The right promotional products manufacturers
It’s often said that the art of successful marketing lies in successful branding. While that is 100% true, branding success itself lies in the experience and skills of your brand promotion partners. Many companies across the world realize this today, and actively seek to align themselves with leaders within the corporate branding space. And one way that they manage to do so is by working with the top promotional product suppliers. One such leader in promo products is OYI Gifts.
Brand perception and gift-giving from promotional products manufacturers
One extremely successful corporate brand management strategy is gift-giving. What this involves is building a comprehensive marketing campaign around a key theme. Then marketing managers launch that campaign with the help of promotional products. These promo items:
- May closely reflect the company’s products or services, or they may revolve around the company’s brand in general
- Usually contain the company’s branding, such as corporate colors, logo, or slogans
- Often include contact names and details so prospective clients might find it easy to reach out to the company and make inquiries or place an order
These three requisites of good gift-giving are vital to sway the perception of a company’s brand, in the eyes and minds of existing and prospective clients. Without either one of them, unless the brand is already well-recognized in the market, a gift-giving strategy may not have the optimal impact that marketing executives hoped for.
Let’s look at how close resemblance to a company’s products or services in a gift may aid in brand perception. Let’s assume your company deals in fitness equipment, and you initiate a sales promotional campaign with a gift of plastic keychains, silicone drinking mugs, and other household items – all of which depict less-than-healthy items, such as high-calory beers, full-fat burgers, and ice creams and drinks loaded with saturated fats and sugars.
What do you think the reaction to your marketing campaign will be?
You might have chosen a leading promotional products manufacturer’s wholesale supplier to partner with you on this gift-giving scheme. And the theme – ice cream, beer, burgers – is something that might resonate with a much broader audience. However, because the items manufactured run counter to your corporate offerings, they’ll create a negative brand perception!
When it comes to using gifts as promotional products, brand perception – positive or negative – is everything. The right choice of a promo item can further a positive perception of your brand, while the wrong products may destroy a brand. That’s why it’s important to partner with a gift manufacturer that knows the importance of branding, and who has in-depth knowledge of using gift items for corporate branding.
How to use corporate gifts for branding
So, once you decide on the right combination of gifts and gift manufacturers, how can you use those gifts to build a successful marketing campaign? Well, that really depends on the type of products and services that your company supports, and the opportunities available to use gifts as marketing tools.
Here are four ideas that savvy promotional products manufacturers might help you with:
- Marketing events: The objective of marketing is to inform and attract prospects and sales leads to your brand. By using gift items as “bait”, savvy marketers grab the attention of prospects, who would typically not listen to the company’s marketing message.
The key to gift-giving during marketing events is to ensure the gifts represent the company’s branding (remember: you’re using these items to get people to notice your brand, and not necessarily a specific product or service). That’s why its vital to work with your gift items manufacturer to develop brand-promoting items to give away at these marketing events.
- Sales promotional events: In the case of sales promotion, the objective is not so much to make prospective customers and clients brand-aware, as it is to sell specific products, services, and solutions.
Because the focus of promoting sales is very much product or service-specific, the items you offer as gifts must highlight those products and services. Make sure you only work with top promotional product manufacturers|suppliers, and that they know everything they must know about your product or service, and the value proposition it offers. Providing this information to giveaway toy and gift makers helps them focus on developing products with higher promotional value.
- Internal promo events: Not all sales and marketing activity occurs with an external audience. In some cases, your own employees act as corporate brand promotional and sales ambassadors.
To tap into the hidden power of employee-based marketing, you might want your gift item manufacturer to think of developing products and gift items of value to your employees, as opposed to your broader customer base. For example, if you have a large workforce that works outdoors, maybe designing corporate merchandise, like water bottles and silicone mugs, for employee use during hot summer or cold winter days, might be a good idea?
- Supplier/distributor-sponsored events: In some cases, you can use promotional products to tap into a much broader network of potential prospects. These networks may be those of your other business partners, such as your suppliers, distributors, and retail agents.
Typically, these partners are often the “secondary” links in your supply chain – meaning, they depend on you (the “primary” partner) and your products and services to generate business for their companies. As a result, secondary partners are eager to work with their “primary” partners on marketing and sales promotional initiatives.
You could work with your promotional products manufacturer’s wholesale supplier to design a series of giveaway products that share branding and marketing messaging. Clearly, since your company is the dominant player in this association, your branding must always take precedence. Then, you could participate in withholding joint promotional events – perhaps giving away the items at partner retail and distribution sites, for example.
To make corporate gift-giving a success, it’s important to understand that marketing and sales are two distinct business functions. While they both focus on generating leads, marketing has a broader focus, with sales capitalizing on that success. To make promotional strategies a success, corporations must focus on both types of promo activities, brand recognition (marketing) and sales promotion.
Regardless of what marketing, sales, or brand promotional strategy you follow, it’s important to work closely with your promotional product manufacturers when using gift giveaway items as part of that strategy. They are the ones that have been supporting countless clients, such as your organization, successfully launching promotional strategies using gifts. Their experience will help you implement a successful promotional strategy.
Choosing your promotional products manufacturers
Clearly, then, who you task with producing your promotional giveaway products matters. In fact, the maker of those products is probably one of the major contributors to any successful marketing and sales promo strategy. The question, therefore, is: What must you look for in deciding whom to select as your promo product supplier?
Well, the list of qualities to look for includes:
- Experience: The ideal company you work with must have several years in the promotional gift manufacturing business. Because of the high risks involved in your company’s brand, working with relative newcomers in the sector may not be a good idea.
- Know-how: The ideal candidate, to work with you on your corporate gift-giving strategy, must possess broad know-how in manufacturing promotional products. That includes manufacturing products in a wide range of categories, from plastic and silicone, to electrical and electronic. Choosing someone with a narrow manufacturing focus can limit your marketing abilities and restrict the implementation of your promotional activities.
- In-house facilities: Because of the sensitivity around manufacturing and delivery timing and product quality, ensure your custom promotional products manufacturer wholesale supplier owns and operates their own facilities.
Before you establish your relationship with your corporate gift-making partner, confirm the types of designing, manufacturing, and testing facilities they own. While working with 3rd-party contracted facilities may be okay, owning and operating their own workshops and production lines gives them greater control on quality and schedules.
- Well-established processes: The easiest way to establish the credibility of any corporate gift-manufacturing partner is by analyzing their processes and procedures. A company with well-defined and mature procedures is more likely to be well-organized and professional in its dealings with you.
Only the top promotional products manufacturer | and suppliers have formal, well-documented procedures that clearly define each step within their process. This includes every interaction that their (the manufacturers’) team has with yours (the customers’). Look closely at these procedures to ascertain how many times your partner interacts with your team. Because corporate gift-making must be a collaborative effort, only choose those companies that work with your team throughout the process – and not just when taking the order.
It’s important to reiterate: Successful corporate gift-giving is the result of a great partnership between businesses and their gift manufacturers. After reviewing each of the points highlighted above objectively, your marketing team should be able to have a clear picture of what the promotional product’s manufacturer can deliver to the partnership.
The OYI Gifts’ difference
With OYI Gifts as your corporate promotional products manufacture wholesale supplier, you’re guaranteed to find all of the above characteristics – and much more! What that means is that you’ll have more flexibility in the promo products you choose, and a variety of materials from which to produce them.
So, if you have an idea for a promo scheme, and would like to run it by our professional product designers and engineers, why not contact us today?