Promotional Items: 7 + 12 (But Not 19) Ways to Use Them

You find yourself in charge of a marketing campaign.  What do you do?  Ordering some promotional products might not have crossed your mind.  Though promotional products are quite effective and inexpensive.  But if it did, how would you go about getting the most out of using promotional products? Ordering them is the easy part.  The hard part is figuring out which promotional products you should choose.  For that, you need to be clear on the objectives of your marketing campaign.  In case you need it, here’s a list of some popular objectives.

Increase sales

There are only 3 ways to increase revenues: sell to more customers, sell more to the same customers, increase prices.  You can do all of the above with promotional items.  You can:

1. get more people to visit your web site (by that I don’t mean your home page.  Most businesses I deal with are crazy about their home page, it seems; they have everybody go to their home page.  But think about it a little: if you’re a mortgage broker, shouldn’t people interested in reverse mortgages go to your reverse mortgage page and people interested in construction loans go to your construction loan page? If you send them to your home page, you’re making them work harder to find the information they need, to order.  You lose some of them.  Why?

2. increase trade show traffic (if you have great promotional products and your competition doesn’t, you’ll have more people visit your booth and more of them will become clients).

3. sell more of a specific product (Promotional gifts create good will, if that good will is associated with a specific product, you sell more of them.  Not to mention that the people you give your promotional products to will get to see your offer for that specific product many times over the weeks and months after you give your promotional products to them.)

4. generate more leads (Same as above, good will plus long exposure to your message equals more leads.)

5. build brand/name recognition (If people get to see your 500, 600 times, as many do when they receive personalized coffee mugs, for instance, they cannot help but remember your name.  According to a recent study by the Advertising Specialty Institute, 83% of Americans can identify the advertiser for promotional items they own.)

6. sell new products (This is the same as #4.  The only caveat, make sure you’re giving quality promotional products and that the personalization is high quality too.)

7. increase overall sales (It stand to reason.  If 83% of people recognize the advertiser for a promotional product they own and a bit over 42% have a better opinion of that advertiser after receiving the promotional product than before and promotional products are kept for months, used hundreds of times, there cannot be any other result but increase in sales.)

Improve Relationships

You get more sales if you have better relationships with your existing customers and if you can easily form new relationships.  Promotional items allow you to:

1. introduce your company or product at an event
2. thank good customers
3. thank new customers for buying from/working with you
4. promote goodwill for your organization
5. celebrate anniversaries
6. motivate staff/employees
7. get the word out about a new initiative
8. improve customer relationships
9. reward service to the company
10.motivate sales personnel
11.increase productivity
12.reward performance

Once you know your objectives, choosing a promotional item is easy.  Keep in mind that people keep useful items longer than any other kind of item.  That bags, t-shirts and caps are seen by most people.  That pens are used most often but coffee mugs are kept longer (most people hold on to them over 7 months, some over 1 year).

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Interested in more information on promotional products? Or would you like to get free virtual proofs of your personalized coffee mugs or other corporate-gifts? Then visit PersonalizedpromotionalProductsPrinting.com

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