3 Ways to Use Promotional Items As Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Like any marketing campaign, the key to achieving your goals lies in your approach.  Typically, you want a strategic plan of action with measurables that allow you to track results.

This is true for all marketing related activities – even when incorporating promotional items into the mix. There are many benefits to using promotional items in your marketing campaigns.  They give your brand a more favorable impression, help your audience remember you and help you gain repeat exposure of your message without an additional cost.

Plus, they can help you increase leads, customers, sales, and can even the dollar amount customers spend with you. In order to get these results, you need to create a strategic plan that revolves around your big goal. Ask yourself, “what am I trying to accomplish?” before you jump into choosing a product.

After you determine your goal, decide who you’re trying to reach, a good call to action and plan how you’re going to track and measure your results.

When you have everything planned out, now you can design your strategy to infuse promotional items into your campaign. How you will use promotional items will depend on your goals.

Incentives

If your goal is to increase leads or increase engagement with your brand, use promotional products as incentives. Incentives help you entice your target audience to take action. By using them as an “introductory” item, the goal is to invite your audience into your “space”.  Your “space” can mean your office, your retail store, website or landing page.

This looks like printing a QR Code, Discount Code or URL on your item. This helps drive traffic to where you want your audience to go. The bonus is the QR Code, Discount Code or URL can also help track how many people contacted you.

Premiums

Using a promotional item as a Premium is similar to using them as incentives. This is because they’re also great for enticing your audience to take action.  The difference is premiums are used to help you close a sale after your audience visits your space. For example, give your audience a free promotional item with a purchase of one of your products or services.

These can also help increase sales per customer. For example, your message would be “spend $75 or more and receive a free tote bag”. The tote bag would be the premium.

Gifts

Gifts are used to recognize or appreciate your client for doing business with you.  Typically, companies put their logo on the product. However, if you truly want someone to feel appreciated, try personalizing it with their name on it. This allows your client to feel even more special.

No matter how you use promotional items, make sure you think through how you will use them, first.  When you are more strategic and create a plan, you will start to see results.