Promotional products are products you give away to help promote your business. All types of companies, organizations, and charities give them to clients and potential clients. They often have the logo, name, and address of the organization giving them away. They are one of the most effective ways a company can promote its business, and the effects of the promotional products can reverberate.
Why to Use Promotional Products?
Promotional items can be extremely effective at promoting your business.
Everyday items that can be reused will be seen not only be appreciated by the people you give them to, but sometimes who they interact with as well. A promotional t shirt worn in a store will be seen by tens if not hundreds of people. A water bottle with your logo on it will be a constant reminder to the person using it about your company.
Comparatively, using promotional products can be a much less expensive method to market your business than other advertising methods. Using advertising methods like google ads can get expensive quickly, and you have to be committed to run them for an extended length of time to get a return on your investment.
If you want some powerful statistics demonstrating the effectiveness of promotional products, check out this study.
Promotions vs Advertising
There are quite a few differences between running a promotion and running advertisements. Advertisements often involve running a campaign, a long term series of paid approaches to get the word out about your product. Be it through TV commercials, google paid ads, direct mail, radio commercials, or other forms of advertising, it can take several months or sometimes years before significant results are seen.
You can usually see the effects of using promotional items pretty rapidly. Promotions such as a buy one get one free usually have expiration dates to draw the customer in quickly. Promotional products like a water bottle that someone drinks from can have long term and short term benefits, if it’s a bottle they like and use regularly they will be constantly reminded of your company.
With promotional products, much of the time you have a greater level of control on who you are targeting. If you are, say hosting a booth at a trade show, you can have conversations with people and gauge their level of interest and their potential as a customer before handing out a promotional item. This will give you a tighter level of control on your expenses rather than a mailing list where you send to a bunch of random people or companies.
In the most basic sense, a promotional item is a gift, whereas advertisements can often interrupt a person’s day with having no relevance to their interests or emotions. It should come to no surprise to anyone that receiving something free will leave a much more powerful impact on your customer than making them feel like their time was stolen.
What should you use as a promotional product?
Ideally you want to use products people use on a daily basis, this creates more frequent impressions about your company. Water bottles, pens, bags, desk accessories, are all great since they will be used regularly and will be seen by many people. You don’t need to spend a fortune on your promotional products, but you do want to make sure they are a good enough quality or novel enough to be worth keeping. A cheap plastic pen doesn’t leave as much of an impression as a wood pen, while the more traditional promotional swag items like printed t-shirts can also be produced with quality for lasting impressions.
Some people choose to give technological promotional items out such as usb flash drives or power banks for phones. These are generally more expensive than other promotional items, and should probably be handed out to people who have expressed significant interest in your company unless you have a large promotional budget.
You can also use products as they relate to your business. For example, if you are selling golf products, you might give away golf balls or tees with your logo on them.
Check out some of the promotional items we can source here. If you don’t see what you are looking for, feel free to contact us to see if we can source it for you.