The ultimate test of the financial success for business lies in achieving a positive return on marketing and promotional investment. Most small businesses fail because of insufficient capital and fall into a spiral of declining turnover and profitability when budgets do not allow for a continuation of promotional activity. Poorly allocated marketing budgets mean one or two failed campaigns can exhaust allocations and from there it’s difficult to fight back. With media advertising being expensive and its results difficult to predict, many small business operators find themselves caught without the investment needed to grow their business making the future uncertain.
These issues are amongst the reasons many small business operators have found promotional products to be an effective way to increase enquiry and sales without the financial risks of mainstream media advertising. The following are the seven best reasons why using promotional merchandise gives a small business greater control over its marketing expenditures.
1. Staged Release of Marketing Program
A new small business often has to fit in with the demands made by home and family life and sometimes the high volume of inquiries that can come all at once from general media advertising can cause an overload, resulting in wasted opportunity. Promotional products can be distributed when it suits you in bursts while still take advantage of buying in bulk to reduce the price per impact.
When you have time and capacity to deal with the response from your marketing activity you can schedule your promotional activity to fit in with the rest of your life. This flexibility is often one of the reasons people want to run a small business in the first place.
2. Easy Market Segmentation
General media advertising requires a “one message fits all” approach making it difficult to tailor individual offers for different segments of your market. This can lead to much of the potential impact of your marketing being lost and a proportion of your budget wasted.
As you know exactly which business prospect will receive each promotional offering, you can ensure the product and message it carries are tailored to appeal to the recipient. This lead to a higher level of return on investment and ensures that in the longer term your promotional gift has a better chance of being retained and influencing its owner, extending the lifespan an return on investment of your marketing activity.
3. Brand Recognition and Sales Opportunities
As a small business owner, you have to accept that in the initial stages of building your business opportunities will come by taking sales from established suppliers. You will be relying on a competitor to fail to deliver and disappoint your prospective client . In this case you have to be ready to step in as an alternate supplier. Offering branded merchandise to your prospective client base ensures your contact details will be on hand when the need arises for them to find an alternative supplier.
4. Budget Control
Advertising in a major magazine or buying traffic from a search engine you can never be certain of the return on your marketing spend. Promotional products give you an exact understanding of your spending on each potential client so you can tailor the cost of the product offering to match their potential value. The fact that a promotional product has an ongoing benefit in creating awareness of your product and service offerings beyond its initial impact means that your investment potentially returns far into the future, long after a traditional piece of media advertising has faded from view.
5. Creating Personal Relationships
Success in business is all about the relationships you can create with your clients, suppliers, and staff. Branded merchandise is a proven way to build relationships as the right branded item will become a part of the daily business life of the recipient. With your contact details and branding applied to a promotional item the probability that you’ll get the call when your services are required increases dramatically. Often users of promotional products in their marketing mix report that they have received a call from a new client months or years after they distributed the item.
6. A Short Cut to Creating a Brand Image
Adding your branding to a promotional item allows you to trade off the image that product has amongst consumers. This can be a short cut to creating a favourable image in the mind of prospective clients while providing an item with genuine practical appeal. For instance, a promotional powerbank which allows the recipient to recharge their mobile phone or laptop computer on the road is likely to be kept handy and create a positive impression of your company when it is used.
7. Trade Off Current Trends
Most people are engaged with news and current affairs so selecting a promotional product idea related to something being highlighted by the media will multiply the impact of your marketing. It could simply be that the message you add relates to topical events and therefore leverages your return on promotional investment, rather than the product itself, but the impact will be even more powerful if the message and the product combine.
