Promotional Products: A Perspective
You can pay a large sum to the newspaper to print a 1/8 page ad that is barely visible by a declining readership.
You can pay for outdoor billboard advertising that creates lots of potential “impressions,” but lets the majority of your potential customers fly by.
You can pay for TV advertisements that get zipped through by the increasingly-popular, almighty DVR box.
OR you can invest (at least a portion of) your advertising dollars in promotional products that your potential customers will actually use. Why is this a better option that the scenarios above? Because it appeals to the most basic of instincts. We as mammals intrinsically search for the highest gain for the least effort. In other words, we LOVE FREE STUFF.
In the act of giving out promotional products, if nothing else, we are providing incentive for receiving our advertisement, even if it is nothing more than our names printed on some kind of inexpensive good such as a can huggie or ink pen. The average person discards (or recycles) a newspaper when they are through reading it. They erase the program from the DVR list after it has been viewed. And most people do not have time to make a U-turn and get a second look at a billboard that caught their eye in passing. But with all that said, most people will not discard of an item that they could gain value from. Being from Southwest Louisiana, I know I personally have enough can huggies to supply ALL of my friends with 3 of them if I were to gather EVERY friend of mine in one place. Why? Because most people will not throw away something from which they can derive value. The same can be said for an ink pen or any other small token. Remember when phone books were still relevant? Even if you didn’t notice the advertisements within the yellowpages, how many of the magnets from the front cover did you have on your refrigerator?
Promotional Products Grab Bag
By investing the few extra dollars in promotional products, you help boost the lifetime impression value of your advertisements. The Promotional Products Association International released an informative (albeit hokey) video with some impressive statistics.
52% of people do business with a company after receiving a promotional product. The same percentage also say that their impression of a company is more positive after receiving a promotional product.
76% of people recall the name of a company on a promotional item they have received.
55% of people keep the item for over a year with half of them using them daily! Can you imagine the comparative cost of running the same ad in print media form for a full year?
But don’t just take their word for it. A Baylor University study found that salespeople who gave out promotional products received 22% more referrals than their counterparts who did not!
In addition to all of the numbers, promotional products are no longer the simple advertisements that they used to be. Today, people are making their promotional products into two-way communication tools. This can be done buy imprinting a scannable QR code on your promotional products. Just think, with the scan of a smartphone, you can turn that passive viewer into an active engager and direct them to your website, a video, or any other location on the internet that has a hyperlink.
Sure, conventional means of advertising work to some extent. But your business is not the cookie-cutter, textbook establishment now is it? If it was, it wouldn’t survive! So Stand out, Be Seen, and have your potential customers take AND utilize your advertisements. Don’t be a passing blur on the highway or a DVR afterthought.
Since 1994, Action Specialties has been helping companies and organizations create visible identity. Whether it be with customized promotional products, specialized print projects, or company uniforms, we help you show the world who you are. With our 40,000 square foot, full-service facility and knowledgeable staff to guide you through the process, we take the headache and guesswork out of your project. We are more than a printing company. We are a company that can help you create the image you strive for. For more information on what we can create for your, visit www.ActionSpecialties.com or call us locally at 337.367.1664, or toll free, at 800.819.1664.
Collaboration and Co-Branding
Many companies or businesses see themselves as an insular, isolated entity, Not with the mindset of One for All and All for One, but more like One for One and All for ME. More so now than ever, companies are being forced to think outside of these boxes as the lines of conventional marketing and branding begin to blur. One strategy that is becoming more prevalent now than ever is the idea of CO-BRANDING and COLLABORATIVE MARKETING.
On a global marketing scale, many brands are joining forces where they might have a common interest and combine their resources and initiatives to form giant global efforts. For example, snack and softdrink giants, PepsiCo and Doritos joined forces with XBOX to sponsor a challenge to game designers to put together the best “consumer created” video game content. The mega-companies were able to combine their marketing efforst (and dollars) to push this expensive sponosored promotion that might have gotten a pass from their respective board of directors if any one was to carry the financial burden alone. The result: an immersive experience for the fans. Fans were encouraged to design these games. Those less programming savvy were encourraged to vote for their favorite, the determining factor on who would ultimately win the $50,000 grand prize. For FritoLay, PepsiCo, and XBOX, this meant getting their name and image in front of a vast group of potential consumers. But Co-Branding is not just for international business-builders alone.
A shining example of co-branding comes from our neighbors in Texas. Austin’s annual festival, Austin City Limits Festival had a unique idea on how to reveal their highly-anticipated festival line-up to the ravenous sea of annual concert-goers. Rather than spill the beans on their Facebook page as one might expect, the organizers of the festival made lottery ticket-style scratch offs with the names of three bands that would be featured at the festival on each. They then distributed these to 5 of their sponsors’ physical locations per day. This drove foot traffic to their vendors while also actively engaging those who wanted to know the festival’s lineup. In addition, they made a promotion out of the tickets, inserting a few “golden tickets,” where 3 matching band names could be revealed. The lucky owner of that ticket would then receive VIP passes for the festival. Quite the call to (physical) action!
To make a long story short, co-branding can be beneficial for any sized business. It can help foster positive perception of your brand by showing that you can “play nice.” It can also help put you in front of a whole new set of clients to whom you might never have otherwise been introduced. And if the relationship is rich enough, who knows… someone on the outside might just blog about you.
The QR Question
When you think of engaging your clients, what is your ultimate end goal? Is it closing a sale? Having them connect to your web site? Simply making a connection and starting a relationship? No matter what the end result, engagement is the ultimate goal for business.
Marketers must overcome a volley of distractions when it comes to making those connection. Will the potential consumer remember to check out the website on your business card they stuck in their pocket? Will they take the time to click around online in order to find the web demo of the product you referred them to? Did they write your email address down incorrectly, ending up in a lost email and a forever-gone connection? Enough questions…QR codes can help.
Put down the hyperlinks and walk away! QR codes can take all of the guess work out of your linking needs. Short for “Quick Response” code, QR codes can offer a direct link to ANY site/image/video on the web when scanned with a smart phone code scanner (unless it’s a flash file and you own an iPhone). Think of it as a link that you can click with your smart phone. But why does this matter?
A study by Google Research (yes, they have a branch devoted to research) in 2011 found that 89% of smartphone owners use their smartphone daily. Not only this, but 80% expressed that they use their smartphones for shopping and shopping-related activities. What does this mean to you? You can connect your point of purchase to the consumer, even if they are not in store.
From a business standpoint, this means that you can take a non-directly-interactive medium (such as a print ad, tee shirt printing, or anything else your heart desires) and turn it into a highly interactive connection between you and your potential consumer. QR codes can link directly to product demo videos, interactive web tours, photo galleries, or contact information. All you have to do is copy and paste the web address you want the code to send the scanner to and VOILA! A custom QR code of your very own is generated before you can say “Thank you for calling Action Specialties. How can I help you?” And what’s more, QR codes are (generally speaking) free for company and consumer alike. 
QR codes can be generated at no cost by visiting many sites, such as: http://delivr.com/qr-code-generator or http://goqr.me/
Of course, you can pay for the ”kitchen sink” version of many programs that will give you detailed analytics about who/when/where scans your code, but most sites are generally free.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are tons of free QR scanning applications out there that all generally work the same. Simply search the application store of whatever smartphone platform you might have.
Click the link for the whole Google Story: http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2011/04/how-people-use-smartphones-to-purchase-products.php
