Top Tips for Marketing Through Vehicle Fleet Wraps

It’s easy to talk about how amazing graphics connect with audiences and leave a memorable impression. Still, the WrapUK design team often works with businesses that don’t have marketing expertise and need the inspiration to ensure their fleet wraps deliver on that potential.

The great news is that you don’t need to be an advertising guru to get prominent exposure from a professional set of commercial wraps – with our top tips for effective vehicle advertising!

Tip One: Decide on Your Van Graphics Advertising Story

Your first step in creating an uplifting ad through your fleet wraps is to pinpoint what you want to publicise. Perhaps that sounds a bit obvious, so let’s clarify.

Every business can benefit from promotions, but the specifics of your advertising will vary considerably. Let’s take a catering company using van graphics to market their wares. Here are a few alternative commercial wraps they might consider:

1. Hire Me! Van graphics to attract local event organisers, corporate clients, or private individuals looking for catering for events such as weddings or birthday parties.
2. Look at Me! Brand awareness, drawing attention to a local catering service, perhaps with times and locations where customers can sample their dishes.
3. Try Me! Advertising about specific events or locations where this catering service has a usual spot, showcasing the food and perhaps pricing.

Can you see how those advertising remits are slightly different and might impact the graphic text, design, and content? This concept applies to every business – before you pour hours into developing an impressive set of graphics, it’s crucial to finesse what you want to advertise and who your target audience is.

Tip Two: Include a CTA on Your Fleet Wraps

Calls to action (CTAs) are like marketing101. You have to tell your customer exactly what you want them to do as a result of engaging in your marketing.

Ok, so a CTA is an easier prospect on a website page and could be something like:

• • Call us now
  • Enquire today
  • Request a slot
  • Book a call
  • Reserve your space

While it isn’t as simple to incorporate an instruction on a set of vinyls, it is an essential aspect of any marketing exercise.

There are a few ways to achieve this. You could include social media icons with your handle and a CTA to ‘Tag Us for Exclusive Discounts’ as one easy example. Another could be ‘Call Us’ and then a phone number or other contact information. If you’re promoting a sale, a discount, an event, a ticket for something, your CTA is pretty apparent, and you’ll want to include a clear direction to help your customer understand what they need to do to get involved.

Whatever the nudge is, you need to make it clear and accessible, so your target audience is left with a direct action to follow up on.

Tip Three: Use Big, Bold, Beautiful Truck Wrapping

Whether you’re wrapping an artic lorry or a tiny van, you have a finite amount of space with which to make the maximum impact – so it’s crucial to use that wisely!

It’s tempting to cram as much information as you can into one set of wraps. However, too much can be overwhelming on the eye and detract from the point of the advert. Consider how much information our brains can observe when we’re overtaking a lorry at 70 MPH on the motorway, and you’ll get the idea.

However, this factor really depends on the environment and where you think your wraps will be seen most. If your commercial vehicles are often static, thinking about our catering truck again, you have a little more freedom to experiment with designs and styles that passers-by will notice. Trucks that tend only to stop for existing client deliveries will likely be on the move whenever spotted by a potential new customer, so you need to transmit those critical messages in a split second, with fonts and text that are visible from a distance.

An excellent option is to mock up your designs on screen before you start thinking about custom wraps. You can quickly see whether the meaning is lost in the bigger picture or whether any crucial parts of your text are running into seams in the bodywork.

Tip Four: Only Incorporate Professional Photos on Fleet Wraps

Vinyl is a massively diverse material, and we can design a bespoke wrap with anything from metallic finishes to a custom photo – with a straightforward caveat.

However incredible they are, amateur photos look terrible when blown up to use as part of a vehicle graphic. Poor quality photos immediately diminish the impact of the overall design and usually look grainy or fuzzy, giving an unprofessional image that we want you to steer well clear of. There is a place for graphics in a wrap. Still, we’d usually advise avoiding the urge to turn your vehicles into massive moving collages, even if you do find it hard to select the best logos or images to represent your business!

One well-placed, high-resolution image or logo is usually plenty to convey your messaging.

Tip Five: Embrace White Space on Commercial Wraps

We get that talking about white space on a set of custom wraps sounds counterintuitive. Still, it’s actually a cool marketing trick that’s so much more effective than overloading your wraps with busy typography and cluttered images!

Vinyl wraps come in a dazzling array of incredible finishes, so it’s wise to draw on that visual impact rather than concentrating solely on the text. Empty space accentuates your design, so while the vivid colours and images draw the eye, it’s the white space that focuses your audience on the brand message and the CTA we talked about earlier.

Now, there isn’t a set ‘correct’ way to create wraps that sell, and so much of this depends on your business sector, intended audience, and travel routine. BUT by taking note of some of the simple marketing tips we’ve mentioned here, you can create van wraps that act as your mobile sales rep every time you hit the ignition.

For further advice about designing van wraps for business advertising, please get in touch with the WrapUK team for a chat.