Car magnet advertisements work far better than I ever would have imagined. I found this out by accident.
In this blog post, I'll explain what happened and how a car magnet brought us foot traffic and sales.
An Accidental Experiment in Car Magnet Marketing
I needed some pictures of car magnets to put on the OpenPrints website. So I printed some car magnets, put them on my car, took pictures, and then removed them.
The last car magnet we photographed was an advertisement that looked like this:
After we finished taking the pictures, I forgot to remove the magnet from my car.
Two weeks later, a customer walked in and said he found us by seeing the car magnet. He wanted to make a poster from a family picture.
Our production facility is in Chesapeake, Virginia, but we are an online printing company that does business all over the US and Canada. We don't advertise locally or court walk-in traffic, so it was pretty shocking to have a customer come in and mention the car magnet after only two weeks of it being on my car.
So after that, I left it on.
[Picture of car magnet on the car]
What Happened Next
The benefit of online advertising are that you can track the results and the return on investment very easily.
The benefits of print advertising are that you pay a one-time low price and can continue to use the print to promote your business at no added cost.
The drawback to print advertisement is it's a bit harder to track the impact of a campaign.
But here are some of the changes we saw after putting a car magnet on one car for two months.
- Walk-in traffic was between 2 and 3 times higher than it was before the car magnet was live. As I mentioned before, we are an online store, so our walk-in traffic is not a big part of our business, but we added 8 to 10 local customers a month. I believe this could have been higher if we were doing local advertising in addition to the magnet.
- Local Search increased 30% and maintained the new higher level. Our local search traffic is also not very high, but we brought in around 50 potential customers per month that otherwise would not have visited our site. We didn't do anything different except the car magnet, so I feel pretty confident attributing this traffic increase to the magnet.
Car Magnet Design
If I had known the car magnet would work this well, I would have made two changes.
I would have increased the size a bit; the size of the decal is 6 x 12 inches, and I would increase it to 18x36 inches.
With the added size, I would have listed more of the services we provide and add a promotion or deal specific to the magnet.
We included our website address in small text. I don't think anyone could read the address when the car is in motion, but we added it thinking someone walking past the car might take a picture of it to reference later.
One thing we might have done to improve this experiment is to add a custom URL and landing page and track how much traffic went to that page.
Car Magnet vs. Decal or Car Wrap
The advantage of a car magnet over a decal or car wrap is that you can remove it and replace it very easily.
It is also easier to convince employees to put a car magnet on their car rather than a car wrap or decal.
Conclusion
Car magnets work to increase your businesses visibility.
If they worked for us, they would probably work even better for businesses like restaurants, home improvement businesses, landscaping businesses, or any company that markets to their customers locally.
And if you want something more permanent, a car decal would work just as well.
If you need help making a custom car magnet or car decal, just let us know.
Make a Custom Car Magnet (link)
Make a Custom Decal (link)