When it comes to promotion, all areas of an advertising strategy needs to pull their weight in order to ensure that maximum promotional success is achieved. Therefore, on the one hand a company needs to be well versed in novel ways of marketing, such as digital marketing, as well as capable of distributing promotional products effectively.
Whilst the latter activity may, on paper at least, seem to be the most simple, it is often the area of promotion that businesses are less apt with, however, this is more often than not due to the fact that promotional products are not treated as a separate kind of marketing, with its own needs and constraints, coupled with a poor strategy; it doesn’t have to be this way, though, and the correct marketing of promotional items can actually be relatively simple.
Firstly, we should identify exactly why promotional merchandise should be a part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. In fact there are lots of reasons for this:
Most importantly, they allow for the direct communication of a brand to the customer or potential customer. This means that unlike a traditional advertisement (or a digital advertisement for example,) there is a special kind of “intimacy” that can be achieved with promotional products, and this coupled with the usability of promotional products, such as USB memory sticks or stationary, means that distributing promotional items can still be the closest your advertising strategy will get to your customer base.
Alongside this important advantage, there is also significant benefit in regards to costs, and when compared to television advertising, for example, the cost of promotional merchandise is practically negligible. This makes them ideal for businesses on a budget, smaller businesses or new businesses who are reluctant to commit a large proportion of their budget to marketing.
So with the benefits of promotional items firmly in your mind, all that remains is to market the products effectively. With this in mind, there are lots of factors to consider, but lots of ways to achieve clear success using promotional products:
The first thing to consider is choosing the right kind of products to adequately represent your brand; so, if you want your brand to be associated with ideas of modernity etc, then you should opt for modern promotional items, such as usb memory sticks, which will exude quality, along with a high usability factor.
Next you need to identify the correct kind of environment in which to distribute promotional items of course, this depends on your particular business, and there are plenty of trade shows and exhibitions ran all year round, which should make finding the ideal location a little easier.
If you want to stand head and shoulders above your competition however, which of course the whole point of marketing, then you should ideally look for creative ways in which to market your products, and therefore as well as choosing creative items, you should also look to distribute your products at creative locations.