One of the trickiest parts about starting a company or launching a new product is the initial phase of having to find a way to market that product or service. The fact that there are many markets that are now saturated means that even if you have a truly unique idea, you will need to be very creative to make it known to the general public or to your demographic.
The good thing is that if you have a great product and a great marketing plan, this will be the hardest part of the process. Once a few people know of the product or service, they are likely to then act as your marketing mechanism by having other people know about the product through various means including word of mouth.
One of the ways of achieving this is by ensuring that you use promotional products to get the word out. However, you need to be very smart in how you use them, otherwise you may end up spending a lot of money and see nothing of it. There are a number of principles you can live by to avoid this including:
Identify a target demographic before deciding on which marketing products to use
Suppose you are launching a new product, and want to create merchandise that you can then use to reach the people who will most likely buy it. The only way to ensure that this works is by first identifying the target demographic you will be working with, and then creating the promotional products for them. Of course, this usually means understanding what their needs are and then creating a product that can meet these needs.
A good example of this is if you are creating a product that will most likely be used by company executives. Most of such individuals are high net worth, and usually love the finer things in life. Choosing to use promotional products that look and feel cheap to try and promote your new business to them will not work, and may even encourage them to avoid it altogether. The best way to avoid this is by identifying the characteristics of the demographic, and then figuring out what type of product can appeal to them. In some cases, you might need to do a little market research to get more accurate information regarding this.
The issue of volume
When thinking of using business promotional gifts, you also have to consider the issue of volume. A classical mistake that most people will make is ordering too many of such gifts, thus spending more than they should on them. You should try to gauge how many of the gifts you will give out before you even have them made. This will depend on many things, including what criteria you will use to give the gifts out.
For instance, if you are going to hand them out to people in the streets, then you will definitely need a large number of gifts. However, if you are going to give them to only a select number of customers such as those who make a purchase above a certain threshold, you will need fewer of the gifts. To reduce the risk of wasting money, you could estimate how many of the gifts you will give out in a week, and then order a number commensurate to this. This way, you will never have too much of a surplus at any one time.
As a first time businessman, you might not know how to do this well. Rather than using guesswork, you should consider getting some help in making such estimations. One of the most effective ways of doing this is by consulting a company that produces the gifts, and asking them for help in making the estimation. You can also work with one of the many business management services out there to help you do this.
What do you want the gift to do for you?
If you are thinking of getting business promotional gifts that you can hand out to customers, you should also think about what kind of message you want to send out. This varies depending on the type of business you are running, as well as what point in time you are in. For instance, you might want to notify your customers that you now have an online presence. In such cases, you could get a gift that is designed to send out this message, such as mugs that have your web address on it.
In summary, if you are thinking of ordering business promotional items to either boost your business or new product, you should refrain from thinking that just any product will do. Remember that this is a form of marketing, and like in all other cases you will need to carefully craft a plan on how to make it successful while spending the least amount of money possible.
