Ever gotten cute branded promotional products such as keyrings or umbrellas decorated with company names and logos? Promotional items like those have been around for years and since the 1970s, companies have been upping their game, trying to outdo one another in the race to brand every possible space. The truth is that anyone who owns a business that has a limited marketing budget has had to find out the hard way that though promotional branding does work well, it can also be a big waste of money.

When it comes to your business, how do you ensure that you’re not wasting money on caps and t-shirts that will sit in the back of people’s cupboards for the rest of eternity? Is there a way to brand, a place to brand and a method to brand that will ensure your products are out in the open, becoming small mobile billboards that advertise your goods and services? Talented branding companies are coming up with more and ways to brand promotional products for their clients and these are all relevant, interesting and cost-effective.

Get the Right Branded Promotional Products for Your Business

Whether you are the sole proprietor of a tiny accounting firm, or you are in charge of a R10 million marketing budget for a huge corporation, you need to know how to brand smart, so that your promotional products will work harder for you. One of the most topical issues currently being addressed in marketing journals is wastage, and this comes down to the right target audience seeing your branding. So how do you make sure the right people see your message?

Think about a billboard and how many people see it every day as they go to work and return home. If you were selling an expensive product, like a smartphone, what would be the value in having low-income target markets seeing your message more frequently than those who could actually afford to buy your product? This is what is referred to as wastage and when it comes to branding, no one can afford to waste their allocated marketing spend for the year.

It’s Important to Reduce Wastage

So how do you ensure that you get your message into the right people’s homes, hearts and minds? This is actually easier than you may think, especially when you consider that people who are grouped together in terms of location, demographics and psychographics have access to the same forms of media. So if you want to advertise a smartphone to those high-income earners, why not brand coffee mugs, and conduct office desk drops at high-profile companies, rather than spend millions on outdoor advertising?

Reducing wastage can sometimes mean location-based advertising and promotional branding too. Giving away small and inexpensive keyrings in a mall may make you feel like you are connecting with loads of consumers on an emotional level, but how many of those will actually buy what you are selling? If you are hoping to take a high value product to market, you should only give away branded products in a high-income mall and only to those who are more likely to buy what you’re selling.

Better Branding Gets More Attention

It is not only the money you spend on branding or where you brand that is important. It is also how you brand promotional products, and what those products are, that drives your message. You need to remember that consumers are swamped with advertising, marketing and branding all day long, so for your products to stand out, they have to be different, shocking, exciting and create talk-ability, just like your message.

A company selling t-shirts, for example, would have a lot more success in giving away branded clothes hangers with a funny message on them, than they would by just saying, ‘buy our t-shirts’. Similarly, if you trying to get more clients for your plumbing business, branding a roll of toilet paper with the message ‘We’ll take care of your poopy jobs’ is much smarter than giving away a flyer.

So it really comes down to a little creativity and some time spent considering how you want your target market to see you, before you spend the big bucks on branded promotional products.