To shout it from the rooftops, you have to be clear and on-point with what’s being promoted. Promotional marketing is the reflection of a brand and its characteristics. So whether promoting your company or a specific product, the delivery of the message is just as key as the message itself. You may wonder, ‘how important is quality when it comes to swag? After all it is a giveaway…’
Creativity
Just like you, your customers and prospects are inundated with promotional gimmicks. Direct mail, email blasts, and cold calls can be the fastest way to have a door slam in your face. So what’s the best way to break the ice with a new lead (or stay top of mind with an existing customer)?
A unique and useful promotional product often means the difference between someone keeping your swag or tossing it in the trash bin. Working with a marketing professional can help you to leverage promotional marketing assets to actually market your company. For example, we help our clients by thoroughly researching target audiences and trends before planning the not-so-simple aspects of sourcing and producing high-quality marketing assets. Having a timely sense of what’s trending (and what’s cheesy) helps to ensure that your swag is memorable instead of meaningless.
Cheap vs. Cost Effective
There is a difference between cheap and cost effective. Budgets are a reality for every company and manager, and there are cost effective solutions for every price point. It is never good value if the price is at the expense of quality. Promotional products and assets are a reflection of a brand, and distributing low-quality materials threatens that brand’s reputation. Imagine a coffee tumbler that leaks and burns a prospect? Or a pen that breaks after one use. You may succeed in staying top of mind – but not for the right reason. The resulting impressions are that your brand is low quality or ineffective: if you can’t get a coffee tumbler right, then how will you be able to manage my: banking/insurance/child care/transportation/mortgage…
Instead, working with a marketing professional can help to ensure that all aspects of branding are covered off at the highest level possible. From matching colour swatches to logo resolution, the details involved in producing good quality promotional swag can result in a long term billboard effect if consumers tote around your promo marketing!
Quality over Quantity
Quality is key not just in terms of the product itself, but also in the type of product that you choose to stamp your brand on. Cheap products tend to get thrown away quickly, while higher quality production goods like apparel stay the course with consumers. So while it may be tempting to buy more of something cheap to blast it into the hands of more people, it may make more sense to produce less quantity of something better quality/more meaningful and have your targets hang on to it for longer. After all, a prospect or customer sporting a t-shirt or ball cap stands to increase brand exposure and recognition. Choosing the right brand to align with can also provide extra brand value to you by piggybacking off of name brands like Under Armour for example.
Additional Resources:
https://www.godelta.com/blog/want-to-ruin-your-marketing-strategy-use-cheap-promotional-products
