Here’s a thought when you give ‘stuff’ away’ in the form of a promotional item – how much have you considered the target audience beforehand?
Of course you have we hear you shout loudly, but really have you?
Don’t get us wrong, we are big fans of free pens and USB sticks our children always find them useful and what’s more it saves us from having to buy them! Admit it we have all walked vast exhibition halls or filled in forms online to get that promotional item that will make us look like rockstars in our children’s eyes.
There can be no doubt that the corporate promotional goods industry is worth millions of pounds. There are a vast amount of companies out there that will sell you everything from high end goods to furry toys all proudly displaying your company name. At the end of the day the theory behind promotional goods marketing is to allow your brand to gain exposure and recall. But is there a better way of doing it than merely just doing what everyone else does.
Well this blog today sets out to tell you yes there is a better way. This better way revolves around one word: TARGET.
You see the best campaigns involving promotional goods that we have ever rolled out have been precisely targeted. What do we mean by this? Think about it, its quite simple. If your campaign needs a promotional item then think about the target audience for it and what they would find useful in their day-to-day work lives.
Whilst working for a large industrial engineering company a plastic vernier calliper gave us the biggest ROI we had ever seen. For this campaign the target audience was maintenance personnel within end user facilities. In other words the people that keep the factories running by fixing stuff. We were convinced that we wanted a hook to our campaign to get people to respond to the email. Therefore we figured that the best way to do this would be to give something that the target audience would value and find useful. We didn’t want the gift to be taken home to their children but placed in their toolboxes ready for when they needed to measure something.
You see the theory was that we would give something away that would last, something that would have high-perceived value but in reality was pretty low cost. Something that had our name on that would be viewed every time the maintenance personnel used it.
We launched the campaign and the email inbox went crazy. The number of requests we got from the target list was incredible. Greater than a 50% response rate.
What’s more the email contained a forward to a colleague option, which we can assure you was used often. We not only got the benefit of communicating with our current contacts but also gained over 300 new ones that were involved in a maintenance capacity.
However we didn’t stop there. When someone responded and an email dropped into the inbox our internal sales team called him or her to see if they needed any parts right now. You see the promotion gave us an excuse to call them and the incremental business we gained paid for the cost of the campaign many times over.
We can safely say that we were blown away by the response. Our advice to you here is open the promotional items cupboard and think about your target audience. There may be times when it is appropriate to give a cuddly toy, but we can guarantee you that if you target the results will blow you away!
