Your digital marketing strategy is a vital factor in the success of your e-commerce business. It helps you expand your brand’s reach, generate leads, and boost sales. However, sustaining your target audience’s interest can be tricky with all the competition. And depending on the strategies you have in place, you could risk losing opportunities resulting in a decline in revenue.
With this in mind, it’s essential to stay ahead by continuously engaging and catching the interest of your online audience. Promotional items like customized T-shirts, pens, hats, water bottles, stickers, or keychains can be a good way to do this.
You may customize such items with the help of custom screen printing services that can help print your logo or incorporate your company’s name and taglines onto these products.
In addition, by merging promotional items with your digital marketing strategy, you can create a unique experience for your online audience, which can help generate leads and sales. You can also use these products to boost brand awareness among new prospects and loyal customers.
To help you start with this, below are seven ways promotional items can help complement and boost your digital marketing strategy:
1. Encouraging Customer Loyalty
Customer engagement and loyalty play a significant role in helping you build customer relationships over time. This makes them more likely to buy from you again in the future, helping you retain customers and maintain good company sales and profits.
A great way to encourage customer engagement is to use promotional items to supplement your loyalty programs. For instance, for your customers to receive those products, they must earn points first for completing actions. These may include completing an online purchase, filling out online surveys, or referring your company to their friends by sharing your content on their social media accounts.
After earning enough points, they can redeem the product of their choice. This can go a long way in encouraging them to continue participating in these activities to receive more promotional items and earn even more points. This also enables repeat business from satisfied customers who feel appreciated and rewarded for their loyalty.
2. Facilitating Brand Recall With Stickers
Brand recall is essential as it helps consumers identify your product or service. If a customer can remember and recognizes your brand, they will likely consider purchasing your offers. For one, they already know the quality of your products and how you do business. On the other hand, if they’re not familiar with who you are, they may look elsewhere for other options.
With this in mind, you can boost brand recall with the help of promotional items like stickers. For example, when preparing orders for shipment, you can insert free branded stickers inside the packaging before sending them to your customers. They can then use these stickers and apply them on personal items like gadgets, tumblers, and notebooks, to name a few.
This approach can not only help in boosting brand recall. Since your consumers use their items with stickers, you can expose your business to more people. This can make them familiar with or curious about your brand, which may encourage them to visit your website, social media pages, or brick-and-mortar store.
3. Personalizing Customer Interactions
Personalized interactions with your consumers are essential for building trust and driving conversions. And one of the keys to creating meaningful connections is ensuring each interaction feels like an authentic exchange between two humans rather than a cold, impersonal transaction.
This way, the consumer will feel more comfortable contacting your business if they need assistance or have questions about your products.
A good way you can personalize customer interactions is through promotional items. For example, in your email marketing campaigns, you may include promotional items for your newsletter subscribers to celebrate brand milestones, such as their anniversary when they first purchase with you.
On the other hand, you may also send free samples of your newest products to loyal customers before you put them on sale in public to gauge their popularity among consumers. These small gestures can go a long way in enhancing customer loyalty and creating lifelong advocates for your brand.
In other words, personalized promotions can help build customer relationships over time by showing them that you value their preferences and needs.
4. Creating A Buzz Through Social Media Giveaways
Creating a buzz around your brand is one of the goals of implementing and continuously innovating your digital marketing campaigns. You can make your company relevant to your target market with the right strategies. After all, you want to give them a reason to talk about you so that they’ll spread the word and help you grow your audience.
One way to do this is to host giveaways or contests on social media platforms. For example, you can use promotional items to encourage your audience to participate in the giveaway. You may include in the guidelines that they can only join the activity by promoting those products with their content.
This strategy can allow you to gain hundreds or even thousands of user-generated content (UGC) from your audience. It can help expose your brand to new audiences and potential customers on those social media platforms. Aside from that, when prospects search for your brand, they’ll see and read those positive reviews, helping you gain their trust.
5. Boosting Competitive Edge
Competitive edge sets you apart and makes you more attractive to your customers. An excellent way to help you develop an edge over your competitors and stay ahead of the competition is by creating a sense of community with your brand through promotional items.
For example, through email marketing, you may give away limited edition promotional items like executive pens or travel bags to your top one hundred highest-paying consumers. These items can signify that these customers are part of an exclusive club that only a few people can get into.
Plus, it can show how much value you place on them as customers since you are willing to go out of your way for them and give them something special. Such efforts can make your consumers feel valued and appreciated, which can help develop a deeper connection with your brand and boost your competitive edge.
6. Compensating Influencers
Influencer marketing has become an essential strategy for companies to boost their digital presence and reach more online consumers. This approach involves working with notable personalities in your niche to help you promote your brand and spread the word about your company’s offers.
And considering they have a significant following on their social media pages, their content will likely be viewed by a larger audience, increasing your chances of gaining more leads and sales.
Aside from monetary payment, a good way to compensate influencers for their time and effort is by gifting them promotional items. For example, you can work on a partnership agreement wherein you’ll give them free products in exchange for positive feedback regarding your brand.
You can send packages of beauty products and other accessories like makeup brushes or curling wands if you sell beauty products. From there, they’ll create content reviewing those promotional items to showcase their usefulness. In doing so, you can reach a wider audience since more online users can view and be exposed to your products.
7. Increasing Sales Through Your Events
Hosting an event is an excellent way to network with industry leaders and consumers. This means you’ll be able to increase your brand awareness and promote your products simultaneously.
As such, you can use this opportunity to give away promotional items to the guests during a product launch or conference. For instance, you may use products with attached quick response (QR) codes that will direct them to your website or social media pages.
When the guest scans the code from the item, they can learn more about the latest products you’re selling during the event. This can encourage them to visit your online shop or follow your social media accounts.
You may also ask them to upload content during the event and share it with their followers online. This can help increase traffic to your website and generate organic traffic from search engines while bringing in more sales.
Final Words
The effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns is tied to the quality of the content you generate for your target audience. And one of the excellent ways to boost your marketing efforts is by supplementing your digital marketing strategies with tangible gifts that can be used as giveaways, rewards, or incentives. This can encourage engagement in your posts, social media pages, and email newsletters.
With that in mind, you can leverage promotional items like T-shirts, stickers, and water bottles. These products can help create a buzz around your brand name through social media giveaways. Similarly, you can use such items to set you apart from the competition and encourage consumers to share user-generated content online.
Ultimately, giving away promotional items can help boost brand awareness by allowing more people to use or interact with them in real life at events or on social media.
