Whether you’re a marketing manager for a fresh start-up company or a mid-sized business, you may always come across one obstacle: money. You want to attract new clients, engage loyal customers, and ultimately grow your brand. However, you have a limited marketing budget. This is one of the most common problems companies face. Nonetheless, by employing a smart, effective marketing strategy, you can still impact consumers in a big way. In this article, we will show you how to use promotional products on a limited marketing budget.
Determining Your Budget
Entrepreneur Magazine has suggested that relatively new companies invest up to 20 percent of their revenue on marketing. Established businesses can afford to invest considerably less. While this may seem disheartening, it is just more incentive to maximise every penny you spend. The first step to a successful campaign is establishing a budget. Look at your previous marketing endeavors and assess what exactly made them successful. Determine how much money you spent, and what your ROI was for a specific number of people. Capitalise on these strategies and measure your current budget accordingly.
Identifying Your Target Audience and Campaign Objectives
Now that you have your budget set, don’t waste your precious dollars on the wrong demographic. If you’re selling drones, skip marketing to older generations and people uninterested in technology. Use Google Analytics or your Facebook company page to see who is visiting your site. Pay attention to details like gender, age, location, and interests to lock in the perfect target audience.
After honing in on your demographic, it’s time to set your goals. One of the easiest ways to squander your budget is being unclear on your marketing campaign’s objective. Figure out whether you want to gain more exposure, bolster your mailing list, or land more immediate sales. If you’re not sure what your objective is or how to identify your key audience, contact us for a free consultation.
How to Use Promotional Products on a Limited Marketing Budget
Once you have determined your budget, target audience, and objectives, you need a solid marketing strategy. A multitude of approaches is available- even on a limited marketing budget. However, one of the most effective ways to expand your audience is to use promotional products.
Increasing your ROI is relatively simple when keeping your demographic in mind and selecting the right product. Consider the following when choosing which promotional merchandise to use:
• Which products are low-cost, high-quality, and will maximise the number of impressions?
• Is the merchandise reusable, and will someone likely regift it?
• Will your promotional product be unique and memorable, or simply tossed into the rubbish bin?
Given our research and experience at Red Tomato, some of the best products to gift are reusable shopping bags, logoed apparel, and water bottles. These items are inexpensive to produce, useful, and reusable. Consumers will use all of these in public areas, making your potential for exposure limitless.
All in all, while you may have to get creative with a limited marketing budget, following these steps will lead you to a successful campaign. A small investment can have a massive impact. Contact us now and we will help you stretch your dollars, making even the big fish of your industry turn their heads.
Have you experienced a successful marketing campaign using promotional products? What are your tips for growing a business without breaking the bank? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
Picture this: You’re flying out to Perth this Christmas to meet your girlfriend’s mother for the first time. Obviously, you need to bring her a gift. You could just settle for a generic basket of fruity lotions or a Myers gift card. However, you want to make a lasting impression, so you decide to dig deeper. What are your future mother-in-law’s (fingers crossed!) hobbies? What is she passionate about? In order to win her over, you need to find that perfect gift that she would have picked out herself. If you think about it, your girlfriend’s mother isn’t much different than your clients. In this article, we will show you the importance of understanding buyer personas to select promotional merchandise.
What are buyer personas, anyway?
We’re sure you’re familiar with what a buyer persona is, but just in case, it is described as follows: “Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers. Personas help us… internalise the ideal customer we’re trying to attract, and relate to our customers as real humans. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.” (Pamela Vaughan, 2015) Establishing buyer personas is crucial in determining what your promotional merchandise should be selected.
How, exactly, should you determine your buyer personas? While demographics such as age, sex, and ethnicity can be helpful, they are not the end-all. You need to dig deeper and discover what really makes your (present and future) clients tick. What are their motivations? What do they value, need, and desire?
How can you determine your unique buyer personas?
In order to reveal your buyer personas, you can send out a survey with questions similar to those above. Analyse your data to see who is visiting your social media channels and your website to glimpse what they are looking for. Another way is to use our straightforward Buyer Persona Template, which can be found in our toolbox.
The ideal client persona will be someone who has a high potential for brand loyalty and are likely not only to become return customers but also to refer your service to others. Once you have established who these personas are, and pinpointed their interests, you will be much better equipped to address their needs. In your marketing campaigns, you will be able to assist their professional goals by providing useful content based on their interests. In addition, by knowing who you are reaching out to, you can improve communication by adapting your tone. For instance, you would write an email to a CEO much differently than a millennial Event Manager. Use this buyer persona knowledge to your advantage.
What does this have to do with promotional merchandise?
Once you know your demographic well and have selected the buyer persona you’d like to target, you have access to the full potential of promotional products. The successful business owner with an affinity for sports would make a perfect candidate for golf balls. The digital nomad in their 20s or 30s would definitely carry around the Stark Tech Computer Backpack. Or the jet-setting businesswoman who’s always looking for unique souvenirs would love to bring some Kangaroo Chocolates home to her British friends.
No matter which promotional products you choose to give away, be sure that it caters directly to your ideal buyer persona. Not only will they feel understood, they will also proudly don that sweatshirt (with your logo on it) for all to see. Mission accomplished!
Have any questions about buyer personas or selecting the perfect promotional merchandise? Let us know!
If you’re in the marketing world, you know that ROI is not just a convenient acronym. BRB, OMG, and LOL (amongst others) could never pull the weight that ROI does, and with good reason. When your business depends on your Return on Investment (ROI), this becomes a very serious matter. Promotional merchandise is a no-brainer when you’re growing your brand: it’s cost-effective, improves customer engagement, and boosts brand awareness. What’s best is that the use of promotional products is tangibly measurable. In this article, we’ll explore how to measure ROI with promotional merchandise.
Benefits of Promotional Merchandise
We know that there are various avenues of marketing nowadays- from radio ads to social media promotion. Nonetheless, promotional merchandise continues to be an effective way to reach a wide audience. Most people keep promotional products and use them quite frequently. This doesn’t just remind clients of your services. It’s been found that one in three people are more likely to do business with a company after they’ve received a branded gift. In addition, your exposure will multiply if you’re using merchandise like reusable bags or branded t-shirts that will be used frequently in public.
Choosing the Best Product for ROI
At Red Tomato, we understand that, as a Marketer, it’s crucial to measure your success. Your marketing campaign can’t be a haphazard, blind investment. Your strategy needs to have a tangible, quantifiable endgame. As Andy Cohen, of the Advertising Specialty Institute, stated, “Ultimately, the return on investment that clients receive from using promotional products in their marketing campaigns can be found in the fact that the items have an extremely low cost-per-impression (CPI).” In other words, your choice of product needs to be wisely calculated. You may want to impress your clients with an expensive bottle of wine or the shiniest new tech gadget, but you may end up spending too much money on something that your client will never use.
How, then are you to choose the best product for your ROI? After all, you are looking to build positive brand associations with your clients. Sending them cheap or useless products with your logo on it, just to lower your CPI, will only prove that you’re cheap and thoughtless. At Red Tomato, we will brainstorm what kind of product is related to your business, useful, and will provide high visibility. Talkdesk’s Shauna Geraghty suggests, “The perfect promotional item with the largest ROI will inevitably be one that takes into account brand messaging, costs constraints and customer interest equally to make the appropriate product decision.”
How to Measure ROI with Promotional Merchandise
After you’ve chosen and distributed the perfect promotional merchandise, it’s important to measure how successful your campaign has been. This is where ROI comes in. A simplified way of calculating ROI would be to take the amount you’ve earned from the campaign and subtract the amount you spent on the product, shipping, trade show costs, and so on. However, with promotional merchandise, this measurement can be a bit more complex, due to factors such as reach and quantifiable purchases. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about complicated math equations anymore. We’ve taken the time to create an ROI Calculator specifically for promotional merchandise products to help you measure your success. Be sure to take a look and use it for your next marketing campaign!
Do you have any questions about how to measure ROI with promotional merchandise? What products have been the most successful for your ROI? Please share in the comments below!
Father’s Day is your once-a-year chance to show Dad how much he means to you. Father figures have a lot of influence in the way we shape our lives and Father’s Day is a good prompt to thank them. It’s also a great excuse to run a fun, creative marketing campaign! We’ve created this blog article to elaborate on our top 3 tips for a great Father’s Day promotion – we hope you love the ideas as much as we do.
1. Use the power of social media
If you’re a marketer, you’ll know that social media can really boost your marketing campaigns. There are a couple of ways you can harness this epic power. Firstly, run a competition! Advertise your product and give all participants the opportunity to win an amazing prize (a promotional merchandise pack, gift voucher or just some cash) if they post a photo using your product or share and tag a particular photo with their friends list. This is a great way to boost your brand presence and also grow your social media following. Using a timely excuse like Father’s Day is a great reason for people to enjoy participating.
Secondly, you can use Father’s Day as a theme for social media posts for a week or even a month. Creating content for social media can be hard sometimes – it’s often tough to find relevant content to contribute to your channels. By using Father’s Day as a theme you won’t be short of great content to post.
Gifts with purchase
What motivates people more to make a purchase than… a free gift? (How many times have you spent an extra $100 at Estee Lauder so you can get that goodie bag? Guilty!)
We’ve thought of a few Father’s Day gift ideas using promotional merchandise that we think would be the perfect incentive to get your clients to buy or invest in your business, just so they can get that gift!
1. T-shirts
Printed t-shirts. We’re not talking about a t-shirt with your logo slapped right in the center that no one outside your company is likely to wear (unless you’re Deux Ex Machina). Why not print t-shirts with 5 reasons why you love Dad? Or your best Dad joke? Of course, include your logo – but put it in a more elegant position such as the bottom corner or the back yoke.
2. A funny giveaway
Promotional merchandise giveaways with a bit of kick is a great way to engage your clients. Something as simple as a stress ball can be so effective for timely events such as Father’s Day! Because when do we not stress our Dads out?
3. Make it relatable
We’ve discussed Father’s Day themed gifts. If you want to purchase a larger amount of merchandise that will last beyond Father’s Day. Choose a gift that directly relates to your product. If you’re selling shovels and gardening supplies – you wouldn’t give a toiletry bag or a towel away, it just doesn’t make sense. Perhaps a branded tin pot or a pair of gardening gloves. This will be much more appealing to your clientele.
Use Father’s Day as an excuse to surprise your staff
91% of Dads are an active part of Australia’s work force – does this number scale out in your office? Due to there being such a large volume of Father’s in the work industry it’s a perfect excuse to put together some gifts for the office Dads. We’ve talked about using merchandise as a way to encourage staff retention. Why not put together a “Dad survival kit” not only will you get a laugh out of it, your Dads are sure to love it! You can even do one for Father’s of fur babies!
We hope you’ve learnt some new ways to tie in timely events, such as Father’s Day and add a bit of creative flair to your marketing plans this quarter. Want some more ideas? Click here to get help with planning a campaign.
Customer loyalty doesn’t begin after you make the sale. Their are four main stages for obtaining and keeping a client: attract, convert, close, and delight. Every single stage in this process is essential for increasing customer loyalty to your brand.
So how do you increase customer loyalty? There are various ways to increase your customer loyalty while still staying true to your brand and making your company stand out amongst the competition.
1. Implement outreach processes
Delighting your customers needs to come at every single stage in the buyer process in order to increase customer loyalty to your brand. Implementing outreach processes can be a good way to delight customers at any stage. Outbound email campaigns, providing helpful tips, and recommending resources can be a great way to delight your customers at every stage in the buyer process, even after they make a purchase.
Provide helpful content
It is much more cost-effective to keep a loyal customer happy than to continually obtaining new customers. Sending out a free eBook or a downloadable guide or template can be a great way to keep customers loyal to your brand both before and after you make the sale. It’s vital not to forget to delight your customers after you sold them your product or service. Returning customers are essential and can provide great referrals for future sales. Sending out a a genuinely helpful piece of content will show your customers you care about them even after you made the sale.
2. Sending promotional gifts to increase customer loyalty
Customers that receive a branded gift from a company are more than 85% percent likely to do business with that same company. With a strategic plan for gifting promotional products, customer loyalty towards your brand is almost guaranteed to increase. Timing and usefulness are two of the most important factors when creating a strategy to gift promotional products in order to increase brand loyalty.
For example, for Red Tomato’s 10-year anniversary we sent out a campaign integrating email and promotional gifts. Our account managers sent out high-quality “birthday” cards to all of our clients which was also accompanied by an email. The email contained a call to action which offered our clients a free gift – a branded box filled with a 1kg block of chocolate and a little hammer to smash and share it with colleagues! These thoughtful, and well-timed gifts increase Red Tomato’s customer loyalty and brand awareness.
3. Discounts
Offering your customers (or potential customers) special discounts and exclusive offers can increase their sense of brand loyalty. Why? Because it shows that you care about your customers enough to provide them with exclusive offers. Offer these types of discounts also instills a sense of urgency for them to act on the offer.
For example, you could have a special offer in which customers share your brand’s social media post within 24 hours in order to receive a special discount or free gift with a purchase. This implements a sense of urgency to act on an offer in addition to a sense of customer loyalty because they will receive a special discount from your brand.
4. Rewards for purchase
Enticing customers to make a purchase with an offer to receive a reward, will both increase sales and customer loyalty if executed correctly. For example, Red Tomato’s “Ugly Christmas Sweater” campaign encouraged customers to place an order before the end of the financial year. If they did, they would receive a free ugly sweater. The campaign was both fun, and a win-win for both Red Tomato and their clients.
Customer loyalty using a points-back system
This is probably one of the most common examples of a customer loyalty program. Grocery stores and coffee shops that offer “points” for purchases that can be exchanged for discounts or free items. A points-back system is a good way to both increase revenue and customer loyalty.
5. Input
Customers, especially millennial customers, want to contribute to the evolution of a brand. Customers want to feel like they are part of the brand and can identify with its message. Asking customers for input can increase customer loyalty because they feel loyal to a brand they helped build.
A perfect example of this is Lego’s “Kronkiwongi” campaign. In this campaign, Lego asked kids to build a “Kronkiwongi” (a word Lego invented) and encouraged kids to use their imagination. Kids all over the world submitted their creations and explained what a “Kronkiwongi” does. The campaign was heartwarming, viral, and increased international customer loyalty towards Lego.
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