With over 20 years’ experience designing and developing targeted corporate gifts and promotional merchandize collections, we understand your brand is precious. Your gifts should reflect and reinforce your brand values and image.
The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI) in the USA defines promotional items as “items that have an advertisers logo and/or message on them. They are usually given away free by companies to consumers”.
However, an effective corporate gift is more than that. Having your logo placed on an ill-considered product will not strengthen your message. But when developed and targeted correctly, corporate gifts and promotional merchandize are a cost-effective tool in your marketing armoury. They are an essential part of sales promotion and of wider marketing efforts. This requires thought and planning.
Mission
- Offer a personalized, flexible fully integrated promotional gift collection service that achieves the highest standards of customer care and satisfaction.
- Develop excellent quality bespoke gifts that follow our clients’ corporate guidelines.
- Create long-term partnerships with our clients to optimally fulfil their gift requirements.
Why use Corporate Gifts and Promotional Merchandize?
A recent study by the ASI argues that promotional products are the most high-impact, and cost-effective advertising medium.
In the US, promotional pens and drinkware are the most widely owned. The ASI study finds that 89% of consumers own at least one promotional writing instrument, with 20% owning more than one. Furthermore, it finds that a promo pen will generate 3,000 impressions over its life. Promotional bags have a similar effectiveness with 3,300 impressions over their life.
Compared with the cost of the products, the CPI (cost per impression) is surprisingly low. For example, the same study suggests that an item of promo drinkware that costs USD7 will have a CPI of under 0.5c per impression.
The ASI study also looks at how long promotional products are kept by end users. Promo umbrellas, for instance, are kept for an average of 14 months and for at least two years by older age groups.
Furthermore, a recent British Promotional Merchandise Association (BPMA) survey asked respondents if they have ever kept a promotional product for a long time, 78% said they had. Promotional charging cables topped the list with USBs, notebooks, mugs and pens following.
This longevity helps explain the number of impressions promotional products can generate. So from an advertising perspective, promotional merchandise is a powerful marketing tool. Although branded products have many uses from use as a business-to-business sales incentive to a gift with purchase in a retail environment.
Choosing the Right Gift
Clearly, what makes a good corporate gift depends on your brand and how you will be using the corporate merchandise.
The BPMA survey cited above asked buyers of promotional products how they use promo gifts. It found 32% are used as tradeshow giveaways and 26% for customer engagement. A further 23% are used as sales incentives and 13% for employee engagement. The remaining 6% answered ‘other’.
Surprisingly, only 71% of those questioned investigates what products would be suitable for their purpose before purchase with 18% saying that don’t. However, 77% answer that they expect or appreciate creative input from their promotional merchandise supplier. That is where we come in.
It is important to choose a product that is suitable for your audience. What is useful at a tradeshow may not be appropriate as a customer engagement gift or mailout. They may require different quantities or budgets. For example, a promotional powerbank containing a lithium ion battery is not a suitable gift to distribute using mail services. Likewise, if the attendees at your event are flying in with hand baggage only, you need to consider what they can carry on the airplane.
Some products may also be more relevant to your campaign, and leadtime too may be a consideration for last minute events. In addition, buyers should think about product usefulness, quality and durability. It is this that leads to a promotional gift being kept and used. This in turn leads to a higher CPI.
Think Ahead
Planning and budgeting allow a bespoke, and often much more cost-effective, solution to corporate merchandise. Consequently, you can build a consistent gift collection. Most importantly, all gifts reinforce your brand message from umbrellas, to pens, to notebooks to backpacks and bags. Your gifts then have a consistent finish, level of quality and follow your corporate guidelines. Customers can also consolidate gifts across events for the year which means pricing comes down and valuable time saved.
At SLD, we look closely at your corporate guidelines, online presence and current marketing material to get a real understanding of your brand.
On top of any specific ideas you may have, we will support you in proposing items that will fulfill your objectives and suggest options to fit within your budget. After that, we will create a proposal document with images and descriptions mocked up with your logo. This means you get a real feel of what we are suggesting.
Out of Space?
Storage and fulfillment is then often the next hurdle. How do you stock gifts for all your events throughout the year? We offer stock management and fulfillment out of our centrally based warehouse. Stock is managed through our own system or via customized, client-branded webshops.
Bespoke targeted gift collections embodying your brand that arrive promptly at your stand or training room will reap huge rewards for your brand. Thought and forward planning are critical to making gifts truly successful and showing your target audience just how much you value your brand.