Why branded gifts are an excellent marketing tool

With businesses starting to open up again, business marketing is ramping up a gear. Many companies will already be looking ahead to Halloween, Bonfire Night and even Christmas. With that in mind, Adele, owner of Distinctive Confectionery, who are specialists in corporate confectionery, shares her three reasons why branded gifts are (still) an excellent marketing tool.

Excellent value for money

Giving branded gifts may seem like an expensive undertaking. In reality, however, it’s all relative. The vast majority of businesses do need to market their products/services in order to continue to grow. Even the biggest names do it, especially at peak periods (like the run-up to Christmas). This means that the only question is how you go about it.

You can still build your reach organically, however, this is becoming increasingly difficult. The harsh reality is that search engines, social media platforms and real-world publications all need businesses to “pay to play”. That’s how they cover their own bills. They will feature content for free if it’s outstanding but they’re unlikely to go out of their way to promote it.

This means that if you want your content promoted without payment, you’ll need to do it yourself. For example, you can participate in conversations on the internet and mention your product/service. You will, however, need to tread very carefully. Overt sales content is likely to be frowned upon if not actively forbidden.

By the time you add all this up, it’s little wonder that many businesses just accept the need to pay for marketing. You do, however, need to get value for money. For small businesses, that tends to mean using niche channels. These would typically be local SEO, micro influencers, local, real-world publications and promotional gifts.

Long-term exposure for your business

The reason why promotional gifts can look so expensive is that you pay the full cost upfront. With regular advertising, by contrast, you effectively pay per appearance. In the case of real-world media, this means every time your promotion is shown. In the online world, it usually means every time someone clicks on it.

Individual promotions can be very low-cost. The problem is that individual promotions are unlikely to get the results you need. You may get the odd consumer who engages with you straight away; for the most part, however, you’re going to need to keep getting your promotions in front of people until you eventually get their attention.

This means that, over time, the costs of running standard marketing campaigns can actually work out higher than the costs of giving promotional gifts. This is particularly likely if you choose items designed to be used over the long term. In theory, you can still be reaping the benefits of the gift for months or even years after you give it.

Increased customer engagement

Promotional gifts can be used to send a strong message about your brand. This can be literal as well as figurative. For example, as previously mentioned, it can be very difficult to drive traffic to your site/platform profile just by organic means. You can, however, use promotional gifts to encourage people to check out your content.

This can be achieved in a number of ways. The obvious ones are competitions and giveaways. In general, the route you take is often less important than the opportunity to get branded items into circulation. By definition, your name will be on them. This makes it easier for people to find you online. Ideally, you’ll put some kind of online address on them too.

Promotional confectionery and merchandise can also be used to make a statement about what kind of a company you are. For example, a lot of promotional merchandise links into the concepts of sustainability and/or wellbeing. It can therefore subtly indicate that you are the type of company that takes these concepts seriously.