If done well promotional products are an advertising medium that your prospects will actually thank you for receiving. But done poorly and they will not be used and forgotten.
So how do you make sure you are choosing the right promotional item for your brand?
Promotional products work, but just like any advertising sending the right message can have a night and day difference in performance.
These are the 5 characteristics of what makes an effective promotional product:
- Useful to the recipient
- Compliments your brand’s values and personality
- Value for money
- Allow your logo or message to be clearly visible
- Generates many impressions
Useful to the recipient
How can you choose the right product if you don’t understand your recipient or target demographic?
This is probably the most important factor that will help you choose the best product. Having a good knowledge of your target demographic makes the rest much easier.
If you’ve already created some customer personas for your brand then start here. Consider what hobbies they have, what they value, what they like to wear and items that might be useful to them.
Imagine a situation where a school, we’ll call them Everton High has two goals for their promotional product campaigns. Everton High wants to give teachers an appreciation gift for reaching performance targets. And secondly to give students who are visiting the school at the upcoming open day a giveaway item so the school gets remembered.
Even though these are both going to be branded with the school’s emblem the choice of product is going to differ depending upon the recipient and the purpose.
The teachers might appreciate something like a reusable coffee cup, umbrella or set of wine glasses.
Whereas these same gifts would not be appropriate for the students. Better options might include a t-shirt, promotional pen, branded confectionery, Rubik’s cube, fidget toy or stress toy.
Empathy is the key to choosing the right gift or promotional product. If you’re stumped for options, ask one of your customer’s things they like to receive for inspiration.
Compliments your brand’s values and personality
You should think of promotional merchandise as an ambassador to your brand. Just like your presence on social media or other digital spaces these channels play a part in how your brand is perceived.
It’s important that you are portraying a unified brand image, so the promotional products you select should be a reflection of your brand values.
For example, if you are a luxury auto brand such as Mercedes or Porsche you may have a campaign that looks something like this:
The goal is to increase sales and increase value perception. To do this dealerships will receive branded pens that customers or salespeople can use.
Now they could just use a cheap plastic pen, but that wouldn’t best represent the brand. Instead, it’s a smarter choice to opt for a premium metal pen that reflects the quality one would expect from the vehicles they produce.
Another example might be an organisation that has a strong focus on environmentally friendly and ethical practices such as Lush (a cosmetic retailer).
They are looking to generate interest for an upcoming product launch event and decide to give attendees a branded gift to generate buzz and encourage them to post pictures on social media. It is important that this product would have eco-friendly properties as alternatives would not compliment the brand’s values and confuse/displease customers.
Value for money
At the end of the day, all marketing comes down to the return on investment generated.
This is harder to measure for some longer-term awareness campaigns but if the value wasn’t there brands such as Google, Apple and Microsoft wouldn’t be doing it.
So what makes a product “good value” for money?
This is subjective depending upon the purpose of the campaign. But in general, there will be an optimum combination between cost and usefulness/practicality for most items.
In most situations when choosing products (including ordering promotional merchandise) it’s usually best to avoid the cheapest options, with the best value products falling somewhere in the mid price range. As the cost of the product increases usually there is also diminishing returns on the quality/usefulness.
Consider the difference between these two pens. Pen A has a cost of $2 and has 4000m of ink, whereas Pen B costs $1 but has only 800m of ink.
Now at first glance, you might be tempted to opt for Pen B, but when you consider that Pen A will last approximately 500% longer, generating 5x the impressions for your brand for only an extra dollar the choice becomes much clearer.
Just remember that cheaper is not always better.
Allow your logo to be clearly visible
There’s not much point in having your logo on a product if no one can see it.
Some products are going to have different decoration areas because of the size of the product or the way they can be decorated.
In general, when shopping for promotional products the suppliers have already taken this into consideration and only offer products with practical branding areas.
However, there will still be some circumstances where if you have fine text in your design this may not be visible on all products.
In these circumstances, we usually recommend using a basic version of your logo without the text or a different product that allows for larger printing/decoration.
Good products will display your logo clearly, great products will complement the product and have it looking like a retail brand with colour, size and position taken into consideration.
Generates many impressions
More impressions equal a higher likelihood your brand will be remembered and even be preferred. In social psychology, this effect is known as the familiarity principle or the Mere-exposure effect.
So promoting reusable items that get used or seen regularly is a safe bet.
Some quick examples of items that fall into this category include promotional shopping bags, drink bottles, apparel, keyrings, pens and coffee mugs.
A useful product gets seen, one that isn’t, doesn’t – it’s just that simple. So as previously mentioned knowing what your recipient will find useful is critical.
Summing Up
Now that you understand what makes a good promotional product you can make a better-informed decision about choosing the best products to represent your brand.
It’s also a good idea to ask a professional for suggestions as they may have ideas that you perhaps have not thought of.
Our team at Promotion Products can assist in providing you with tailored suggestions for your brand. Feel free to contact us today or browse the range below!
