Should I brand my car to market my HR consultancy?
The short answer to this is: if you can, then 100% YES. Especially, if you want to work with local businesses.
Why? Because it’s a fabulous form of brand awareness.
What’s brand awareness?
First impressions are important, but lasting impressions are EVERYTHING in business.
This is what brand awareness is all about. A bit like magic dust. Hard to quantify and measure. But it matters.
Quite simply, brand awareness is how familiar your brand is to people and how well they recognise it. And the reason why it’s so important is that it builds trust and creates association - which ‘speeds’ (see what I did there?) up people’s decision to work with you.
Increasing your local brand awareness is a great idea if you want to work with local businesses
If you want to work with local businesses then you need to raise your local brand awareness - branding your car is the perfect way to do this.
Having your branding on your car offers you a completely passive form of advertising. Any time you drive your car, wherever you go and whatever you’re doing, you’re advertising your business to the local community.
A great example of this…
Remember back in the day, radio stations used to have these big 4x4s that had their logo slapped all over it. You could spot them a mile off and you got really excited if they were parked up in your area - was a neighbour going to be on the radio?! It was a big deal.
The marketing strategy for these vehicles was to just get them everywhere! They would be parked up in popular locations, they would be driven to local events, trade shows and village fetes. Literally spreading the word and reminding people of this local radio station.
Is it time to get your car branded up?
It’s very likely that you have a personal car and if you’re the owner of the business then it would make sense for you to get it branded.
It’s well worth getting it “wrapped” - this means not just having your logo on the car door, but getting the entire vehicle wrapped in your branding.
It probably costs a couple of thousand pounds to do, which might seem a lot - but once it’s done, that vehicle is advertising you all day, every day - wherever you go.
A vehicle that’s completely wrapped really stands out in a car park or a traffic queue. People will look at it, just to figure out why it’s so different from all of the uniform vehicles around it. And how often would you otherwise be able to grab people’s attention like that?
This is something you don’t want to be subtle and tasteful about. You want bright colours, a clear design. The company can help you out with a really loud and clear design that will get you noticed.
Will you get a return on investment?
Unlike a standard marketing campaign like Google or Facebook ads, or even traditional newspaper ads - which run for a set period of time - getting your car branded lasts for ages.
You pay for it once and it keeps on going.
Can you measure a return on investment from this type of marketing? Probably not. Because quantifying brand awareness is incredibly difficult.
But instead, you should think about the bigger picture. How many people are likely to see your brand if you do get your car wrapped. This is when you see value.
