20 Campaign Poster Ideas To Drive Audience Action
Suhith Kumar RN - January 21, 2022 - Leave your thoughts.
Whether you’re running a political election campaign, a student-council election, a health awareness campaign such as for COVID-19, or a product launch announcement, posters are arguably the most effective tool to drive results. Versatility, visibility, flexibility, and affordability are among the advantages of using campaign posters. They help convey the right message to your audience and convince them to take action.
Ever since the discovery of the first printing press, posters have been widely used as a marketing and advertising tool. They were also among the foremost means of communication in the fast-growing cities of America and Europe in the 1870s.
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To start with, posters mainly consisted of text and contained information pertaining to commercial and public announcements, forthcoming events, polls, to name a few. Nowadays, a combination of text and graphical elements is used in poster designs, and posters are created and distributed digitally more often.
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Campaign Poster Ideas (Examples)
Let’s now look at the best poster ideas and examples for your digital, political, social media, and health awareness campaigns.
Idea #1: Man Wearing Face Mask No Mask No Entry Poster
With mask-wearing remaining critical for health protection, use this poster to encourage and alert people to wear face masks before entering the office premises. The messaging is clear and is accompanied by the image of a man wearing a face mask which is available at the reception desk (or customize the copy to wherever it’s available in your case).
Idea #2: Make Your Vote Count Poster
Use this traditional campaign poster to get maximum votes for an upcoming student election or political election to elect a candidate. “Make your vote count” is a powerful slogan that encourages people to vote. And the design, while being minimalist, helps the audience pay attention to the key part of the campaign poster and absorb the message.
Idea #3: Hardcore Weightlifting and Gym Enrollment Poster Template
Need to drive sign-ups and inquiries to your gymnasium or fitness center? This poster is tailored just for you. It has a well-defined, persuasive slogan along with a clear image conveying that the gym is suited to anyone looking to build muscle and achieve a toned physique. Simply customize the web address, add social media links to the respective icons, and start distributing to achieve your campaign goal.
Idea #4: Valentine’s Day Restaurant Offer Promotion Poster
This poster is ideal for restaurants and food outlets that are promoting special offers ahead of Valentine’s Day to invite guests and increase dine-ins. The copy includes all the essential information and needs little customization before use.
Idea #5: Black Background Black Friday Deal Poster
Shop owners planning campaigns to boost Black Friday deals (Black Friday is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year) can use this poster to achieve their goal. The poster has a minimalist design along with clear messaging, which clarifies that Black Friday deals are being promoted at 50% OFF. It also comes with a CTA button which needs to be customized to drive buyer action.
Idea #6: Restaurant Weekend Menu Advertisement Poster
Use this poster to increase the number of dine-ins at your restaurant this weekend. The design is clear and elegant, and the copy clarifies that a restaurant is promoting a weekend menu at 30% OFF. Based on your menu offerings and discount rate, the copy might need a bit of customization before use.
Idea #7: Indigo And Orange Professional Business Poster
This poster is tailor-made for B2B businesses and agencies that are aiming to drive customer acquisition. You can make use of this professional poster to run your campaigns in different channels like Shopify and Etsy to expand your brand. The poster wears a professional look. Its layout is clear and offers users the option to customize the copy as per their needs. You should include your logo and brand name before use.
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Idea #8: Save The Earth Environmental Poster
Running an environmental awareness campaign with global warming the central theme? This poster is just for you. It requires little to no customization, yet contains a powerful message designed to increase awareness about saving planet earth and the persisting threat of global warming.
Idea #9: Jazz Music Rewind With Musical Instruments Poster
Event organizers prepping to organize a music festival in the town or city can use this poster to draw music lovers’ attention. It’s colorful and the combination of bold and light fonts highlights the key features of the music fest and organizer of the event. It requires little customization to drive inquiries and bookings for the event.
Idea #10: Orange Happy Diwali Poster
This poster is perfect for campaigns whose main objective is to drive brand awareness and maximize audience reach. It is designed for use on the occasion of Diwali, also known as the festival of lights, and can help brands to grab the attention of their target audience. It requires no customization before use.
Idea #11: Save Wildlife Conservation Awareness Event Poster
If you’re conducting a webinar or an in-person conference whose theme is wildlife conservation, this poster is tailored just for you. It comes with a punchy slogan “Act now before it’s too late”, which instills a sense of urgency in the audience and piques their interest in attending the event to know how they can help with wildlife conservation. The look of the poster is further enhanced by the imagery that draws the audience’s focus.
Idea #12: Minimalist Monday Motivation Poster
Use this poster to motivate employees and inspire people to create the right opportunity to flourish in their careers and lives. This is a quote poster that carries a powerful message and is best used on working days as people look for inspiration to get them going.
Idea #13: White And Black Motivational Quote Poster
This is another quote poster designed to improve the morale of the workforce, but it also is pertinent in settings such as schools and colleges. Use this poster to drive productivity and get the best out of people. Ensure appropriate placement for maximum visibility and to drive audience action.
Idea #14: Back To School Announcement Poster
Schools and colleges ready to welcome students back to school after term or summer holidays can use this poster to announce and alert students (and parents) about reopening dates. The designer has used a bold typeface to highlight the central message of the poster, while the color scheme provides a warm look to draw and hold the audience’s attention.
Idea #15: Summer Flash Sale Announcement Poster
Retailers and sellers can use this poster to announce an upcoming summer flash sale at their brick and mortar or online store. Just customize the web address and the offer margin before printing and distributing to achieve your campaign goal.
Idea #16: Light Bulb Energy Conservation Awareness Poster
This is an excellent awareness campaign poster if the event theme is about energy and electricity conservation. If you want to get maximum sign-ups to the event and raise awareness among your target audience, this poster will help achieve your campaign goals.
Idea #17: Blue And Black Career Expo Poster
Use this career expo poster to drive more professionals to attend the career expo and make the most of the event to improve their careers. It’s a professional poster design along with a clear copy that needs a little customization before use.
Idea #18: Racial Discrimination Awareness Poster
Use this awareness campaign poster to draw people’s attention and raise awareness about racial discrimination in society. The poster includes a powerful image of two people intertwining their hands to showcase togetherness despite their differences. The copy requires no customization and can be used online and outdoors to maximize the reach.
Idea #19: International Women’s Day Conference Promotion Poster
This poster is perfect to promote conferences and webinars centered around International Women’s Day and celebrating “the power of womanhood”. The copy is self-explanatory and may require little customization before printing and distributing to reach the target audience.
Idea #20: Happy Holi Sale Informational Poster
Use this poster to promote special sales and shopping offers on the occasion of Holi, the festival of colors. The poster background clearly illustrates the theme of the poster. A combination of bold and light typefaces is used for the poster copy, which may need to be customized based on your exact offers.
How To Design A Campaign Poster
This type of poster is different from an educational or school poster, though it shares some of the common poster design principles.
Let’s look at the key principles that designers must employ when they create a campaign poster.
Ensure The Theme Is Clear
As soon as the audience sees the poster, they must know if it’s a political campaign poster, a medical poster, or another.
For political posters, it’s best to use an image of the candidate, along with their name, and the position they are contesting for. The same is true for court elections and school elections too.
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For health awareness and medical posters, use symbols or images of precautionary measures (mask-wearing, for example) to highlight how people can protect themselves from flu, or transmissible disease.
Write A Compelling Slogan
Just as in the iconic poster examples, a campaign poster’s slogan must be evocative, strike a chord with the people, persuade them to join a cause or rally against injustice, and so on.
Slogans are a key part of a campaign poster and their ideal length is four words or less. Combine the slogan with a contextual message to reinforce the message your audience needs to know. Or, use a slogan generator to ease this process and get more ideas for your drafts.
Create In Multiple Formats
Even in today’s digital age, printed posters remain effective and have an audience that prefers them in print format, distributed in prominent parts of the town or city.
Also, however, more people than ever are consuming information online and spending several hours (or more) of their day glued to laptops, smartphones, and digital devices.
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Therefore, create your campaign poster in PDF, JPEG, PNG, and other formats for distribution across multiple channels and to reach the maximum audience.
Make It Impactful
Posters must turn heads, hold the audience’s attention and convey the essential information in a matter of seconds. Make sure your poster ticks all these boxes before finalizing the design. In other words, these are requisites for an impactful, action-driven poster.
The poster needs to be impactful in every way: that is, with its color palette, messaging, and its design.
Iconic Campaign Posters
For decades, campaign posters have been a prominent tool for persuasion. Sure, with time, the way posters are designed and distributed has changed, but they remain a powerful tool to achieve a wide range of campaign goals.
Let’s look at a couple of the iconic, persuasive campaign posters from the decades past.
The “I Want You” poster by famous illustrator James Montgomery Flagg, was used by the US Army during World War I to recruit soldiers. A whopping four million copies of the poster were printed between 1917 and 1918. The poster’s popularity grew to such an extent that it was used to recruit troops during World War II, too.
“We Can Do It” by American graphic artist J. Howard Miller for Westinghouse Electric is another iconic campaign poster aimed at boosting the female workers’ morale. Though it was designed during World War II, it was rediscovered during the 1980s, when it was used to promote political issues and feminism. The poster is also called “Rosie the Riveter” in tribute to a female war production worker. The same image was included as a campaign tool for American politicians in 2008 and, two years later, was reworked to commemorate Julia Eileen Gillard becoming Australia’s first woman prime minister.
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“Hope” poster by American contemporary artist Shepard Fairey is renowned for helping change America’s political history. The poster, according to an article on CNN, “Brilliantly captured the country’s need for optimism and hopefulness after eight…years of George Bush II.”
The article adds: “Many believe this poster inspired enough voters to give Obama the edge that he needed to win.”
Following the rapid growth of communication channels, posters have evolved into more of a strategically used, visual element of branding for companies. However, whether in print or digital, a well-designed poster can help a company’s campaign be successful.
Conclusion
Posters have, for decades, been an effective medium for brands, political parties, business owners, educational institutions, and healthcare companies to achieve their campaign goals. The “I Want You”, “We Can Do It” and the “Hope” posters are testament to the effectiveness and impact of posters if designed right.
For a campaign poster to be successful, it must:
- Have a clear theme
- Have a compelling slogan
- Be designed in multiple formats
- Be impactful
A free online poster creator such as Picmaker offers a vast array of campaign poster ideas and templates that can be customized in minutes. Powered by several Artificial Intelligence-based features such as MAD Button and Background Remover, Picmaker helps fast-track the process of designing a poster. That’s not all: use Brand Kit to ensure your campaign poster is on-brand by uploading custom fonts, brand colors, and more, and incorporate them in your design.
Once you’ve designed the poster, you can download it in PDF, JPEG, and PNG formats to promote your campaign online and offline. You can also directly share your campaign poster on your favorite social media channel to achieve goals such as brand awareness, inquiries, sales, and more.
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