How To Design Your Own Promotional Bumper Sticker

2020-10-23

Ready to design your customized promotional bumper sticker? Keep your hands on the wheel, stay in your lane, and hold on tight for a few tips on creating your own catchy sticker, guaranteed to get noticed and help you make money!

Before designing your promotional bumper sticker, ask yourself:

1. What is the desired outcome?

Are you promoting an event, a business, a school? How are you going to achieve your desired outcome with a bumper sticker? Do you want people to purchase your product? Support your band? Utilize your services? Attend your play?

2. How will people use the stickers?

Take a close look at your supporters and assess what they like and dislike. For example, what kind of cars do they drive? What kind of design and phrase would make them want to put your bumper sticker on their car? Maybe they’re more the type to slap a bumper sticker on their laptop top, binder, or skateboard. Is a traditional vinyl sticker be a match? Or maybe you’re better off with a window cling sticker that can be easily removed?

3. How will the bumper stickers enhance other marketing efforts?

Are you planning to use your promotional bumper stickers in conjunction with matching posters, flyers, or direct mail? Or relate to an ongoing advertising campaign?  Or do you simply want to achieve name recognition that will drive brand recognition along with site and in-store traffic?

Now that you understand your desired outcome, target market, and overall marketing plan, you can begin designing your custom bumper stickers!

 Promotional bumper sticker design tips

1. Build an eye-catching foundation

Flashy colors and interesting patterns grab attention, while easy-to-see, recognizable logos achieve brand recognition. Large fonts (especially sans serif fonts like Impact) and short messages help the eye speed and text.

Pro tip: Overly busy designs are visual traffic jams and don’t get you anywhere. Keep it clean and easy to read, so the viewer’s attention flows from the logo and through the message.

2. Color matters

Colors are a striking form of non-verbal communication and express emotional meaning. For instance, stoplights are red and green because these colors elicit strong human responses. From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains are hard-wired to understand that red means “stop” and green means “go.” RED immediately arrests the attention with its associations of aggression, anger, passion, danger, and love. GREEN represents ideals like the environment, nature, health, safety, or money. Research color psychology to understand the meaning of colors and design accordingly to convey your message.

3. Humor works well

Funny and catchy phrases or images will get you noticed. Anything that wakes people up from their mind-numbing drive can leave a lasting impression. So try a clever play on words or a joke that will appeal to your target audience.

Pro tip: Be careful about the kind of humor you use. You don’t want to offend people, whether or not they are potential customers. So unless your marketing plan involves creating controversy, play it safe and keep it clean.

4. Keep it simple

Try and keep your text to seven words or less. This is because the average driver can read no more than that without taking their focus off the road. A well-devised, short, and witty message on your sticker will be far more successful than something so long and complicated that no one can get to the end of the slogan…unless the car it’s stuck to is parked and you’re walking by.

Pro tip: Don’t have a witty or funny message? Simply include your logo, company name, and/or URL. The more people see your name, the more you build brand recognition!

Are we there yet?

Designing a bumper sticker provides a great opportunity to have fun! If you’re not enjoying your promotion, do you expect your customers to stay interested? Remember: Keep the message simple. Make the words “pop” with color and a strong design. Create impressionable images. The bumper sticker provides a moving sound bite for your marketing efforts. Of course, you can’t fit everything on a bumper sticker, but by following our simple roadmap, you can drive customers right to your business!