so brilliant and you made it in a minute or two. In that case, you could just get custom sticky notes with anything your imagination can think of — like someone else’s logo. Whatever makes you happy.
Large-format stickers
Laptops and notebooks are not the only surfaces that you can stick a sticker on. There also large format stickers. Bumper stickers, for example, are a great way to promote something, especially if you’re stuck in traffic and the person behind you has to stare at the back of your car for however long. Or maybe you want to warn people that you are a new driver or that you have kids on board. But car stickers can also just be cute and for fun and not have to promote anything or warn about anything.
A good example of using promotional stickers as a full ad medium was the Lays “Our potatoes are grown closer than you think” campaign which included a sticker on the ceiling of Chicago’s Jackson Tunnel which made it look like potatoes were growing over their heads. This was supposed to demonstrate that Lays’ ingredients are homegrown.
Wall stickers are also a good idea; they aren’t as expensive as actually painting something on the wall, and they are easier to remove, but they still add a charm to the room. Maybe you want to have a huge hole in your wall, but you do not actually want a real, huge hole in your wall as that would be quite inconvenient; in that case, stickers are the way to go.
So what have we learned? Promotional stickers are pretty great. Not only do they have more uses than I can count — which is up to about 13 so I guess that doesn’t say much — they are also a great advertising medium. And above all, they are fun.
