Promote Your Company Well

It’s that time of year, yes already, when companies are planning Christmas promotions and savvy businesses make sure they get remembered for the right reasons. If you don’t want to end up on The Gruen Transfer being slated, take note of these top tips.

I recently went to a very useful conference focused on business inventiveness. Whilst the event was memorable for the right reasons, the compulsory giveaway bag contained some shockers.

One company had gone to the expense and organisation getting a USB stick in a lovely leather pouch embossed with their logo. My first thought was ‘Great! This is really useful and good quality’, however, I was really disappointed when I tried to use it and found it only had 256MB of memory. To be of real use to me, a minimum of 1GB memory does the job. For the sake of a few cents this company would have had a positive impact and won kudos, as well as business. Instead, I felt frustrated and let down by the product and frankly didn’t think much of the company that gave it to me.

The implication when you give something with your brand name on it to a customer or potential customer is that it reflects your brand values. So beware of cheap and nasties.

I always say to clients the most important thing about promotional items is to get something that people use every day and make it good quality, pens for example. Yes I know everyone does pens, but how many companies do good pens? If you get a good pen you keep it and you don’t let it get taken from you, in fact you actively guard it. I’ve seen people get very shirty if someone ‘borrows’ their pen and forgets to give it back. Give a good pen and it can take your name around the world, pens travel. A pen that falls apart or doesn’t write well, now what does that say about your company? You want your customer to show off your pen to their colleagues – you don’t want them cursing your company name every time they try to write something down.

In a recent survey of business travellers at an international airport 71% had received a promotional product in the past 12 months. Interestingly, 33.7% had the item on their person and 56% of them kept their promotional product for more than one year. An overwhelming reason for keeping the product was because it
was useful.

Now there’s not many other ways of getting such a great response with your marketing dollar. So next time you’re looking for something to give to your target audience think quality and useful and your brand name will be remembered for positive reasons not negative ones.

Accounting

Peter Fowler

Peter Fowler Collins Hume

Collins Hume has over 12 years experience in finance and is a specialist in driving business forward while working smarter not harder. Awarded CPA Australia’s Top 40 Young Business Leaders 2012 he helps make things happen.

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Leo Senese

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Meg Nichols

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Moyra Burke-Smith

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Telecommunications

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