Giving promotional products out to Canadians can seem old school in the modern age of online advertising, analytics and social media marketing. Why give out customized promotional swag when you can put that money into an ad budget on Google Canada or Facebook?
The answer is simple – a promotional product is a wildly powerful marketing tool when used correctly. Below are a few tips to get the most out of your promotional product campaign.
Integrate Promotional Products with Digital Marketing
The first thing you should realize is that you don’t have to choose between online marketing and promotional products! A great marketing campaign integrates physical media with online ads and gets the best of both worlds.
Online marketing is great because you see the results on clear charts and can easily adjust your audience and messaging to create the perfect advertisement. But online marketing is intangible and sort of disappears into the noise of the internet – how many ads have you printed out and hung on your wall?
Physical marketing with promotional products in Canada is a different story – you won’t see a chart that shows how popular your printed t-shirts were. You can’t follow the funnel of how many people at the tradeshow picked up your custom printed stress balls and went to your website or signed up for your service. Promotional products are tangible and memorable. The right promo product – a flashlight or hand sanitizer will be held onto for years and a delicious chocolate with your logo on it can attract tons of people to your tradeshow booth and create a long lasting positive association with your brand.
Combining promotional products with digital marketing is so powerful. Summon the analytical strength of digital marketing to test your designs and find out which will be most popular before creating your custom printed promo products like Tim Ferris did with the Five Hour Workweek. Before publishing his book, Tim ran competing ads on Google to see which book title attracted the most clicks – then he went with the name that was most popular and his book is a top seller. Use the power of the internet to create promotional products Canada will love.
On the other side, you can use the tangibility of promotional products to increase the popularity of your social media campaign. Offering a prize for likers and subscribers can increase your fan base exponentially! We’ve seen promotional products used as prizes, giveaways and draws to get a ton of attention online. Seeing an ad online is forgettable, but seeing a photograph of a real promotional product that you can win for free by sharing a post? That mix of physical/digital marketing is where the real power of promo products comes into play.