How To Market Your Product In Packaging Design

A lot goes into marketing your brand and products successfully. But you can go beyond Google PPC ads, blogs and newsletters, and other types of marketing to take advantage of passive marketing on your new products’ packaging.

That’s right – you can market via packaging just as effectively as elsewhere. Here, we’ll explain how to market your product with your packaging design and elements step-by-step.

Best Marketing Product Packaging Ideas: Overview

Marketing through product packaging is about doubling down on your brand, then deciding what specific messages or stories you want to communicate to your target audience.

1. Focus On Your Branding 
2. Go Sustainable and Brag About It 
3. Prioritize Your Customers’ Experience 
4. Tell a Story with Your Packaging
5. Use Your Packaging as an Opportunity To Build Trust
6. Include Attractive, Detailed Information

Focus On Your Branding 

Your product packaging should be a part of your brand identity and aesthetic as your website, social media platforms, and online store. For a great product marketing campaign that utilizes your packaging, you should focus on what makes your brand different while keeping those packages consistent with the rest of your brand identity.

Brand Differentiation

Brand differentiation distinguishes your company from competitors in the same niche. For instance, are you more eco-friendly than competitors in the same industry? Make a big deal by eliminating plastic in your packaging or writing that your boxes are biodegradable on the side.

Branding Consistency

At the same time, you should make sure that your product packages are consistent with other brand materials in terms of their:

• Colors and shades. You probably already have a few company colors; be sure to use these for your products’ packages to identify them as part of your lineup immediately.

• Fonts and lettering. Again, if you have a company font or lettering style, use it for any words on your product packages.

• Overall Design. You want to ensure your aesthetic is consistent, but you also must consider your overall packaging design. The shape and size of your packaging should be as uniform as the other aspects of your branded packaging.

Go Sustainable and Brag About It 

As mentioned above, eco-friendliness or green packaging is massively important these days. It’s good for the planet and your bottom line. Customers love shopping at brands that offer eco-friendly packaging, so it may be wise to market your products with “green” packages as much as possible. 

Then you can announce that you’ve started using eco-friendly packaging materials and benefit from the influx of traffic to your store.

How Can You Implement Sustainable Packaging?

You should implement sustainable packaging by determining which packaging providers can fulfill your order needs. You can also design your sustainable packages with Box Genie or other resources.

For example, Box Genie’s triangular document mailers feature intuitive folding designs. They’re not only 100% recyclable; they’re also suitable for use with custom art or graphics that can communicate your brand identity quite easily. 

Why Customers Love Sustainable Packaging

Customers particularly appreciate sustainable packaging because:

• It helps them feel that they’re doing their part for the environment
• It reduces the waste they have to deal with in their homes

Overall, there’s no downside to switching to green packaging as soon as possible.

Prioritize Your Customers’ Experience

You can take a different marketing strategy with your product packages: emphasizing positive customer experiences with your brand.

Show Customer Appreciation

One of the easiest ways to market to your current customer base and build up more loyalty is to show your appreciation for those customers right on the custom boxes for your products. A “thank you” is never a bad idea. 

Still, you can also write a sentence or blurb about how purchasing that product lets you commit to charitable donations or something similar (if valid and applicable, of course).

Speak Directly to the Customer

Alternatively, you can use the space on your product packages to speak directly to current customers, potential customers, and new customers. For example, you can write:

• Your brand mission statement or goal
• What do you hope the customer gets out of the product
• A heartfelt message of appreciation
• Something else entirely – the sky’s the limit. 

Tell a Story with Your Packaging

Some creative product packages are done well enough to tell customers full stories, acting as little marketing messages in and of themselves. For instance, you can:

• Draw graphics showing the product creation process from start to finish
• Showcase a graphic or image displaying how the product will help the customer with their need
• Include a bio of you or your company’s history

Use Your Packaging as an Opportunity To Build Trust

The right product package can help you build trust with potential or soon-to-be customers. For instance, if you’re an eCommerce company doing a product launch, you might include a list of customer reviews or a few positive quotes from real customers or influencers on a product’s box.

Positive testimonials can go a long way toward building trust or loyalty in new store visitors you haven’t yet converted. They can also help entice customers to try out similar products, just as much as email marketing efforts or social media marketing tactics.

Include Attractive, Detailed Information

You can and should also use your product packages to communicate as much information to customers as possible. For example, a bullet point list with all the product's benefits can help sell that product to another customer in the store if they see someone carrying it to the front register.

Remember that you may need to put some essential information on product packages according to state laws, like safety warnings or other guidelines. Regardless, make sure any information on a product’s box is detailed, easy to find, and read.

Marketing in Product Packaging: Why Is it Important?

You already spend tons of time and money promoting your brand through other marketing channels, like Google PPC or pay-per-click ads, email newsletters, and website blog posts. Why does it matter to market effectively on your products' packages, too?

It’s because customers in your target marketsee those product packages all the time. Whether or not they buy anything, a product’s box or package can be a prospective customer’s first experience with your brand. 

Furthermore, the package can tell a customer a lot about a product, your brand identity, and your priorities simultaneously.

Think about the standard packages for an Apple product, like an iPhone or a Mac computer. Apple products come in sleek, usually plain white boxes without much flair or fuss. When you open up a new Apple product, there isn’t a ton of plastic – instead, the device waits in the middle, waiting for you to put your hands on it.

That’s a great example of stellar packaging that communicates Apple’s tech-friendly focus, its lack of pompousness, and its (relative) commitment to green packaging simultaneously.

That’s also an example of passive marketing. Just by seeing an Apple product, someone who has never bought an iPhone gets information about the brand and what matters to it. Odds are someone has purchased an Apple product at least in part because of the design of its packaging.

Plus, your products’ packaging is free real estate in marketing messages. When you have room to put your brand slogan or logo, why not take that opportunity to market your company that much more effectively and universally across your industry or target audience?

Marketing Mistakes To Avoid in Product Packaging

You can see that there are many ways to master marketing and package design simultaneously. 

But there are also specific marketing steps you should avoid to maximize the effectiveness of your message (and to minimize the likelihood of turning a customer away from your brand).

1. Frustrating Packaging
2. Boring Design
3. Inconsistent Branding/Packaging
4. Overwhelming Packaging

Frustrating Packaging

First, ensure your packages are never frustrating or challenging to open. Nothing can kill a person’s enthusiasm to try out one of your products faster than being unable to open a box or get the goods inside. 

Always test out your product boxes and packages beforehand so you can switch the boxes if necessary.

Boring Design

You’ll also want to avoid designing product packages with bland aesthetics, images, or other visual elements. If you want your product boxes and bags to market for you on store shelves or in public, they need to be visually engaging and stimulating.

Spend some time with Box Genie’s design tools and try to come up with something visually unique and relevant to your brand. 

The time you spend doing this will be well worth it when your boxes help your products fly off your store shelves.

Inconsistent Branding/Packaging

As noted earlier, your product packages have to be consistent with your brand identity and aesthetic from start to finish.

Say that your company is defined mainly by the colors blue, gray, and white. It evokes a cool, masculine aesthetic for masculine apparel. If you ship out your products in a bright red or pink box, this creates cognitive dissonance in your customers – they might not even know that they've received the products ordered from you when they see the box for the first time.

Overwhelming Packaging

Lastly, try not to make your packages visually overwhelming or too complicated. Inserting dividers into a box, for instance, can be helpful if one of your products has a lot of small pieces. 

But too many dividers can make it tough to reach those small pieces inside or annoy a customer because they have so many small cardboard slots to throw away. 

The Bottom Line

Marketing via packaging is just one element of a well-developed, holistic marketing plan. When done correctly, packaging marketing can reinforce your brand in the minds of your target audience members, help you convert prospects into customers, and lead to more revenue in the long term.

When combined with packaging design tools at Box Genie, you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your profits once you start marketing your products with packaging. Keep the above elements in mind when designing your packages; your new boxes will be interesting, practically useful, and effective marketing tools all in one.

Sources:

Brand Identity Definition | Investopedia

The Power Of Sustainable Packaging | Forbes

How Important Is Packaging in Marketing a Product? | LinkedIn