Want to perfect your branded promotional products?

Giving out branded promotional products is a great way to extend your brand awareness. You can hand them out at trade fairs to encourage people to visit your stand and you can give them to your customers to remind them of your services. 

But where is the line between a promotional product that is useful and a promotional product that goes straight into the bin? How do you know what your customers will like to receive and what they will ignore? The key is to do your research. 

The Perfect Product for Your Business

One of the most obvious things businesses miss is that the product you choose to brand and give out must be relevant. An auto business giving out fancy etched glasses makes very little sense but putting auto branding onto an air freshener to hang from the rear view mirror works really well. The perfect product creates the right impression, anything else can range from a near miss to a total disaster.

The key to working out which product is best is understanding where your customers’ needs align with your opportunities. Anyone who has ever bought a new car loves the smell that comes with it, which is why a branded air freshener works in this case. Presenting your customers with something that they want and will find useful is the best possible way to put your branding in front of your customers.  

The most popular items to give away are always the useful ones. The least popular are the ones that everyone does: the pens, USB drives and paperweights. Who even uses paperweights anymore??? If you want your customers to hang onto the branded stuff you give out, you need to make sure that they remember they have and have a good use for it. So, be novel, do something different but make sure that you also provide something worthwhile.

The Right Message for Your Customers

The next thing to consider is what sort of message you are sending out. Everything you do with your brand needs to be cohesive but you shouldn’t do anything that doesn’t benefit you somehow in the future. One of the most popular branded items businesses give out is the humble business card for this reason: it provides the details a customer needs to get in touch later, it is branded and it is small enough to be carried around. 

So what sort of message do you want to send? In a practical sense, you should definitely include your logo as this will identify the product as from your brand. However, you may also wish to include details such as an email address, phone number or website where appropriate. These details will give your customers the opportunity to get in touch or find out more. All marketing strategies should come down to these basic things so your promotional giveaways don’t need to be an exception.

But you also need to think about the more subliminal message you are sending. If your company is trying to be more eco-friendly, you might choose a product that upholds this value, such as a refillable water bottle. Equally, if you are a holiday company, you might choose to hand out branded flip flops for customers to use on the beach. 

The Ideal Timing for Your Gift

Now you know what to give and what it should say, you need to think about the timing of your gift. Giving away freebies is a great way to bring in more customers so you could host a big giveaway event where you hand out your branded swag as well as a few of your regular products to raise brand awareness and encourage people to buy more. 

Another good time to give away branded promotional products is at events. If you are trying to attract people to your stall in the middle of a bright and impersonal hall, surrounded by your competitors, giving something useful away is going to gather people around your area. Giving gifts at random is also a fun way to incentivize people to come over. Try putting a spin wheel on your counter with different items in each segment, spin the wheel to see what you give away. 

Understanding the purpose of your promotional products and carefully tailoring them to your brand and customers is crucial for this marketing ploy to work. Like every marketing strategy you use, you need to make sure that you are customer-focused and not simply putting your brand in front of them in as many different ways as possible. You need to be smarter than that!