How to Design Premium Packaging for Social Media

Social media and premium packaging may seem the product of an odd matchmaking session. But there is a good reason why beautifully-wrapped goods make inroads across platforms at any time of year - they perfectly complement each other’s efforts.

Once upon a time, the only person who would see your package was your customer. So, it would be a fair assumption to say that premium packaging might not offer the best ROI.

But social media has been a total gamechanger in this area. Instead of your packaging being seen by an individual, it can be enjoyed by an audience of millions - if you play your cards right!

If you focus your efforts on cultivating a brand image that your customers want to share, you have a recipe for a more successful, long-term strategy. When you are able to motivate customers to discuss your brand with others, it’s far more effective than a paid ad placement. The conversation is authentic, rather than feeling forced and intrusive.

So, the better-presented your products are, the higher the likelihood is that your customers will want to share it. In fact, two-thirds of consumers say they are more likely to share a purchase online if it comes in premium packaging!

By harnessing these conversations, you also have a virtual goldmine of user-generated content right at your fingertips.

In other words, this is the effect of social media - it amplifies your brand’s reach far beyond your initial customer base.



Why Social Media Matters

Every Customer is an Influencer

Today, there is a potential audience for just about everything that we do as consumers. Whether it’s a trip to the beach, going to a concert, or our latest online purchase arriving, we can share all of these moments in an instant.

What does this mean? That on some level, every one of your customers is an influencer. If you treat them as such through how you interact with them, you will see a big uptick in customer loyalty.

This is where the role of packaging comes in. It expresses to your customers how much they matter to your brand, and that the customer experience is just as significant as the product. This is the kind of content that will you memorable to an online audience - and being memorable is exactly what makes your brand worth sharing!

Extending Your Organic Reach

Conventional wisdom tells us that to spread the word about your brand, you need to get the word out in as many places as possible. But privileging the quantity of your advertising (A.K.A putting out as many paid ads as possible) over quality is a classic misstep.

Let’s be honest: We all hate it when ads clog up our feeds. It’s irritating, and takes space away from viewing content from people or brands that we matter to us. In fact, 91% of people say that ads are more intrusive today than they were 2-3 years ago.

That isn’t to say that conventional advertising on these platforms has no return. Rather, it simply isn’t as efficient as organic marketing techniques. Why? Because it’s hard to target the right people.

At noissue, social media has always played a central role in how many of our customers discover our brand, usually through its use by brands they already follow and admire. This kind of endorsement by fellow businesses plays a key role in building an engaged community online - which in turn boosts your branding efforts.

For this reason, It’s not unusual for our customers to hire professional photographers to get insta-worthy shots for their feeds. It might sound extreme to some, but when social media is the modern incarnation of word of mouth, this outlook is an important one.

It’s well known that we trust the opinions of people we know far more than what an ad tells us: 92% of us feel this way, in fact! Having customers recommend you to others and even post about you online is by far the most valuable kind of engagement you can receive as a business.

So, why Premium Packaging?

Packaging is often characterized more by functionality than its marketing capabilities. Yet the personal interactions we have with packaging are far more intimate than we might think. That anticipation of unwrapping a parcel - the ‘unboxing’ experience - is one that we all experience and understand, regardless of age, culture, or any other demographic.

The growing popularity of unboxing videos supports this - we all want to feel as though we have received something unique and special. Thus, there is a shared visceral pleasure to unboxing which can be easily leveraged in your social media marketing.

Custom packaging provides some unique opportunities for fostering customer engagement. If you only treat your packaging as a container, you will never see a great return on this essential investment. But if you also use it as a vehicle to showcase your brand, you will make this cost infinitely more valuable.

A custom packaging experience that lends itself to visual content creates a valuable opportunity. Investing in a curated brand narrative means the consumer effectively does your marketing for you!

Here are our top tips for stretching your packaging a little bit further online:



Putting Your Brand Front and Center

If you are going to put in the effort to design custom packaging, you want to make sure that it sparks brand recognition and recall. Otherwise, it’s not going to help build that end-to-end experience. If someone is scrolling down their feed and an image of your packaging comes up, you want that person to be able to pick out those key identifying features at a glance.

Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest run off great aesthetics, but feeds are crowded and the bar for success is high. An eye-catching logo or fun graphics is a must if you are going to capture those infamously short attention spans!

Above is a great example from Brynn & Co. Their custom tissue paper design neatly incorporates their name, while their custom sticker creates a strong focal point that affirms this important brand information.

Add Some Video Content

We all know that video content really helps to liven up a brand’s feed. However, it can be tough to find ongoing sources of inspiration. Your packaging presents a great avenue to get your customers involved with the daily goings-on of your brand.

Many consumers know little about how a small business functions behind the scenes, especially for single-person operations without a team of staff to keep things running. Revealing the tricks of the trade will help your followers to build a stronger connection with the person behind the brand they love:

Order fulfillment: A timelapse of you putting together your customer orders (complete with your gorgeous packaging, of course!) is a fun and compelling glimpse at the realities of running a business.

An old-fashioned unboxing: Unboxing videos are short, sweet, and very compelling - especially when you put your own twist on the genre.


Creating a Social Media Campaign Around it

The launch of your custom packaging provides a great opportunity to draw attention to what makes you distinct as a brand: your customer experience. Publicizing this through a social media campaign showcases your value-added approach to current and prospective customers in a really tangible way: They get to imagine themselves receiving your packages, which is a pretty powerful marketing pitch!

For example, you could create a specific branded hashtag to encourage our customers to use to share their unboxing experiences online. It gives your customers a strong sense of validation when you share their content, which in turn fosters greater loyalty towards your brand. It's an excellent way of extending the branding experience far beyond the product itself.



In short, packaging your products well leads to customer satisfaction, and an aesthetically pleasing experience that they will be inclined to share online. This is all helps to foster a positive perception of your brand, which builds in turn brand loyalty and customer retention.

If this all sounds good to you (and we are sure it does) check out our range of custom packaging on offer!