Do you remember the customized stickers created by Bacardi that were floating around on WhatsApp around Holi, Valentine's Day, Diwali? Pretty much on every special occasion last year? Just everyday customer-hunting, we reckon!

"We had a lot of success with the WhatsApp stickers we made with Breezers around Holi. The stickers are generally intended for a specific area or a current event. It's a terrific platform for reminding people about your brand. It's all about long-term brand growth, and WhatsApp stickers and GIFs help us create the recall value we want for our brands," said Anshuman Goenka, Bacardi India's Head of Marketing.

Stickers have taken over the digital communication landscape. While it was easy to dismiss them as "toys" five years ago, outside of social media platforms, even companies and marketers are seeing the benefits of stickers. Surely you must have come across many Disney stickers on iMessage following the release of almost every one of their movies!

But what exactly is customized sticker marketing? Simply put, it is brands falling back to creating engaging, immersive content and then leveraging the 'sharing' behavior of social media to spread their customer network. Some of the tech start-ups actively enabling firms to 'sticker' their message includes GIFKaro, Xploree, StickersApp, and BobbleAI.

Why do customized stickers allow such great opportunities for brand marketing?

Isn't it obvious? Stickers and messengers go hand in hand, resulting in a desire for sticker marketplaces, which provides a wide range of branded emojis, GIFs, and other animated material as a marketing playground. Hitting two birds with one stone, no?

One of the main selling aspects of a branded sticker is its seamless integration into a client's life: in other words, turning that customer into a brand ambassador.

This is one of the most efficient techniques of generating brand ambassadors since consumers distribute these stickers to their friends on their own initiative; they enjoy the content and are distributing the brand to all of their friends, resulting in a win-win situation.

So then, how to make these 'digital firecrackers' the ideal marketing tool?

1. Make your own Personalized Stickers Twitter is all about having a good time with appealing conversations, and there's no better way to do that than by using branded stickers. Brands using up-to-date internet savvy language attract a lot of attention, and if you make your own personalized stickers, you'll stand out even more!

The same goes for Facebook! Use branded stickers in comments and replies to potential customers and add them as post images in Facebook Groups. Your brand will be the epitome of audience engagement and will keep them interested long enough to come back.

2. Humanize your Interactions Creating branded stickers for your staff to hand out to consumers in messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp etc. is a brilliant approach to humanize your interactions. We all like a good laugh.

The ability to include a one-of-a-kind, bespoke sticker in your chat may make the consumer feel special! If you have a fun team, make or share some for team interactions as well.

Slack has some great animation integration, and you can even add your own custom stickers to group conversations. You can use them to draw attention to the day's or week's aim. We've heard of teams using them to share when someone receives a great customer service review. It's fantastic for the team's morale!

3. Spice up the Conversation Sequence Businesses are embracing chatbots, but the challenge is to make them engaging and relatable. Stickers may spice up the conversation sequence, make it more enjoyable, and even help to calm down your agitated consumers. How would you customize them?

Here's how:

• Create cheerful and interesting phrases and images to entice users to want to know "What's next?" when they engage with your bot!

• Because they're interacting with you on your private channel, you may utilize your branding in your ChatBot stickers.

• Make it one-of-a-kind and unforgettable! Make stickers with team member cutouts, captions, and even apologies. The conversation with a chatbot has never been human or immersive!

4. Raise Brand Recognition The fundamental goal of a branded sticker campaign is to raise brand recognition and engagement organically. Stickers are a groundbreaking tool since they allow marketers to have their brand presence in their clients' regular mobile chats. To put it another way, their brand gets ingrained in the lives of its customers.

Lovate Health's MuscleTech stickers, which promote their MuscleTech line of goods, are a fantastic illustration of this. These stickers are centered on and appeal directly to MuscleTech's user base; as a result, they are often used since the sentiments and in-jokes are pertinent to them.

This further embeds MuscleTech in the community, creating a feedback loop that benefits both the firm and the user, as well as assisting newcomers to the community in finding their product among a sea of rivals.

But what is worth noticing more here is that Lovate Health has taken it a step further by creating clickable stickers. When these stickers are issued, the recipient or sender can click on them to go to a website, an app, or the app store. This is fantastic since consumers can interact with the graphics they're receiving while still having rapid access to the company's brand.

They also make it exciting for users to submit links to things they like!

Your customer won't stand a chance of coming out of the maze.

5. Increases Recall Value and Effect WhatsApp, an instant messaging service, has a substantial presence in India, thanks to the country's rising smartphone market and lowering data rates. Marketers have used the platform to quietly promote their brand message in a low-cost manner that increases recall value and effect.

This is where the use of stickers comes into play. While larger businesses such as Tinder, Tide, Reebok, Bacardi, KFC, Dunkin Donuts, McDonald's, Zomato, and others are embracing WhatsApp sticker marketing, smaller players working at the city or state level are also attempting to capitalize on the trend.

While most worldwide information is smoothly converted into stickers, the necessity to give them a local spin in order to attract diverse groups of people in a more familiar atmosphere has proven to be the most important factor. You need not go any further than the very first line of the article to get a feel for this!

Takeaway

Overall, the option of customizing stickers as a marketing tool has opened up an entirely new channel of communication for businesses and customers. Branded WhatsApp stickers and GIFs are now a classic example of low-cost, high-impact marketing that can also be employed by smaller businesses.

Customers can enhance their ideas with your brand without losing what they want to convey, rather than having their message "lost in translation."

And any development that triggers such seamless inclusion of technology, customer needs and brand reach small is worth diving headfirst into!