Which promotional tool is most effective?

It's hard to deny that consumers love free giveaways. Whenever anyone mentions branded merchandise, your mind immediately goes to the engraved pens and key chains that, even after years have gone by, you still find yourself using.

More often than not, promotional items are practical things that are intended to be used on a regular basis. This includes items such as coffee cups, pens, notepads, and USB sticks. But how effective are promotional products as a marketing tool? Does using a pen that has a company’s logo printed on it make people actually want to buy from that company?

Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?

A study done by DIMA Market Research has proved that the effect caused by advertising and promotional materials is twice as high as that of television advertising. Unlike TV commercials, which people on average only see only for 30 seconds, promotional items are generally actively used for several months. A VistaPrint survey has also shown that 52% of the people surveyed have a better opinion of a company after receiving a free giveaway. 50% of respondents went on to say that they use the products daily.

Why use promotional products as marketing tool?

1) Advertising products increase brand recognition

Promotional products are perhaps the simplest way to both communicate your brand, and daily focus your potential customer’s attention on your company. Although focus is diverted to your brand subconsciously, it increases the likelihood that your potential customers will remember your brand when they find themselves in the decision-making process.

2) Mass communication at a comparatively low cost

For smaller businesses that just do not have the budget to implement far-reaching campaigns, promotional products can greatly strengthen the brand image. They provide a potent medium with a high return on investment, as advertising materials are relatively cheap and come in all shapes and forms. A free giveaway is a great way to strengthen customer loyalty.

Which promotional products are the most effective?

Numerous studies have shown that calendars and notepads are the most effective promotional giveaways. The reason for this is that they are used every day, meaning that people are consistently being reminded of your brand.
Positive results in terms of brand recognition can also be achieved by the classic pen giveaway.

However, it is also important to recognize that promotional products are most effective when they are individualized. Just as with all branches of advertising, the more specifically a product is tailored to the target group, the more effective it is in instilling brand recognition. So keep in mind the specific interests of your target audience while choosing your promotional products.

Tip: Price is not everything. Low-quality promotional materials can actually damage the value of your brand. Thus, make sure to pay attention to quality, even if all you are giving away is pens.

Equipping your global team with the right marketing materials and branded merchandise can be a challenge. It doesn’t have to be, though.

Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?
Which promotional tool is most effective?

Last updated September 5th 2017

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Seo title 7 Brand Promotion Tools You Can’t Ignore as a Marketer Seo Description Content, SEO, social media, and email marketing - these belong to the list of 7 most effective tools every marketer needs to master today. Find out why 7 Important Brand Promotion Tools You Should Use as a Marketer

Getting your brand known became easier thanks to the various digital platforms online. However, the challenge now is how to stand out from the rest of your competitors. In this age of content, competing for your audience’s attention is a whole other battlefield. You need an effective marketing strategy if you want to remain relevant and competitive in the market.

As more businesses embrace full digital transformation, software plays a critical role in developing marketing strategies to increase sales. In fact, a study by Statista shows that the demand for marketing tools grew by 13.6% compared to the past year alone. Hence, it is high time you explore what technology has to offer to boost your brand’s popularity.

Which promotional tool is most effective?

Here are 7 of the most effective brand promotion tools that you can use to improve your marketing strategies.

Content marketing

Businesses use content marketing to educate their audience about topics related to their respective industry. And in the process, they get to promote their products and services to their prospective customers.

With content marketing, you focus on distributing information relevant to what you need to attract potential customers. This can be made in the form of blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, white papers, and even webinars. Through this strategy, you can draw prospects into your sales funnel, while boosting your brand visibility and credibility. Since marketing can get complex, many organizations choose to hire employees with a marketing degree to ensure they are experts in the field.

Some examples of the top content marketing tools:

  • Hubspot - is a full-time marketing software with integrated social publishing and blog analytics to optimize and streamline your content management.
  • Monday.com - allows you to organize your content and streamline production through its collaborative features.
  • WordPress - started out as basic blogging software but has now developed into a full-time CMS that offers thousands of themes, widgets, and plugins for greater customization.

Search engine optimization

Content marketing goes hand in hand with search engine optimization or SEO. This strategy involves optimizing your content and website to rank higher in your target audience’s search results, boosting your brand awareness and traffic simultaneously. SEO involves unpaid or organic search results in search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, making it a cost-effective way to keep your brand competitive online.

Cracking the algorithms for search engines requires you to be more data-driven in your marketing approach. This allows you to adapt to the latest trends and make sure that your web pages remain relevant. There are various strategies involved in SEO. For one, you need to find out relevant and popular keywords and incorporate them into your web pages. You must also “crawl” search engines to mine data from the web. Moreover, you need to learn techniques on how to write titles, tags, descriptions, and actual content to make sure your web page is optimized.

Some of the top SEO tools are:

  • Ahrefs - highlights parts of your websites that need to improve to rank higher in search engines.
  • Google Search Console - is a free SEO tool that monitors and reports your website’s ranking in Google SERP.
  • SEMRush - makes it easier to compare your website to your competitors’ to help you better understand keywords and domains.

According to Globalreportal, 55% of the global population are social media users. That is around 4.33 billion people around the world. This makes it one of the most perfect platforms to promote your brand and reach out to a wider set of audience. What’s more, is that you can join any social media sites for free. This makes it one of the best marketing strategies used by companies nowadays.

Which promotional tool is most effective?

Through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can promote your products and services in a more casual and relaxed environment. It allows you to directly interact with your customers. And likewise, your customers can freely engage with your brand. This helps humanize your brand, allowing you to cultivate personal and intimate relationships with your customers in the process.

Examples of some of the top social media marketing tools are:

  • Buffer - can be used as a Chrome extension to help manage and schedule content for all your social media channels on the go.
  • Buzzsumo - is a powerful research tool you can use to find the most shared content in social media and find relevant influencers for your brand.
  • Missinglttr - provides you with ready-made templates for content creation for each social media channel.

Email marketing

Email marketing can be both a great inbound and outbound brand promotion tool for your business. You can use it to build more personalized relationships with your customers. Likewise, you can attract prospects through promotional emails. You simply need to create a mailing list of people who might actually be interested in your products or services. You can get these emails through your website, newsletter signups, subscriptions, and more.

One great tool to incorporate into your email marketing is AMP. This open-source framework is capable of optimizing your web content across all types of devices. It helps drive user-generated content and seamlessly incorporate dynamic elements into your emails. This, in turn, can boost customer engagement and improve user experience.

Here are some of the top email marketing software to look out for:

  • Mailchimp - provides the most features for your marketing needs such as automated scheduling for campaigns, A/B test copy, reports on click-through rates, open rates, subscription rates, and more.
  • ActiveCampaign - offers hundreds of pre-built automation to help personalize campaigns for each subscriber.
  • MailerLite - has a drag-and-drop interface that makes it convenient and intuitive to create the designs you want.

According to a study by Accenture, 52% of consumers would rather buy discounted items than full-priced ones. For small and new businesses, this is a great way to introduce their products and services to potential customers. You can giveaway free samples or trials or provide discount vouchers to entice your customers into purchasing from your brand.

Another brand promotion tool and one of the best types of sales strategies is referrals. By offering incentives, you encourage your customers to tell others about your brand. There are many ways to do this. For one, you can leverage customer reviews to promote your brand. Through positive customer feedback, you can boost your brand’s credibility and reputation organically. Another strategy is to create referral programs wherein customers who share their brand experience get rewards such as promo codes on their next purchase.

Some software you can use to help you manage your discounts and promos are:

  • Voucherify - allows you to personalize coupons, discounts, referral, and loyalty campaigns in a few clicks.
  • Competera - is an AI-powered pricing platform that can help set the optimal discounted prices for your products.
  • Referrizer - utilizes your current customer database to generate additional revenue through referrals.

Influencers

Word of mouth can travel fast, but you can boost it even more by partnering with influencers. Influencers are mostly regular people with huge followings on social media. By working together with them, you gain access to their followers as well. And since these influencers already built a community of loyal social media followers, they help boost your brand’s reputation and credibility as well.

One of the benefits of influencer marketing is how easy it is to measure its performance. You can check if your strategy is working through counting the number of likes, shares, clicks, and referrals you get from the campaign. This, in turn, makes it easier for you to determine how to develop an effective marketing strategy to get better results.

Some examples of influencer management software are:

  • Influencity - is an AI-powered marketing platform that helps manage end-to-end influencer campaigns for businesses.
  • Paladin - streamlines influencer discovery, management, and campaign reporting for talent managers, creator networks, brands, and influencer agencies.
  • Tapfiliate - helps you find the right influencers for your brand through referrals.

Businesses hold events to gain brand recognition in the market. These can be in the form of trade shows, product launches, conferences, and seminars. Some take it a step further by sponsoring charities or supporting causes like fundraising activities, donation drives, or immersions. By making people feel that they are part of something bigger, you can turn potential customers into loyal customers in the process.

Your customers can get a lot from events. For one, they can gain new knowledge and information on certain issues and topics. Moreover, they get to create memories as part of a community. In turn, you can use this opportunity to show off your brand and allow customers to test your products and services out.

With that, here are some software you can use to help plan your events:

  • Glue Up - plans, promotes, executes, and evaluates both offline and online events for your business using high-performance tools.
  • Ungerboeck Software - is an event and venue management software with features such as CRM, booking, registration, reporting, and finance management.
  • Bitrix24 - is a free event management software with a CRM and client management module that allows you to create quotes and invoices, send emails, and manage vendors on one platform.

Boosting brand awareness

The internet is an ideal place for you to get your brand out there. It allows you to reach out to more audiences in the most cost-effective way possible. But in this age of content, you have countless competitors vying for your customers’ attention. You need to work on your brand promotion if you want to survive this cut-throat market. This means investing in the right marketing tools and strategies for your business.

Nowadays, there are a lot of solutions to choose from that can help you streamline your brand promotion strategies including programmatic advertising. Programmatic automates media-buying and optimizes campaigns on the go to help you effectively drive brand awareness, user loyalty and sales.

Use SmartyAds DSP to amplify your brand’s voice with effective branding campaigns!

Written by
Irina Kovalenko, CMO of SmartyAds
June 2021

What is the most effective promotional tool in marketing?

Advertising represents the broadest type of promotional tool and often subsumes the other three categories. For example, a company may pay for a communication that qualifies as a sales promotion because its message informs the target market about current or future discounts.

What is more effective tool for promotion process?

Public Relations: PR is an effective promotional tool in any business. PR or public relations plays an important role in the promotional activities of the company. This tool helps in creating and managing the positive image of the brand or product.