Promotional merchandise gives businesses a tangible way of connecting with their current and potential future customers and is an invaluable marketing tactic for building brand awareness. But it is not enough to simply dole out freebies. You must ensure that doing so delivers a sound return on investment (ROI) and to make sure that this is the case, you must have a strategy in place to measure the success and impact of your promotional merchandise marketing campaign.
Strategies for success
1. Set SMART goals.
Before you place your promotional merchandise order, you must first establish a set of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART) goals for your campaign. By clearly defining your objectives and key performance indicators at the outset, you are more likely to achieve them.
2. Decide what technique(s) you will use to monitor success.
There are a whole host of ways in which you can monitor your target audience's engagement with your promotional merchandise, and you must select those that best suit your way of doing business.
Printing a QR code or URL on the merchandise that directs traffic to a monitorable website is a simple yet effective technique. You could even choose to direct traffic to a lead capture form rather than a website landing page.
Alternatively, you could incentivise your target audience to participate in social media discussions or share pictures, videos or user feedback using carefully pre-selected hashtags. This is a great way of monitoring user engagement and can dramatically increase brand awareness.
3. Decide what metrics to track.
It is important to understand what metrics matter to you. If brand awareness is your driving priority, then you should analyse social media and website traffic to see what proportion of promotional merchandise recipients are engaging with your business.
If lead conversion is more important to you, then you may wish to track your cost per acquisition by dividing the total cost of your marketing campaign by the number of new customers acquired.
4. Choose the right products.
To maximise your ROI, you will need to select promotional merchandise that aligns with your organisation's goals and values and that resonates with your target audience. The products should be carefully personalised to enhance brand recall and be of high quality, delivering a greater impact to the recipients.
Many modern consumers care deeply about sustainability, so selecting sustainable products can deliver a greater ROI, despite the higher initial purchase cost.
5. Seek expert advice.
If you are struggling to develop a promotional merchandise marketing campaign or cannot decide upon the products that will deliver the greatest long term impact, please speak to the experts at Source Promotional Merchandise today. Helping businesses to develop and run a personalised, sustainable and successful promotional merchandise marketing campaign is our bread and butter, so working with us will save you time and money.
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