Harness The Power Of The Promotional Product

When it comes to marketing, there are certainly worse times to be a small business owner. While the most effective marketing tactics and channels were once exclusive to large, highly successful firms, it’s now easier than ever for fledgling companies to leverage content marketing, PPC, and other great digital marketing tactics. However, once you’ve grown enough, it’s important to apply more traditional marketing tactics, such as in-person networking, direct mail and so on. Here, we’ve listed some of the best advice for using one particular timeless marketing tactic: promotional items. I hope it guides you in the right direction!
Make Sure You’re Being Consistent
This is a tip that you can apply to pretty much any facet of your marketing strategy, but promotional items are one area which a lot of people tend to neglect it. If you don’t establish and maintain a consistent look and feel to your marketing materials, both digital and traditional, then you’ll be limiting yourself in terms of what it can achieve. A clumsy, disjointed tone in your marketing materials will prevent your target market from trusting you as much as they should, and can even cause confusion within the organisation about your brand identity. Being consistent can be as simple as applying the same brand colours to all your materials, or a certain font. Just make sure you stick to a certain program, and your customers are much more likely to remember you.
Make Sure People Want Your Items
 
The last time you went to a trade show and came away with a gift bag, think about what you held onto and what you threw away. In these environments, there’s nothing worse than being showered with random junk that you’re going to throw away the first opportunity you get. Unfortunately, this is one of the most common slip-ups business owners make when they first try to leverage promotional products. Don’t become another one in the crowd, and make sure all your promotional items are things that people are actually going to want! There’s a massive range of different promotional items you can invest in, from branded confectionary to USB sticks to these printed drink bottles from dynamicgift.com.au. Some of these are fairly universal, whereas others are going to be better suited to a more niched target market. Make sure you’re keeping your ideal customer persona in mind when browsing these items, and buying ones with the best chance of being kept and used. If you’re trying to attract other business owners or investors who travel a lot, use toiletry bags and luggage tags. If you’re targeting parents specifically, use chocolate and stress balls (aspirin would be going a little far). It’s also a good idea to do some recon on your main competitors, and avoid anything they’ll hand out en masse.
Leverage Partnerships and Events the Right Way
Just like with any kind of investment, you should always be looking out for opportunities that will help your investment to go further. This can come in a number of different guises, so don’t cheat yourself by keeping your vision too narrow. Think of any opportunities you may have to partner up with another business, ideally one that deals in some kind of complementary service or product, without actually being a competitor. Then, look for trade shows where you can both set up, and help each other out in achieving your respective networking goals. After you’ve had a chat with a potential lead, give them a goodie bag with some of your partner’s promotional items alongside yours, and they’ll do the same for you. Furthermore, you should make sure there’s someone taking high quality photos at the event, and that these are being shared and tagged, thereby giving you both greater reach. There are many ways you can leverage events and partnerships to get the best returns on your promotional items; use them!
Give Away Any Leftovers
Unless you’ve had an exceedingly successful trade show, you’re going to be left with a few leftover promotional items by the time you leave. If these items are versatile enough, promotional pens for instance, then you can hold onto them and use them in the next trade show or find some other platform for getting them out there. However, in a lot of cases, you may have chosen the items specifically because they suited a specific message or mien of your current marketing campaign. In the latter case, that doesn’t mean you have to consider these leftovers as wasted money! Announce a giveaway through your newsletter or social media channels, and use it to leverage your target market for some valuable insights. For example, you could announce that you’re giving away some branded pens, but in order to get one, people need to fill in a survey covering certain things that you want to know about your target market. As long as you’ve followed my earlier tip, and made sure the items are something your target market want, doing this will be much better than letting your items gather dust somewhere.
Get the Right Balance of Quality and Quantity
If you’ve been looking at promotional product deals for a while, and you’re torn between ordering a lot of cheap items and a smaller number of more expensive ones, then generally it’s better to go with quality over quantity. One of the biggest mistakes that small business owners make is turning up to a trade show with masses of poor-quality promotional items. If you were a potential investor on your way back from a  trade show, and you noticed that one company had given you something that seems on the verge of breaking, and another in the same niche that was of a quality you’d happily pay for, it’s going to have a pretty big impact on how they view each brand. It could be that the company which cheaped out on their promotionals had a better product or service, but there’s a fair chance they’ll never find that out! It’s better to give out ten high-quality items than a hundred shoddy ones!