Stickers in Telegram are not only a way to express emotions during correspondence. There is another non-obvious use of them – to help promote a business or personal brand. This is a cheap (or even free) marketing tool that can be created without any help.

In this article, we will tell you how to make your own stickers for Telegram, how they can help your business and what is important to know when creating stickers for promotion.

Why create your own stickers

The main tasks that branded stickers solve are increasing brand awareness, reminding customers about themselves and increasing trust on their part. These stickers work to retain old customers and attract new ones.

How exactly does attracting customers with stickers work:

Telegram users can save stickers to their library and share them with others. You send a sticker to a customer, he saves the stickerpack, sends it to a friend, that friend sends it to his friend, and so on. If the stickerpack is of high quality and viral, it will easily spread to other users. They may become interested in your company and become customers. Or subscribe to your Telegram Channel. Here is such an interesting way from a fun sticker to a new customer. For personal brand promotion, the principle is the same.

Important: For this to work, stickers must be associated with your brand. We’ll come back to this point.

With the help of stickers, you can:

• Promote a particular brand, company and product;
• attract attention to promotions and events;
• Promote your Telegram channel;

A couple of examples of using Telegram stickers for promotion:

#1. Fun stickers for underwear brand TEZENIS.

#2. Stickers for promotion of Telegram channel “Office Wars”.

One of the cool things about Telegram is that all the stickers in it are free. Unlike competitors Viber and WhatsApp, where most of the stickers are sold for money. Therefore, they are willingly saved and distributed.

Another big plus in favor of stickers is that they have an unlimited lifespan. As long as they are used, they continue to be a marketing tool.

By the way, you can create stickers not only for customers, but also for employees. Cheerful stickers loosen up the atmosphere in the team and can be one of the tools of team building. In order for employees to actively use stickers, you need to use phrases that are most often heard in the team.

Types of stickers and technical requirements

Any user of the messenger can create his own free sticker pack. There are several types of stickers in Telegram:

• Static illustrations.

• Animated stickers.

• Stickers from photos or pictures (with or without a border).

• Text (a sticker in the form of word combinations or phrases using a beautiful font).

For the first two types of stickers you need to be able to draw and work with programs like Adobe Illustrator (for static), Adobe After Effects or Adobe Animate (for animated). If you don’t have the skills, you need to look for artists.

You can create text and photo stickers yourself using only Photoshop. They are not as bright as illustrated ones and not always viral, but they work too.

P.S. To promote a brand, it’s still better to make illustrated stickers. Although this is more complicated than text and photo stickers.

Technical requirements for stickers in Telegram

• file size: 512*512 pixels;
• weight: up to 350 Kb per sticker;
• color space: RGB;
• format for static stickers: PNG with transparency;
• format for animated: telegram special format TGS, made in After Effects with the plugin Bodymovin-TG.

Creating stickers for Telegram: step-by-step instructions

Let’s show you how to create a simple illustrated sticker. An important point – in order to draw the sticker, it is desirable to have a graphic tablet and install Adobe Illustrator (or another graphic editor).

If you don’t have a tablet, you can learn the Pen tool or use the Brush and Pencil tools.

Now to the steps.

Step 1. think of a character and create a sketch. You can doodle on paper with a pencil or sketch in the same graphic editor. Since there should be several stickers in a pack, it is desirable to think up and sketch 8-10 variants on average. More are possible. We take a picture or scan the drawing and add the file to Adobe Illustrator as an independent layer. We make it more transparent so it does not distract from the drawing.

Step 2. Now we have to circle the drawing. We create a new layer, you can call it “Stroke” or “Stroke. We use the tool “Paint Brush Tool” if we draw with a tablet, or “Pen” if we draw with a mouse.

Step 3. We create a separate layer “Color” and paint over it with the Blob Brush Tool. The layer with the color should be placed under the layer with the outline, so it does not go beyond the stroke.

Step 4. If desired, you can create a separate layer with highlights of lighter colors, and apply a gradient effect to the fill to give the sketch a glossy look.

Step 5. save the result and draw some more stickers in the same style.

P.S. If creating from scratch is not your thing, you can buy stock licensed stickerpacks in vector format and adapt them for your business. That is, you should not draw from scratch, but just edit them and make them more unique (but only if the license allows it).

How to add stickers to Telegram – instructions

In order for the stickers to appear in Telegram, they need to be added there through a special bot. You will need the desktop version of Telegram.

Step 1: Launch Stickers Bot (@stickers).

Step 2. The bot shows you hints – what command is responsible for what. Since we are creating a new pack, we will use the command /newpack.

Step 3. Create a name for the pack. This step is very important. Since the article is about stickers for promotion, the name of the pack should also fulfill this role. You can write the name of a brand.

By the way, you can specify the link to the site without https:// – it will still be clickable.

Step 4. Drag and drop the first sticker from the sticker pack into the dialog window. Bot will suggest you what format and size you want. You have to add without compression. Bot will suggest adding a description to the sticker, ignore it, click “Send”.

Step 5. choose smiley, that corresponds to your post-it.

Step 6. to publish the sticker, send the /publish command.

Step 7. After publishing, the bot will offer you to choose the address to set the stickers. It’s like this: https://t.me/addstickers/name, where name is your word, for example, https://t.me/addstickers/postiumru. This is the link you will use to distribute stickers outside of Telegram.

Step 8. Add the rest of the stickers to the sticker pack with the /addsticker command. The bot prompts you to select the set where you want to add the sticker.

How to distribute branded stickers

Just by adding a stickerpack to Telegram and getting a link to it, promotion will not start. Telegram does not have a sticker marketplace like Viber. You have to distribute branded stickers yourself until they start promoting themselves. Here are a few ways to show your stickers to your Telegram audience:

– Offer stickerpacks to Telegram directories. These are channels where different stickers are posted. You can find them on Telegram by the keywords “Stickers” or “Stickers.” But it is easier to find directories at telegros.ru and tlgrm.ru. The point is to offer your stickers in these channels on the rights of advertising, and somewhere they can be placed for free.

– Use in correspondence with customers. This is the most obvious way to show stickers to customers.

– Post them in group chats. You can correspond in chats on third-party topics and use your stickers to express emotion. The goal is just to get them seen by other chat participants.

– Promote a link to the stickerpack on your website, social networks, or YouTube channel with an offer to your subscribers to download and start using in Telegram.

– Offer bonuses to stickerpack users. Example – stickers to promote a TV series and an online movie theater. To attract attention to the stickers offer to look for a promo code inside the stickerpack (most likely, it was written into the name when the set of stickers was created).

– If you hold offline events it is possible to make a stand in the form of a sticker or a small selfie area. Next to it should be a QR code with a link to the sticker pack. There are several sites that generate QR codes, such as qr-code-generator.com and qrcoder.ru.

– Distribute with the product. A leaflet with an image of QR-code stickers and an offer to download them can be placed in the package of the product. This can be presented as a “gift or bonus” to the customer for his purchase. A trifle, but pleasant.

In general, the task is to make your stickers noticed and start using them. If users appreciate them, they will start to distribute them themselves.

A good way to draw attention to your stickers and achieve a viral effect is to use infotainment when creating them.

Important points when creating stickers for promotion

What should be the stickers created for the purpose of promotion:

• Quality. Even such a small thing as a picture in the messenger can affect the perception of the brand. The thought of the average man is simple – if the company saved on stickers, maybe the quality of the goods is not all right?
• Brand association. This is reflected both in the name of the sticker pack and in the stickers themselves. This could be, as an example, a character used in brand advertising or a sticker with corporate colors. An example is VTB stickers in corporate blue colors.

• Reflect in stickers the emotions that one will want to use. That is, be relevant in most conversations. This also affects the desire to download the set.

We also advise keeping track of sticker statistics – the number of uses, installations, and deletions. If you plan to create multiple stickerpacks, you can figure out which audiences come in best and focus on creating similar ones.

Conclusion

For messenger users, stickers are just fun, but for businesses they can be an effective marketing tool. The number of messenger and social network users is growing every year. It is necessary to keep up with the times and use modern methods of attraction, including such methods.