Content Marketing and Promotional Products for the Win

You’ve probably heard of how content marketing is transforming businesses into resources for their customers. Having content that educates and entertains keeps your customers coming back to your website; improves your SEO; keeps you top-of-mind; and builds “like, know, and trust” (the three traits of businesses that induce customers to buy).

This isn’t an article about content marketing so I don’t want to spend a huge amount of time on it but basically good content marketing creates valuable content for your business audience.

Valuable in their eyes, not yours.

Promotional product marketing ties promotional items to your sales cycle in order to move people along the sales pipeline. Used together they are extremely effective.

Content and Promotional Marketing: Perfect Together

When these two powerhouses of marketing strategy meet, you’re able to create a valuable campaign that promotes sales of your product or service. Let’s take a look at a brilliant example of this:

Publix Supermarket does this through their Aprons Simple Meals program. (It also throws in a little event marketing into the mix.) Let’s take a look at how they do it:

The problem faced by their audience: What to make for dinner? No time to decide.

Their competitor: in addition to other grocery stores, they’re also competing with fast food alternatives.

The content marketing solution: provide quick recipes for busy parents.

The promotional product marketing solution: instead of placing these recipes on the website where the customer would have to know they were there and then take the time to access them, they print up logoed recipe cards and have them available for free at the Aprons kiosk.

The event marketing solution: knowing full well a stand of recipe cards will be ignored by harried parents, Publix employs an in-house demo team cooking up the quick meal with all of the ingredients at arm’s length so that shoppers can grab everything they need – from ingredients to recipe – and be out the door in minutes.

A brilliant blend of marketing strategies!