Using Promotional Merchandise to Market Your Business
This is a collaborative post
The ability to connect with your customers improves massively when you’re looking to include branded products within your business model. Freebies often make people happy and also gives customers another way of remembering you and your business after they leave. They’re great for communicating with customers during expos and conventions.
How you use them to measure success is another factor that should be considered when you’re planning to use promotional material. This guide from this top event merchandise supplier shows you the best ways you make the most of your merchandise.
What will you be using your merchandise for?
Having a clear aim with the merchandise is key when deciding what merchandise to have. An easy way to figure this out is by looking at your customers, target audience and what you’re selling.
Say you’re a paid advertising company, you could be really imaginative and look to make small plant pots for customers, suggesting that you make your customer’s businesses grow.
If you’re a brewing company you may look to make beer coasters for people to take home and use. Be creative and fun with the merchandise you want to offer up to prospects and how they’ll look to remember you.
How much is it going to cost?
If your ideas (no matter how extravagant they could be) are costing more than the overall return on investment then you could be coming out at a loss. This is good practice to figure out exactly what you want and what merchandise you think
will give you the biggest advantage. An alternative to this problem is by only reserving the special merchandise and perks to those that consider a free trial of your product or those that sign up for your services.
However you sell it, make sure it brings a benefit to you as much as it will to your customers.
How will you distribute your merchandise?
At conventions or business expos there’s a great opportunity for you to give away your cheaper pieces of merchandise, like pens and notepads for instance. For those expensive items it’s worth keeping them for warmer leads and signed up customers.
You might not know what works best until you do a bit of trial and error. You’ll find that some customers can be needy, so you may have to strike a balance and sometimes offer that additional incentive. If it begins to perform well you can even offer them in a shop front to increase your sales and return on investment further.
