As a large promotional company we see it all! Some of our clients are super organised, planning months ahead and providing comprehensive creative briefs for each promotional marketing campaign they run. But we often see businesses fall into the same old traps, and we want to make sure you can avoid them.
Here is our top seven list of promotional branding mistakes:
1. Buy the cheapest promo product
The cost-quality equation is always worth looking at in detail. A higher quality promo product or giveaway will deliver more benefit for your promo dollars!
2. Order the minimum quantity
Unless you are purchasing for a specific time-bound promotion, look at leveraging volume to bring down the unit cost and plan well to ensure that you can use your promotional products or merchandise for other events and purposes later.
3. Promo for the sake of promo
Before you begin any promotional marketing activity, stop. Quantify your objective. What do you want to achieve? What is your goal? Can you assign a monetary value to it? What is your time-frame?
Document your objective and share it with your promo company to ensure that they understand the over-arching aim of your initiative. This means they can make useful suggestions and look for ways to improve the effectiveness of your campaign.
4. Excessive branding
There is a reason “Make the logo bigger” induces an industry-wide cringe amongst advertising execs, graphic designers and promotional marketing people. The old adage “Sometimes less is more” can often be applied to logo placement and size, as excessive branding can mean that a promo product is seen as simply advertising material.
With promotional products best practice may mean that the entire piece is boldly branded (banners, sublimated shirts, etc) or, you may decide that no branding at all is best. Unbranded luxury corporate gifts retain their exclusiveness and your customer is likely to remember your generosity without prompting.
Most often, the best solution for promotional branding is judicious use of brand colours and logos to ensure that the item is retained, and bears a reminder of your brand.
5. Last minute orders
We can turn around promotional products fast, especially with our Express Service. But tight timelines can mean that sourcing overseas is not an option – or even that products can only be supplied unbranded!
Talk to us early on. We’ll let you know the options you have for various time-frames, and what the optimum option is.
6. What customer?
Planning needs to include thinking about who your customer is and what motivates them to be loyal to you.
Any promotional products or merchandise should appeal to this audience – the customer is always right!
7. Collateral damage
Your promotional marketing products should align with your brand. If you run a top-notch firm where quality is your watch-word, your promotional marketing needs to be high quality also. Likewise, if your brand leverages the fact that you are eco-friendly, plastic giveaways may not be the best choice!
Ask our team – we are experts and know our enormous range of products and suppliers inside out. We’ll find the right promotional branding option for your company.
