3 reasons why branded merchandise is important for your business
When it comes to marketing, it’s important to explore as many avenues as possible to maximise the success of your business. This could include digital advertising, social media advertising, traditional advertising and, of course, branded merchandise.
Unlike the first 3 approaches, however, marketing with branded merchandise can often be overlooked, especially by smaller businesses with less budget. But, the truth is, when it’s done right, it can be an extremely valuable part of your marketing mix.
In this post, we look at the 3 key reasons why branded merchandise is important for businesses of all shapes and sizes, to explain why you should seriously consider adding it to your marketing strategy.
Builds brand awareness
There’s a reason brands like John Deere, Harley Davidson and Catapillar have clothing ranges. And, it’s not just to find additional revenue streams. Although, that certainly plays a small part. By providing their fans and supporters with branded clothing, they’re actually radically enhancing brand awareness.
Even one person wearing a John Deere cap, for instance, is going to interact with a lot of people. Times that by a few thousand for every John Deere cap owner and that number grows exponentially. And that means a lot of people are going to be exposed to the John Deere logo and result in a considerable uplift in brand awareness.
Streamline Tip: Clothing and transportable items work best for building brand awareness. Think hoodies, t-shirts and hats and also other transportable items such as bags, water bottles and pens.
Promotes products, services or events
While logo printed merchandise, like that mentioned above, is great for building overall brand awareness, branded merchandise is also ideal for promoting products, services and events. Depending on the capacity of your supplier, the skies the limit in terms of what messaging you can feature on your merchandise.
This technique is often utilised by charity organisations and event hosts. If you think of the popular Tough Mudder event, for example, they’ll often provide contestants with T-shirts upon completion of the challenge. These are then personalised to feature event details such as future event dates, times and locations.
When contestants proudly wear their T-shirts out and about, they’re also subtly promoting both the brand and the future events.
Streamline Tip: As above, clothing can work really well for this type of promotion. However, you can also take inspiration from festivals and exhibitions, who often provide lanyards and wristbands.
While these have a practical use within the event, they’re also often worn by attendees outside of the event, which can also support the promotion of future events.
Improves brand perception
While it’s important to build your brand awareness, there’s no point doing that if you’re not simultaneously improving the way people feel about your brand. For example, if you were to give people poor quality branded merchandise or “tat” they’re likely to just throw in the bin, they’re unlikely to leave with a positive opinion of your brand.
If you’ve ever bought an expensive car, for instance, you’ll notice that sales reps tend to throw in some high-quality branded merchandise like luxury pens or branded clothing to sweeten the deal. Since it’s useful, useable and high-quality, you as a consumer are then left with a positive impression of the brand.
Streamline Tip: Improving brand perception is down to 2 key factors: quality and usefulness. For this reason, we always recommend providing your customers with high-quality branded merchandise they’re likely to get a lot of use out of. Pens, USB sticks, water bottles and bags are a great start.