How branded stickers can help you build meaningful connections with your audience

This article is sponsored by OzStickerPrinting who have kindly gifted some sticker products for use in this article. As always all opinions, ideas and advice are my own.

Custom branded stickers are a great way to shine a spotlight on the character of our brands in a vivid and engaging way, allowing small business marketers to draw attention to defining and endearing aspects of our brand’s character in a tangible, touchable, peelable, stickable, sharable, collectible and sometimes even sniffable creative format.

As a brand builder and designer, I get excited by the opportunity to develop creative marketing concepts for stickers.

In my opinion, this expressive yet simple printed format provides the perfect creative medium to convey alignment between the values of our brands and those of our audience, and highlight the character and personality of our brands in eye-catching, fun and interactive ways – creating a lasting impression on the hearts and minds of our customers in the process.

Branded stickers can be used in a simple manner to build a baseline-level awareness of your brand and reach new customers in new markets, or a more focused manner to highlight key aspects of your brand’s purpose, values and character. They make excellent micro-gifts, for both customers and internal team members, and their specialty as one of the most versatile and cost-effective print marketing materials means they can be adapted for an assortment of use-contexts and used in a variety of creative ways.

There’s a lot to love when it comes to using branded stickers as a marketing device, and there are so many ways you can harness this colourful format to imbue your brand with meaning, personality and heart.

This mini-article explores how branded stickers can be used to build brand awareness and strengthen the sense of connection between your small business brand, your internal team, and your customers.

How branded stickers build brand awareness

On a fundamental level, branded stickers can be an important vehicle to help your business reach new customers and foster a baseline-level awareness of your brand in new markets. They tend to stick around in high-visibility environments longer than leaflets, brochures and card-based marketing materials; their longer-than-usual advertising lifespan means that even just one sticker has the potential to create an enormous amount of exposure for your brand.

Another inherent strength of branded stickers lies in their fun and playful format; they’re a discreet, light-hearted, non-disruptive form of advertising, and in a world where consumers are developing near super-human levels of ad-filtering prowess, the beauty of stickers is that, if designed and produced thoughtfully, they often don’t appear to be an ad at all. This feature gives them marketing stealth, social relevancy, and the capacity to go viral.

This more casual and artful form of advertising works well for small businesses in certain industries and niches with a strong social component, or where a gentler approach to advertising is more appropriate – like the wellness industry for example – where sensitivity and audience-understanding are critical to a brand’s success.

How to deploy branded stickers for increased brand connection

1. Gifting branded stickers to customers

Thoughtful branded gifts – however small – create an instant emotional connection between a brand and its audience, and branded stickers can make for excellent cost-effective micro-gifts, either as loyalty gifts, bonus gifts-with-purchase, event-specific gifts, or simply just freebies.

In fact, giving a relevant gift to your customers is known to have a number of positive marketing benefits: it increases feel-good endorphins and makes a powerful positive impression on the receiver, evoking delight and surprise, and immediately strengthening the brand-customer relationship.

Because your customers will be at their most receptive to your brand – as a purpose-driven and values-based movement – upon receiving your sticker gift, this then creates the perfect opportunity to connect with your customers emotionally through your sticker's content about what it is your brand stands for and values.

2. Gifting branded stickers to your internal team

In a similar sense, branded stickers can be given in a complementary manner to your internal team members to help strengthen internal brand adoption, and can be beneficial in encouraging a sense of camaraderie, belonging, and pride in your brand’s culture.

Brand strategy isn't everyone's cup of tea, and the concept of the importance of brand character can be a tricky one to grasp for employees, but the small and minimalistic sticker format can be particularly effective at capturing the essence of a brand’s character in ways that are difficult to express by other means.

Internal sticker-gifting is a fun and inclusive way to get your team thinking about core brand concepts, and will often facilitate healthy discussions about the brand’s purpose, values and character. You can even encourage your team members to propose their own branded sticker ideas for future print runs!

3. As a physical branding device

Stickers also offer a range of quick, cheap and simple physical branding applications. They can be used within stores to add character or communicate to shoppers in an on-brand way, adhered to storefront exteriors to attract new shoppers into the store, or used in conjunction with shipping parcels and packages (on either the exterior of the parcel for quick identification and brand recognition, or placed within the package, for an enhanced unboxing experience and to encourage organic content creation, sharing and tagging of your products).

Harnessing the sticker format to its full potential

As small business marketers, we can develop creative sticker concepts to make the most of this eye-catching format, whether we simply want to raise brand awareness with the application of our logo and core brand colours, or connect more deeply to our audiences in either an emotional or philosophical way.

Something to keep in mind is that stickers are relatively inexpensive in comparison to other printed marketing material formats, so their designs can be updated and refreshed more frequently than other forms of marketing. Their low cost allows for greater creative experimentation and variety, allowing small businesses to develop targeted sticker designs for their brands that appeal to different segments within their audience.

To demonstrate how to make the most of the branded sticker format, I collaborated with the folks at OzStickerPrinting to develop and print five original sticker design concepts for different segments within my own audience.

The resulting designs included:

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1. A core brand sticker design (for baseline-level brand awareness-building).

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2. A brand value statement sticker (appealing to strategically-minded members of my audience).

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3. A vibrant, emotionally-expressive sticker (appealing to fun-loving and passionate members of my audience).

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4. A wholesome brand character statement sticker (appealing to artistic and creatively-minded members of my audience).

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5. A creative, pop culture-themed sticker (designed to be fun and engaging when shared socially).

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Do any of these designs resonate more with your personality? The goal of creating a sticker set like this is to cater to the different tastes and interests of your audience, so that most members of your audience feel a sense of personal connection to at least one sticker design, increasing the chance that they'll either share it, or use it!

Creating effective branded sticker concepts

Truly passionate advocates of a much-adored small business brand may be inclined to adhere a logo-based sticker to one of their belongings, but for most small businesses with a relatively small audience, this is less likely to happen as there is less societal recognition of the brand, and therefore the sticker is less effective as a personal identity-association device (a key psychological factor in sticker utilisation).

In this case, it’s helpful to experiment with more endearing, interesting, socially engaging and personally-relevant creative concepts for your branded stickers, just like I’ve done in the five examples above.

Popular and generally-effective sticker content topics include messages that evoke an emotional response, make your audience think or make them laugh, and references to pop culture, which can help increase the virality (or the tendency of something to be circulated rapidly and widely) of your sticker designs.

Here are a few tips to help you generate strong creative ideas for your stickers' content:

1. Be endearing

A fundamental best-practice when it comes to branded sticker design is to focus on connecting and resonating with your audience. This is your opportunity to showcase the intricacy and personality of your characterful brand. Be as relatable and candid as possible and appropriate, and focus on your audience’s opinions, values and beliefs. Your mission is simple: demonstrate just how much you 'get' your audience.

2. Be relevant and on-point

Use language your customers use themselves, where possible, and creatively express attitudes your audience embrace. Stickers that pass the "peel and stick" test often express key beliefs and values that your audience want to associate themselves with – qualities that align with their own values, and that enhance their own sense of character.

3. Be interesting

Due to the long-term lifespan of the sticker format, it’s important that your designs have an enduring visual appeal and are aesthetically interesting. Brainstorm creative content ideas that your customers will find visually or philosophically engaging, and will enjoy seeing over and over again. An eye-catching branded sticker design that prompts a conversation from a passer-by, or questions from an interested friend, is truly ideal from a marketing perspective.

4. Be socially engaging

Stickers are made to be shared, so it’s worth creating at least one socially-conscious design geared towards social sharing, either online via social media or in-person. Your customers’ personal connections will often have similar interests, and as a result, have a higher likelihood of becoming interested in your product or service themselves after seeing their friends sharing and tagging your product on their socials.‍

Designing visually-engaging branded stickers

The marketing efficacy of your branded stickers lives and dies on their overall creative concept being deemed worthy of being peeled and stuck on…well, something by the recipient.

If you intend to design your own sticker content, remember that less is more when it comes to branded sticker design and messaging, so focus on expressing one simple idea, message or concept per sticker. Considering the (usually) small size and design real-estate that you have to work with, it’s important to avoid having too many elements at play.

However, to really capitalise on branded stickers as a marketing tool, I recommend working with a professional designer to help you create visual designs that connect on a personal and emotional level with your audience. After all, in most cases, the sticker recipient will have to really like your sticker’s creative concept, taking into account design and material/print quality, in order to make the long-term commitment of adhering your sticker to one of their personal possessions.

Modern sticker printers like OzStickerPrinting offer a vast variety of sticker customisation options including shape, size, material, finish, and supply format, all of which are important factors that contribute to the overall visual outcome and perceived quality of your branded stickers.

Your designer will be able to help you navigate the array of creative choices available and select the options that best match your sticker's content and message. OzStickerPrinting's well-designed online product selection interface made this process incredibly easy for me during this particular project,  so if you're new to sticker design, I wholeheartedly recommend visiting their website and having a play with the different customisation options available for their custom sticker product to get a feel for what's available.

Conclusion

As digital marketing tools continue to grow in popularity, and the world becomes more digitised and impersonal in the way it communicates, we have the opportunity to set our brands apart by creating small moments of meaningful personal connection with our audiences, and simple, printed marketing formats like stickers are beginning to feel more expressive and charming then perhaps they ever have.

The interactive branded sticker format brings the fun back into small business marketing, encouraging concise creative expression, a simple message, and intimate brand-to-customer communication – it's truly the perfect format format for creating meaningful and lasting impressions on your brand's customers.

Branded stickers can introduce your business to new markets, make excellent gifts and conversation-starters, and offer versatile physical branding applications. And when designed with care, and tailored carefully to the brand's audience – helping them pass that all-important "peel and stick" test – they offer versatile and focused brand awareness-building opportunities and a long advertising life span.

Branded stickers invite your audience to let your brand into their lives in a pretty prominent way, and because this is a big ask, strategic visual design, quality print production, and engaging content ideas are worth investing in here, especially considering the potential marketing benefits at stake.

Whether you're new to branded stickers, or a seasoned 'stickerhead', I hope this post has provided you with some inspiration and guidance for how you can strengthen your business' brand-customer connection via the playful sticker format.

I'd love to hear more about your personal experiences creating branded stickers, as well as any feedback you might have on this blog post (which helps me to improve my future articles), so please don't hesitate to reach out and send me an email here.