Personalized Products – A Grand Re-Opening’s Best Friend

You might not think a lot about personalized water bottles but, if you’re a business owner, you should. I know, who am I to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do.  I insist and counter-insist.  If you’re a business owner give personalized water bottles some thought.

Actually, give promotional products some thought.  Brief review, personalized products are products that have your logo and/or a marketing message printed, lasered or painted on them.  They more useful they are, the more people tend to hold on to them.  Also, they hold on to them longer.

Not long ago, I was at a grand reopening for a chiropractic practice.  They’re in a large building.  You walk into a hallway and the first thing you see, is a fitness club.  If you’re observant, you also see the chiropractic practice.  Most people enter that building to go to the fitness club.  Most people who go to the fitness club don’t know there’s a chiropractor just down the hall from the fitness club.  Many of them need chiropractic help every now and again.

At the grand reopening, the chiropractors had great food and drinks.  They had a table with business cards, fliers and copies of some articles one of the doctors had published.  And a bunch of the people who worked there were on hand to greet and answer questions.

Kind of typical of grand re-openings.

But it didn’t have to be.  They could have had someone give out free stuff to the people who entered the gym.  There were a lot more of those than people interested in the grand re-opening.  A lot more.

In my opinion, personalized water bottles would have been perfect.  I mean, how many people go to the gym and don’t get thirsty?  If besides the log, the personalized water bottles had a call to action, an invitation to visit a website, they’d have been perfect.

The bottles would have been of different colors and sizes.  The website address would not have been the home page but a page dedicated to gathering links, perhaps a page where people could have learned about how to avoid certain gym-related injuries or, perhaps, about ways to make their workouts more meaningful or how to improve their well-being overall.  The subject is not that important as many fit the bill.  The information would have to be quality.

Would the people walking into the chiropractor’s office get the personalized water bottle? Yes, if they were members of the gym across the hall.  But if they weren’t, perhaps promotional USB drives, pre-loaded with information on how to avoid injuries, how to diminish pain and/or how to take care of yourself, with the use of a chiropractor, to live a happier and longer life.

Well, the grand re-opening I attended gave away no gifts but the food, especially the pastries, were great.  Which means that I don’t even remember the name of the chiropractic practice.  I know where to find them – vaguely, though.  But I don’t know their name, or their web site address.

I am sure some of the people who showed up have or will become customers.  But they could have gotten more.  But they did not.

It’s good to create occasions where you give yourself a chance to introduce yourself, your business, to prospects.  It’s even better if you give yourself a chance to get tons of them to become paying clients.  You can do it with or without promotional products.  But promotional products are an inexpensive way of getting your message in front of people.