Racine County Eye
Journalism that serves
What is the best way to generate brand awareness for your company in 2022? There are probably many different answers in marketing that you could hear, from social media initiatives to artificial intelligence to traditional advertising like television or radio. It all depends on the specific industry and business niche that a brand occupies.
One method that does not receive as many accolades is promotional product marketing. This strategy involves ordering custom-printed items that can be given away to increase a brand’s exposure to the public. Typically, businesses will sell or freely give promotional products to loyal customers, employees, and members of the local community. The reason this strategy can still be effective in 2022 is that it is cost-effective and can lead to many impressions with potential customers.
However, investing in promotional items is not a perfect solution for every business. Not every audience is interested in every item you may give away. Plus, if a target audience is not being reached, then your campaign will result in very few changes to your sales numbers, making the strategy a waste of money. The key to a successful promotional product marketing campaign is a winning strategy, which requires several factors.
The ideal customer behaves in a certain way based on their life circumstances. They make purchasing decisions based on emotions, which means you need to connect with them and understand them to turn them into an actual customer. This is also needed to have a targeted promotional product campaign that will increase brand awareness with the people that are most likely to buy what you are selling.
If you, as a business owner or marketing decision-maker, do not have several buyer personas to consider, then it is time to change that. These avatars can guide your promotional product strategy and inform every decision from what products to buy to where they should be given away. The more connected your business is to its target audience, the more likely you are to create a promotional product campaign that generates leads and increases brand recognition with your ideal customers.
When you understand the nature of your target audience and what drives them, you can make better decisions about which promotional items to invest in. If your business is focused on environmentally-friendly products or services, investing in items made from recycled materials would be a great way to go.
There are so many options for branded merchandise that you could give away. Hoodies, custom pens, phone stands, stadium cushions, koozies, notebooks, stress balls, and paperweights could all be useful for audiences in different circumstances. The key to a successful selection is knowing what your ideal customer would use regularly. Maybe flash drives would not be particularly helpful to your customer niche. Are there a lot of sports fans in your base? Rally towels and foam fingers might be more effective.
No marketing initiative occurs in a vacuum. Your overall strategy probably uses multiple channels to communicate with current and potential customers, so there is no reason why you cannot integrate these with your promotional product campaign.
Say, for example, you want to grow your construction business. You probably rely on a mix of digital marketing and word-of-mouth to entice new customers. You can use these strategies to spread the word about another marketing campaign, such as a branded merchandise initiative. Share contests with these items for prizes on social media and through email. Create some printed materials that tell people about a chance to win a free hoodie or collect a koozie when they make a purchase online or in-store. Cross-media integration for your promotional products can increase the reach of the giveaways, leading to greater brand exposure with your target audience.
The temptation could be to order a huge number of smaller and cheaper items to give them away to more people. That does not automatically result in more impressions. In fact, it could result in a smaller reach. Sometimes, one quality product can outweigh 100 very cheap products.
What do you think would generally create more impressions? 10 well-designed t-shirts with your logo on them or 100 staplers? Those shirts will be used in public far more often and are more likely to catch the eye of others. Though there is a place for smaller items in greater numbers, it might be more effective to invest in a few high-quality items instead.
Having specific benchmarks to reach for is a necessary aspect of any marketing campaign. If you plan to invest in promotional products, make sure that you build a strategy before you start spending precious resources on items that you aren’t sure what to do with yet.
How will promotional products help you achieve the business marketing goals that you have laid out? If you cannot answer that question, then you need to go back to the drawing board before you invest in any branded items.
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