Personalized Water Bottle Marketing - 4 Tips for Greater Success

A personalized water bottle can make a great marketing tool as it's an inexpensive yet effective way to disseminate information about your company. According to a recent study, on average, drinking wares have a per-impression cost of $0.004 and get you a bit over 1,300 impressions over their useful life.

You can have lower per-impression costs with other promotional products and you can have more impressions too. Think personalized bags and shirts. However, not every occasion calls for a bag or a shirt. As a matter of fact, some call for a water bottle.

Since not everybody who's determined that giving away a personalized water bottle or two gets the full effect, here are four tips to help you market with water bottles more successfully.

1. A Personalized Water Bottle That Stands Out Works Harder For You

In the world of personalized products marketing, "He who screams louder gets the attention" becomes "He who stands out get the client." A visually striking water bottle will do just that. But you do have to be careful. Yes, your logo/message has to be noticeable but if you make them too large, they might backfire. If you don't pay attention, they might blend in with the rest of the bottle.

Personalized water bottles work because people find them useful. But people don't use useful items they find ugly.

2. Choose Quality Over Quantity

I understand that you want to reach tons of people. But you want to reach them and make a good impression. What's great quality to one person might be average to another person. What's average to one person on a given occasion might be great quality on another.

That said, if you can only give away 100 personalized water bottles that are the right quality given the occasion and to whom you're giving them, give 100, don't give 200 lower quality ones.

The whole promotional products works on association. You give me a personalized water bottle so that I associate the pleasure of receiving a gift with you and/or your company. And I will make that association, unless you do something to force me not to.

3. Match Message and Target Audience

No matter how great your personalized water bottles, if you're giving them to the wrong people, you get no benefit.

Most marketers don't give them to completely wrong people. Yet they don't give them to the right ones either. You need to narrow your focus and give them only to people you're going to benefit from giving them to.

If you give them to the right people but your message doesn't speak to them, you have the same results.

An easy way to do the above is to talk to your existing customers, survey them, ask them questions. And write their answers down, study their answers. It can be as easy as asking, at the point of purchase, a couple of questions. If you do it regularly, pretty soon you have information you can act upon.

4. Have a Call to Action

I do get promotional products that have nothing but a logo and a company name. That's not good, unless you have deep pockets. I also get some that have a phone number too.

I spoke to the sender of one of the latter. "Why isn't it enough that I put the phone number?" she wanted to know. "People know what to do with it."

It's true, they do. Still, more of them call if you tell them to. Even more call if you give them a reason to call. "Call xxx-xxx-xxxx for a free quote," therefore, is better than "Call xxx-xxx-xxxx" and much better than "xxx-xxx-xxxx."

If you're going to do any personalized water bottle marketing, keep the above tips in mind. You'll like the results.