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A company car is already doing a job. It takes employees to meetings, carries equipment, visits customers, and moves around town every day. But while it is doing all that, it could also be helping people remember your business.
The wider reach of out-of-home advertising also shows why vehicle wrap advertising can be useful. In a 2022 survey, the Out of Home Advertising Association of America and Morning Consult found that 78% of adults who noticed OOH advertising had engaged with an ad within the previous 60 days. Vehicle advertising can give a business repeated exposure without requiring the vehicle to make a special trip for marketing purposes.
The key is making the vehicle easy to understand at a glance. A good wrap should tell people who you are, what you do, and how to find you without asking them to study the design.
Here are some ways to make your company vehicle work harder for your business.
1. Make Your Brand Easy to Recognize
The first job of a company vehicle is to make your business recognizable. Your logo, business name, colors, and contact details should be easy to see from a reasonable distance. If the vehicle is moving through traffic, people may only have a few seconds to notice it.
That means a complicated design can work against you. Too many colors, small words, or several competing messages can make the vehicle harder to understand.
Think about the one thing you want someone to remember. For a plumber, it might be the company name and phone number. For a catering company, it could be the brand and a simple website. The design should support that main message instead of competing with it.
2. Use the Vehicle as a Marketing Space
A company vehicle gives you a large surface that can be used to communicate with potential customers wherever it goes. This is particularly useful for businesses that serve local areas. A contractor’s van traveling between jobs, a delivery vehicle moving around town, or a food truck parked at busy locations can all put the brand in front of people who may eventually need its services.
This is where business vehicle wraps can become more than a change in appearance. A wrap can turn an ordinary company car, van, truck, trailer, or fleet vehicle into a moving part of the company’s marketing.
The design should be built around how the vehicle will actually be used. A van that spends most of its time on local roads may need a different message from a truck that travels long distances.
3. Keep the Message Simple
More information does not always make an advertisement more useful.
A moving vehicle is not the place for a paragraph about everything your company offers. People need to understand the message quickly.
A simple design might include:
- Your business name or logo
- A short description of what you do
- A phone number or website
- A simple call to action
- A strong image or visual element when appropriate
The exact combination depends on the business, but the goal stays the same: make the message easy to remember.
In practice, it can help to look at the vehicle from a distance before approving the final design. If you have to walk close to it to read the phone number, the text may be too small.
4. Match the Wrap to the Vehicle and Its Role
The type of vehicle should influence the advertising wrap design from the beginning. Guidance published by RoadRunner Wraps recommends considering the vehicle’s configuration, the work it performs, and the customers the business wants to reach when planning the graphics. That makes sense because not every company vehicle needs the same treatment.
A small car may work well with a partial wrap or carefully placed graphics. A large van has more room for a detailed design, while a box truck or trailer can provide a much larger advertising surface. Think about where the main message will appear, which areas are most visible, and how the design will look when the vehicle is parked as well as when it is moving.
A van that spends most of its time in local neighborhoods may need a different message from a truck that travels between commercial sites or covers longer distances. The available space, vehicle shape, driving routes, and type of customers can all affect how the graphics should be arranged.
5. Think Beyond One Vehicle
You do not need a huge fleet to make vehicle advertising useful. One well-designed company car can keep your brand visible during normal business activity. If the company grows and adds more vehicles, the same branding can be extended across the fleet.
RoadRunner Wraps says it has completed more than 70,000 vehicles and works with both individual vehicles and large fleets. The company also offers volume discounts based on fleet size.
For a growing business, this makes it worth thinking about branding before every new vehicle is added. Having a consistent design makes the fleet easier to recognize and can prevent every new vehicle from becoming a separate design project.
Key Takeaway
The best results of business vehicle wraps come from keeping the message clear, matching the design to the vehicle, and making sure customers can quickly understand what the company does.
Vehicle wraps are also not limited to full coverage. Partial wraps, decals, and lettering can provide different ways to put a business name and message on a vehicle depending on the company’s needs and budget.
When business vehicle wraps are treated as part of the marketing strategy rather than decoration, a company car can do more than get from one place to another. It can keep working for the brand every time it hits the road.
