Promotional goods for your company may sound like an expensive idea, but they can be useful in keeping your businesses name at the forefront of people’s minds.

But promotional merchandise isn’t for every business. Some customers think pens, mouse mats etc are cheap and tacky and pushes the price of your goods or services up. For example, if your business is accountancy it’s unlikely cheap pens will appeal to customers. If this is the case, why not try something more sophisticated or loyalty schemes.

But if you think your customers would appreciate give-aways, and think these could motivate them to buy from your business, don’t dismiss the idea too quickly, especially as employees often like receiving the merchandise themselves to keep on their desks.

However, promotional merchandise should only be considered as a short-term strategy. Customers should only be able to get them for a particular reason and for a limited amount of time.

Good Reasons To Invest In Promotional Merchandise:

1) Measuring Your Advertising Campaigns Success – Your advertising campaign could invite customers to send off for free gifts etc. The responses will help you judge how successful your advertising campaign is and gives you the opportunity to ask people questions that could give you important customer information.

2) Reinforcing Advertising – Using direct mail you can send free gifts to selected groups of potential customers. This could be to help launch a product. If they haven’t heard of your product, they will have done after they have received your free gift!

3) Turning An Unsuccessful New Product Into A Successful One – If a new product isn’t selling as well as you’d hoped, offer customers a free gift with each purchase. It’s slightly high-risk and could waste money, but it may just sway your customers to buy your product. Use what you already know about your product and customers to decide if it’s worth a try.

4) Stealing Your Competitors Limelight – Maybe your competitor is running a big advertising campaign which is negatively influencing your business. A free gift could persuade your customers to come back to you.

Whatever you decide to give away, make sure it complements what you are selling and doesn’t stop your customers needing to buy from you!

It is sometimes even possible to make a profit out of such merchandise by ordering in bulk and selling at just above the cost price, but this is only going to work if your promotional merchandise is in high demand, such as advertising a band tour etc.

What Do You Think?

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