Wikipedia defines promotional items or promotional products as articles of merchandise that are used in marketing and communication programs. Simply put, these items are usually imprinted with a company’s name, logo or slogan, and are given away at trade shows, conferences, and as part of marketing campaign.
Most important use of promotional gifts are fostering customer goodwill and customer retention. When the customers see your products they remember you and somewhere a connection of recognition and trust is established. This helps you to retain our customers and get new customers as well because the one who gets a gift surely shows it to other.
Somewhere it is a kind of viral marketing too.
Other common uses in business industry are traffic-building, brand awareness, public relations, new product introductions, customer referrals and marketing research.
Pharmaceuticals distributing the complimentary gifts to the doctors work on the same principle. Corporate gifts are well known. You must have encountered them surely at some occasion.
It is one of the methods used by guerrilla marketers.
I find it a very good brand building and value creation activity.
What To Give?
Almost anything!
Yes! You can brand anything with your company’s name or logo. Common items include t-shirts, caps, keychains, bumper stickers, pens, mugs or mouse pads.
Promotional Umbrellas and Promotional Mugs are very popular and cost effective gifts used by promotion.
Most of the promotional items are relatively small and inexpensive. This enable the advertiser to produce it in large number. Higher end products are offered to high profile people like celebrities because they have their own influence.
Promotional product industry is on rise. The industry is growing at a faster rate than newspaper or radio advertising and is larger than Internet advertising, cable television, Yellow Pages advertising and outdoor advertising [Wikipedia]
One of the supplier company is ideabynet.com.
Ideasbynet.com was established in 1985 and is one of the market leaders in UK. If you are looking for products for your campaign, they offer more than 5000 products and the prices are very competitive. You can order through their website, let them know how to brand your gifts and the product would be delivered to you, completed and ready to be served.
Their prices are based on the quantity you order. More you order, lesser would be the cost per unit.
If you want to know more about promotional gift campaigns, their blog is a good place to have an idea.
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