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What Service does your company offer, is there a particular product that expresses what the company is about?
If you’re a modern, trendy digital marketing agency, you’re not going to want to give potential customers a fridge magnet! That just wouldn’t suit the business vibe. On the other hand, fridge magnets are an excellent promotional item for Restaurants with local delivery. Imagine the power of your local restaurant’s number tempting a potential customer, every time they’re hungry and heading for the fridge!
Effective promotional product marketing isn’t a matter of slapping a logo on something and hoping for the best. You want to strategically select your promotional products, based on your businesses services and customer base to ensure a return on the investment.
What are your Marketing Goals?
There are two main marketing objectives that promotional Items are incredibly efficient at achieving: Impressions and Brand Familiarity.
Typically marketers break up the stages a customer goes through when discovering and purchasing a product or service, as well as hopefully becoming a brand advocate. They call this process “the customer journey” it’s a useful theoretical model to map the various touch points that the marketers should make with a companies audience to help convince them to buy your product, have positive feelings towards the brand and become a loyal customer.
Depending on the particularities of the model the stages very slightly but a typical customer journey looks something like;
(image credit: Udacity)
Promotional items are powerful marketing touch-points for the first and last stage of the journey.
Awareness is whether potential customers have heard of your brand. Or they might have a problem and not be aware that your company offers a specific solution. If they don’t know you exist there is no way they will come to your business to find a solution. Promotional products are an incredibly cost-effective channel for reaching audiences in the Awareness stage as the cost per impressions are so low compared to other marketing channels (See the previous blog post).
Similarly, promotional items are great for the Post action stage of the customer journey. Think of the legions of fans who wear tour t-shirts from bands they admire; this merchandise is essentially a post action promotional item. Giving away promotional items can turn your loyal patrons into “brand ambassadors”. A simple t-shirt with your company logo on the chest of a loyal customer is incredible for brand recognition. The effects of this may even be amplified in the digital age with people sharing images of themselves wearing promotional items across social media.
What will be your method of distribution?
If you’re planning on distributing your promotional products via a traditional direct mail campaign, then you’re going to need something light and flat. Whereas if your promotional items are given away at a conference, there will likely be fewer restrictions on the type of products that you can choose. If your items aren’t going to be given directly to the customers in person, you probably don’t want to go with a product that is fragile and relatively heavy, like a ceramic mug. This may sounds like common sense but many a company has fallen into the trap of selecting the product before the means of distribution.
Who is your audience?
If you’re a larger company with more products and services, your audience likely doesn’t it may be wise to segment your audience and select different products based on their characteristics. An 18-25’s segment may be more likely to appreciate one type of product than 25-50’s
Case Study: Gold’s Gym
Gold’s Gym is one of the most recognisable Gym brands in the world. It’s gained iconic, almost legendary status. A considerable part of the businesses brand awareness strategy was related to its strategic, audience-focused use of promotional products. All of the promotional products Gold’s Gym uses incredibly well targeted to their bodybuilding clientele. Their use of promotional products includes items like Muscle vests; fitted t-shirts (to show off those guns) as well as functional equipment for lifting like wrist straps. The wearing of these promotional products by famous bodybuilders helped Gold’s Gym gain its iconic status.
The Importance of Quality
It’s important to recognize that promotional items leave lasting impressions, handing out a promotional item that is completely impractical, serves no function or is of poor quality is probably worse than not handing out anything. This is why Promote It enables brands to sample their promotional items before making a decision, this way you can be sure you’re buying a high-quality item.
If you’re interested in buying branded products to help promote your business have a look through our extensive product range. Or get in contact with Promote it today.
