Distributing promotional products is an awesome way to increase brand awareness, and to give your faithful customers a way to promote your business for you. The resources you have for to use custom apparel products to advertise your business are endless: from custom printed t-shirts, to pens, to hats, to reusable shopping bags. There’s no wrong answer; some companies have been successful promoting their business with custom printed toilet paper or underwear.
However, if you conduct your marketing campaign poorly, you could end up with boxes of poorly custom printed t-shirts in your garage (or in the garage of people you gave them to) collecting dust and reminding you of the precious mula you wasted to have them made. To make sure that every dollar that you put into your custom printed t-shirts (or whatever other promotional item you create) serves your marketing goal, check out our list of tips:
- Be strategic about what you have printed on your promotional items.
When you don’t have the branding power to make people work as walking billboards on your logo alone, you might find it beneficial to include a catchy slogan or design with the logo that make the apparel appealing to customers. For example, back to our Mike’s Plumbing Supply situation, instead of just printing your logo, include the slogan “A Royal Flush Beats a Full House”. That’s the kind of custom printed t-shirts that your customers will be proud to wear, and will cause people to think twice about when they see, putting your brand at the forefront of their mind.
On the same line of thought, you should enlist the help of a professional and avoid home-cooked designs when creating custom apparel. Consumers are so saturated with advertising that they are extremely savvy at identifying when a business owner’s artsy cousin created a logo with Microsoft Power Point, and will assume everything your business does cuts corners. - Consider your target market.
When planning out your custom promotional items, you will have the most bang for your buck if you create a promotional item the customers you are trying to entice are enticed by. If your target market is teenage high school students, printing your logo on a reusable grocery shopping bag might not do much for them. On the other hand, if you run a tech business, make your customized apparel online-friendly, such as slapping your logo on a flash drive or another promotional item that people use when they’re in a situation where they would need your products, will put your name at the forefront of their thoughts when they need your product the most. There is literally no limit to the types of promotional items you can put your logo on, consider the demographic of your target market, and what most effectively will reach them. - Opt for promotional items that are here for the long haul.
Putting your logo on an item that will be used over and over gives you free advertising over and over. Avoid promotional items with a short shelf life; printing your logo on a candy bar wrapper will have a marketing impact of about three seconds. On the other hand, putting your logo on a drink koozie or screen printed t-shirts that will be used over and over gives you are much greater reaching marketing impact. - Give customers a choice.
Unless you can find a way to legally (and affordably) print your logo on cold, hard cash, there’s no one product in the universe that very single consumer you are trying to reach is going to want. Creating two promotional items and giving consumers a choice completes the task of identifying a promotional item that will best reach your target market for you.
Do you have any other great tips for using promotional items to market a business? Please share your advice in the comment section below!