Coaster Advertising: Its Working And Advantages

Coaster advertising, also known as drink coaster advertising, is a distinctive approach to advertising your brand. In a nutshell, it’s all about placing brand assets and messages on coasters at bars, restaurants, pop-ups, and events. These coasters can be made of absorbent paper or cardboard or from more durable materials like plastic, wood or metal. They serve a dual purpose: protecting tabletops from drink spills whilst operating as an advertising medium.

Brands, businesses and event organizers use coaster ads to:

• Raise brand awareness
• Advertise products
• Showcase services

They can also communicate brand messages to a captive audience. When customers or patrons place their drinks on these coasters, they naturally engage with anything printed on them. If you have created custom coasters with your adverts on them, you guarantee prolonged exposure to the messaging. All of this occurs in a relaxed, social atmosphere, which further enhances the effectiveness of your coaster adverts.

Creating and distributing coaster ads is quite simple. First, you need to find a service that can create bulk quantities of custom coasters with your unique designs on them. We can do this, with a wide range of coaster materials and personalization options at your disposal. You will then proceed like this:

1. Create your advert as a custom design, bearing in mind the proportions of the coasters.
2. Use our intuitive custom coaster design wizard to create the specifications for your coaster production and upload your advert design.
3. Determine the quantity of coasters you need. There are bulk discounts available, and you can save more the more you order.
4. When your coasters arrive, you can distribute them however you choose.

Distributing your coasters is key to the success of the coaster adverts. If you operate a bar or restaurant, place coasters on tables and your patrons will naturally use them. This puts them in close contact with your adverts for prolonged periods. In other environments, like events, you can give the coasters away as promotional items, and people will use them at home for the same basic effect.

The unique impact of drink coaster advertising lies in the high assimilation of the message. This happens because:

• The customer is exposed to the advert for a long period of time in very close quarters.
• They absorb the ad in a relaxed, social environment, making them more receptive to the message.

Having coasters produced is an inexpensive way to get your ads in front of a highly targeted audience. Create your design carefully to be eye-catching and engaging, making lasting impressions with people who are already engaging with your business.

When sponsoring the FIFA World Cup, a prominent beer brand used coaster advertising to great effect. They produced and distributed coasters that featured team flags and World Cup-related trivia questions for bars and pubs around the world. Clearly incorporating their logo helped cement their association with soccer and encouraged patrons to engage with the coaster content while boosting their brand presence. The result was a measurable increase in brand engagement and revenue as a result of coaster advertising.

This demonstrates the effectiveness of the targeted audience. People who were already interested in the World Cup were presented with these coasters in relaxed environments with friends. This turned those coasters into rich conversation points, driving direct engagement from a captive audience who would go on to purchase that brand of beer or, at the very least, become more aware of it.

A study from 2019 found that a person’s receptiveness to adverts is dependent on their emotional state. It found that, for audio ads, people are 35% more open to advertising when they are in a positive mood, which can mean:

• Relaxed
• Happy
• Excited
• Focused

The kinds of environments where people engage with coaster advertising are typically very relaxed. They may be in a restaurant, cafe, or bar, or even at home if they received the coaster as a promotional item. These environments are conducive to positive emotional states, like the ones listed above, and the close exposure to ads on coasters further enhances their effectiveness.

Reaching a targeted audience in a relaxed environment is quite unique to coaster ads. The audience experiences prolonged exposure to the content and is in very close quarters with it. Whether you make your own custom coasters or have them crafted professionally, this is a highly effective way of reaching your target audience.

If you are seeking specific benefits of drink coasters for your marketing, there are many. They help drive brand awareness and reach customers in the right place and at the right time. Let’s take a closer look at the full range of benefits of coaster advertising based on the experiences of our customers.

Drive Brand Awareness

It is a much-researched and known fact that increased brand awareness leads to increased sales. Customers are more likely to buy from a brand that they know and trust. When you operate a pop-up or run a restaurant, you already have engaged customers who are familiar with what you sell. Coaster advertising can create a lasting impression that helps them associate that experience with your brand.

Thus, by driving brand awareness in your customers, you gain loyalty and people who are more likely to recommend your business to others. All this with the use of simple customized coasters.

Reach Customers In The Right Place At The Right Time

If you are trying to promote a specific product or service, what better place to do it than while they are at your event or place of business? They are already connecting with your brand and experiencing what you have to offer, with the added bonus of being in a relaxed environment. If you use this opportunity to present them with custom personalized coasters containing your ads, you have a powerful method of reaching and influencing them.

Tailor your design to incorporate your branding and make connections with your audience in the right way for them. You know your customers, and you know what forms of communication they are receptive to. Use that to your advantage with your custom coaster design.

Extend Customer Engagement Time

Most advertisements are just seen in passing. Billboards, commercial breaks, and social media ads are easy to ignore and have only a few seconds to capture attention. But bar coaster advertising puts your audience in close quarters with the ad for prolonged periods.

They will interact with the coaster casually as they relax with friends, enjoying beverages and food while the advert is constantly in their field of vision. This significantly increases the chances of the advert grabbing their attention. What’s more, the mere exposure effect from this extended customer engagement time can help create trust and familiarity for your brand.

Drink Coasters Offer Advertising Flexibility

What are coasters used for? They are small pads or mats that create a barrier between surfaces and drink containers to prevent heat damage, scratches, and moisture exposure. This means they can be designed in many forms, and our custom coasters can be tailored to your preferences for:

• Shape
• Size
• Material
• Colors
• Custom visual elements
• Text

Essentially, you can present your advertisements in any way you wish with coaster advertising. What’s more, you have complete control over the branding and messaging of your custom designs, and you can expose customers to the coasters in different ways. Engage them at tables as they drink and dine or encourage engagement by giving coasters away as promotional items or loyalty rewards. It is a flexible solution that you can use in your own way.

Control Costs In Marketing Efforts

Another great feature of coaster advertising is that it enables you to take control of your marketing budget. When you design customized coasters with us, we make it very clear how much you will pay. If you need to order large quantities of these branded coasters for your business, we offer tiered discounts for bulk orders, meaning you will save more per coaster the larger your order is.

If you buy coasters suitable for repeated use, made from durable materials, you get maximum value for your investment as well. We provide comprehensive maintenance instructions on how to clean your coasters and prolong their lifespans. This enables you to access long-term marketing tools for a single upfront cost, driving brand engagement passively while you focus on running your day-to-day operations.

When you create designs for customized drink coasters, you can even align these physical items with your digital marketing efforts. QR codes can be printed with superb accuracy onto the coasters as part of the personalized design. This will entice customers to scan them and engage further with your brand online. Use the codes to simply link to your website or social media, or to direct people to your digital marketing assets like landing pages, surveys, and other interactive digital resources.

In this way, coasters can be integrated with your broader marketing efforts to gain online exposure. And they can be very effective at this, thanks to the points we have explored in this article. With prolonged exposure to your coaster advertising efforts in a relaxed environment, you will drive a targeted audience to connect with your brand on a deeper level, which leads to:

• Increased awareness
• Stronger brand loyalty
• More sales

Billboard advertising is known to be very effective at influencing spontaneous decisions, such as choosing something for lunch. However, beyond that, it is not known to be a powerful marketing technique for raising brand awareness or winning customer loyalty. Furthermore, it can cost several thousand dollars per week just to run a billboard ad, so its limited power to bring in business means you could be operating at a loss.

With coaster advertising, you make a single payment for the production and delivery of your customized coasters, and you have permanent additions to your bar or restaurant. You can also take them on the road to pop-ups and events to extend their reach. As we have explored in this article, they are highly influential marketing tools that drive brand engagement, win loyalty, and lead to increased revenue. In this way, they have far greater long-term profit potential than billboard ads.