Creating an Industry-Specific Promotional Products Plan

How to Create a Promotional Products Plan for Your Industry

It is crucial to create a custom promotional products plan tailored to your brand and industry. After all, it can be hard for your brand’s message to get to its target audience by using the wrong vehicle. Anything that is associated with your company should reflect your brand values and philosophy and resonate with your market. Your brand is your identity and your marketing tools, including promotional products, should reflect that.

For your brand to reap all the benefits that promotional products offer, they should be related to your industry and the people you serve. For example, if you are a health and fitness brand, giving away water bottles, fitness bands or sports bags and apparel will serve useful for your customers while also being related to your brand.

If you want to create the perfect promotional products plan tailored to your brand and industry, here are the factors you should consider.

Does your branded merchandise represent your brand?

Promotional items are advertising tools, so they should reflect your brand identity and values. The promotional items you choose should be related to your business. Imagine the people who’ll be using your branded merchandise. How can they be reminded of your company if the items are completely unrelated to and different from your brand?

When choosing promotional merchandise, make sure that they’re a good representation of your brand and your message. Encapsulate all your brand elements (brand image, logo, and the services/products you offer) and find an item that will be an approximate match.

A perfect example is IAMS Australia’s frisbee giveaway campaign to raise brand awareness. These frisbees are shaped into barbells and with the slogan, “Strong Dogs,” which emphasises how strong the dogs become when fed with IAMS dog food.

Source: UK Corporate Gifts

This campaign not only drove the brand identity and message home to the customers, but also served useful for their customers, which are dog owners, sitters, and walkers.

How are your promotional products comparing to your competitors’?

There’s nothing wrong about looking at what your competitors are doing. It gives you invaluable insights into your industry’s trends and practices. What worked for them and what didn’t? You can learn something from their successful campaigns. This does not necessarily mean that you’ll be copying their whole plan. But you could be inspired by their strategies and adopt or update them when you create your own.

How will your promotional items enrich the lives of your audience?

Your promotional products are only as effective and beneficial for your brand as they are useful for your customers. They will be the ones to use or consume the products so if they won’t have any use for them, they are more likely to toss the items away.

It also helps if your promotional items can be used alongside the products/services that you offer to make it easy for them to recall your brand.

A perfect example of this is the Thingamaboob keychain by Canadian Cancer Society.

It doesn’t just accessorize your keys or bag zippers. The keychain’s beads help people detect cancerous lumps by showing them how big the lumps are when doing a self-exam. This has not only spread awareness about breast cancer but also generated $725,000 in proceeds for the Canadian Cancer Society.

Get hyper-focused promotional products that will take your industry by storm!

Your promotional products plan, just like any marketing plan, need to cater to your specific industry and audience. If you need help in creating your custom promotional products plan, you can join our Road Testers program.

We will send you a custom industry-specific branded merchandise bundle every two months - free of charge! You can use, test, and keep them for your campaigns, all you have to do is share your feedback about the products.

You can sign up for Road Testers here: https://www.brandconnect.com.au/information/road-test