Don’t Waste Your Time on Promotional Product Marketing

Yikes! What am I saying? Stay with me here…

Promotional product marketing can open new doors for you, increase your reach, and make an impression on your ideal audience, but only if you do it correctly. If you’re not willing to give up doing the following things, and implement the underlying best practices, just go throw your business post cards into the wind and hope someone will pick them up and call you to place an order.

 

Don’t Waste Your Time on Promotional Product Marketing If…

• You’re just going to pick out some random tchotchke because it’s on clearance for $.25 per unit.
• You don’t know your ideal audience/buyer.
• The promotional product doesn’t tie in with your other marketing.
• You’re just going to order from some company on the Internet that came up in search with no research into their business practices and no referrals.
• You’re thinking a cheap pen will convince someone to buy a high ticket item.
• You just want something — anything — to take to your conference.
• You think cheap, fast, and unique can be accomplished by yesterday.
• You have no idea why you need a promotional item.
• You’re ordering one-offs and guessing at numbers. (Ordering one item in bulk, or using a promotional product company for all of your promotional needs will save you money.)
• You can’t think more than a few days in advance. (Promotional marketing items are designed to keep you top of mind. You want to order early for best price. Look at a calendar and get a 365-day view of your promotional marketing needs. Know that a promotional product keeps working even after the potential customer walks away from the booth.(
• You go for the cute item. (Cute items are great but if it’s too cute, it will end up in your potential customer’s kid’s bedroom, where it will only get seen by a person who isn’t authorized to make a purchasing decision.)

Promotional product marketing is an important part of a cohesive marketing strategy. Give it thought as you would a media or advertising buy. To think of it just as a trinket to throw to people as they pass your booth is doing yourself a disservice. If you’re going to do that, you’ll never maximize your ROI and it just won’t be worth it.