Marketing your business using your vehicle is an increasingly common practice because of it’s a relatively low cost endeavor with a potentially high impact. It can include a low key addition, such as a personalized license plate or customized licensed plate holder or be as obvious as a billboard style, full wrapped vehicle. What you choose will depend on your style, comfort level and your business goals.
As with any marketing effort, you want to match the message to the market and maintain your focus on the image you want your brand to represent. It can be very easy to go overboard on vehicle graphics if you don’t keep your goals front and center.
For example, if you drive a high-end luxury car for business use, you aren’t likely to benefit from the full wrap effect that you might want on your maintenance vehicles. Instead, you might find it more appropriate to choose a license plate holder that features your website address to maintain an upscale image. A window graphic may be a consideration on some higher end vehicles as long as it can be accomplished in a somewhat unobtrusive manner that blends with the image you want to project.
You’ll want to be sure to coordinate your signage with your existing branding efforts. You want to make sure that you utilize the same logo and typography across all your marketing efforts, from business cards to your website to your vehicle signage.
Maintaining a cohesive and consistent image aids in recognition and recollection. A hodge-podge of different images and fonts weakens your message and impact.
When considering any signage for your vehicles, you’ll want to make sure that the graphics and text are easily recognizable and readable. It does very little good to have signage that is too small to see in traffic, especially if you are on the road a great deal of the time. Unless your vehicle is often parked in areas that your target market is likely to walk by, you’ll reduce the potential impact of your investment with a too small effort.
Your budget for vehicle marketing can range from $30 for a customized license plate holder to a couple of thousand dollars for a full color full body vehicle wrap. Whatever budget level you choose to enter at, you’ll want to make sure that you proofread everything. Don’t finalize the project without having a very clear idea of what the finished product is going to look like with a scale-model preview.
To find a good vendor within your community, start looking at the vehicles that catch your eye as you’re on the road. Ask for recommendations and referrals from colleagues that have a similar style and image to your vision. Make sure that you see at least some of their completed work in action. Like standard signage projects, vehicle marketing lasts a long time and you don’t want to be stuck with substandard work that you’ll struggle to live with or have to have redone.
