Effectively Advertising Your Promotional Items

Promotional items have long been recognised as powerful marketing tools that aid business organisations in furthering awareness of their brand in addition to the products and services they’re also looking to promote.

But it isn’t enough to simply create and produce promotional items, their existence must be brought to the attention of current and future customers and that, generally, requires advertising in some form or fashion.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean spending further marketing capital on advertising, for advertising takes many forms and something as simple as your employees wearing promotional t-shirts in your store is an effective form of advertising and a great way to further awareness of your brand.

Here are five additional ways to advertise your business’s promotional items.

1. Your business website

Using your website to promote both your for-sale products/services as well as your promotional items is beneficial in many ways and can successfully help you to increase sales.

There are a number of ways to go about this, including posting pictures with active links that take interested customers to a webpage where they can access information on how to they can get their hands on the promotional items you’re offering, for example, spending over X amount on products and services or something along the lines of ‘purchase this receive this free!’.

2. Your social networks

Social networks and promotions are a match made in marketing heaven and if you’re not using your social networks to advertise your promotional items you’re missing out on some great opportunities.

Social networks like Facebook are wonderfully visual platforms so make the most of the opportunity to upload photos and pictures of your current promotional items. Moreover, look for ways to involve your customer base, not just advertise your promotional items.

If t-shirts and clothing are among the promotional items you’re advertising, encourage your customers to upload photos of themselves wearing them and look for innovative ways to encourage them to do so.

A competition of some kind with rewards to compete for would be an excellent way to encourage customer participation in your advertising efforts.

3. Your marketing materials

Featuring your promotional items in your marketing materials – brochures and fliers are good examples – is another excellent way to advertise your promotional items and doesn’t necessarily need to be linked to a purchase, though will prove to be an excellent means of encouraging sales.

4. Your bricks-and-mortar store

In addition to having your employees wear your business’s promotional items like caps and t-shirts, use your bricks-and-mortar store to advertise your promotional items.

This could include posters in your store windows, banners in front of your store, mannequins to advertise custom lanyards and promotional clothing, along with in-store displays, including POS (Point Of Sale) displays that target customers at the checkout.

Advertising methods that aim to draw potential customers off the street and into your store – banners, displays, posters, etc. – are an excellent way of appealing to passers-by and are generally very affordable to produce.

5. Giveaways

Everyone like to receive something for free which means that giveaways, when given out thoughtfully and with attention to paid to usefulness and exposure, can have quite an impact and therefore successfully raise awareness of your promotional items which will in turn raise awareness of your for-sale products and services.

Ensure the customers to whom you give promotional items actually have a genuine need for them, and will therefore use or wear them, for if your promotional items aren’t garnering exposure your advertising efforts are tantamount to a waste of marketing capital.

Promotional items are powerful marketing tools – advertise them for maximum impact.