Increasing Brand Awareness Through Promotional Merchandise

Building brand recognition is not a simple task, especially if your business is in its fledgling stages or is looking to break into a new market niche.

Thankfully with the help of promotional merchandise available from suppliers like Promotions Warehouse, this is less of a challenge. So what is it about branded merch that makes it such a powerful tool for modern firms, especially in the age of digital marketing?

Making an impression

For brand awareness to grow, the brand itself needs to be memorable. If your logo and message are printed on a promotional product, it will stick in the minds of customers and clients much more consistently.

Furthermore, promotional products not only gain traction with those that receive them first-hand but also keep on building your brand’s reputation when they end up in the hands of others.

Almost two-thirds of people who receive a promotional product end up giving it to friends, family members or colleagues. This means that each item you order and distribute has a knock-on effect that will last for much longer than you might assume.

Leveraging sharability

The rise of social media has opened up many new marketing options for businesses of all sizes, particularly when it comes to influencer marketing tactics.

Even SMEs can make sure that there branding reaches a broad audience if they hand out promotional products at industry events, provide them to office visitors or send them to customers direct. Social media encourages people to share their experiences with their followers, and they are far more likely to mention a brand directly or even include its logo and messaging in their posts if they have some physical token to show off.

Outpacing competitors

Winning customers from an established rival is difficult, but can be made much easier if you have promotional products available to sweeten the deal.

Giving a promotional product as a free gift can be enough to sway previously loyal customers away from their preferred brand and over to yours, while also associating positive attributes to your business which will stick in the minds of those who make the leap.

When it comes to increasing brand awareness, it is always sensible to do this in a way that improves your reputation, especially if you are also eating into the client base of a competitor. At the same time, you should always pay attention to your brand protection. As you and your brand grow, there is a higher chance one of the competitors’ will try to plunder what you have already gained by using your images or very similar promotional products.

Providing practicality

It is no coincidence that most promotional products are not just purely aesthetically pleasing or entertaining; they also often perform some useful function that gives the owner an incentive to keep on using them.

From USB memory sticks to umbrellas, the idea of promotional merchandise also being practical is not a new one, but it remains hugely relevant in terms of building brand recognition.

The more a product is used, the more it will be embedded in the mind of the user, while also being displayed to other people they interact with, allowing for brand awareness and recognition to grow organically. This is just one of the reasons why merch will always be worth investing in, and why businesses spend billions globally on it.