Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Promotional Products - What are they and how can they help

By Bree C Robbins

A promotional product is an item, such as a Pen, Compendium, Tote Bag, or Novelty Gift, that a business gives away in order to help increase brand awareness in the public domain.

All businesses especially small to medium businesses need to gain name recognition somehow, and promotional products are one of the easiest, most impact-full and lasting way to expose your business to others. It also helps you stand above your competitors.

For example, if you hand out a Pen to a mortgage broker, not only will that broker remember your company, but every one of the broker's customers who use or see the pen will also gain exposure to your company. If you give out a Tote Bag and someone takes that to the gym with them 4 times a week, every person that sees them on the way to the gym is now a new potential customer for your business.

Essentially meaning that a Promotional Product doesn?t just appear once and then is forgotten similar to an advertisement in a magazine, what it means is that your business gets continual exposure for the life of the Promotional Product just from one item. So essentially the more Promotional Products you can give away to potential or current clients and or customers, the more you increase your business exposure within the community and the more you increase you client base.

Let's take a look at some of the cold, hard facts, as provided by the Australian Promotional Products Association (APPA):

Business travelers surveyed by APPA at a local airport showed that more than 70% of these travelers had received a Promotional Product of some kind within the last 12 months.

Out of those people over 30% actually had the promotional product - right there and then! These Promotional Products were actively being used or at lease carried the Promotional Product they had been given. The promotional product was used over and over again, not simply tossed to the side or thrown away.

Out of these People over 50% were still using the promotional product they were given for more than 12 Months. So this one item was able to help create brand recognition for the business that gave out the product for over 1 Year.

When APPA inquired they found that almost 75% of people kept the Promotional Product for the 12 months did so because it was Useful to them.

All of these facts found by the APPA help make the case for the effectiveness of promotional products. These findings help relieve a common fear among small business owners that their hard earned marketing budget may be wasted when recipients simply forget about the promo products or throw them away. More likely, the promotional product will either be used by the recipient or given to someone else who will use it (thereby achieving the same result.)

What's more is that a solid percentage of those promotional products will continue to be used for more than a year. With the cost of a promotional Pen, Compendium, Tote Bag, or Novelty Gift cheaper than you would expect, this marketing strategy can help you get your business out there, at a meager price.

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