Swag works. In one survey, 83 percent of Americans admitted that they enjoy receiving promotional items, and those who use swag are likely to remember company names and products for years after they first receive a promotional product.
Yet, many business leaders don’t know how to make swag work for them. If you find your company closets chock full of swag after every promotional product order, you might be making some key mistakes in how you design your branded items.
Here are a few reasons no one wants your swag and how to change your promotional product effectiveness in the coming years.
You Choose Useless Swag Items
No one has used a mousepad since 2009, and it is possible that at no time in human existence has a paperweight been a sought-after item. If your swag isn’t useful, people won’t want it.
Before you order any kind of promotional products, you need to think about your target audience, perhaps using marketing tools like buyer personas to better understand the types of swag your customers want.
For example, if you cater to a tech-forward crowd, you might opt for USB drives, laptop sleeves, or portable chargers, but if moms are your target audience, tote bags and travel coffee mugs might be better options.
Even if your audience is large and diverse, you should try to narrow your swag to items that people like and can use.
You Invest in Low-Quality Swag
You shouldn’t devote an overwhelming majority of your company’s marketing budget to swag — but you shouldn’t cut corners on quality, either. Low-quality swag is hardly better than trash, and usually, that is what it will soon become.
Because you should strive to create branded items that will remain in a customer’s home for some time, building name recognition and trust, quality should be a top priority.
If you can’t afford to create a large line of quality promotional products with your budget, you should stick to one or two exceedingly high-quality swag items that customers will be wowed by.
You might even work directly with another product brand to ensure you can provide the right value for your customers.
Your Swag Designs Are Ugly
Maybe you have chosen practical items for your consumer audience. Maybe you aren’t skimping on quality. But, if your swag looks terrible, it still won’t be particularly prized.
Because your visual assets are such a significant element of your brand, you should invest in professional graphic design for your business logo, color scheme, and more.
Again, it is important to consider your target audience. Teen boys have vastly different aesthetic preferences to young marrieds, who tend to gravitate toward different-looking products than single adult women.
You might need to research what aesthetic attracts your audience before you design your swag.
Tips for Improving Your Swag in 2022
Bad swag is bad — that’s a fact. Fortunately, just because you have made bad swag in the past doesn’t mean you are resigned to producing bad swag forevermore.
In addition to committing to practical, attractive, and quality swag items, you can use the following two tips to generate promotional products that might be even more popular than your business’s main services:
Make a Consistent Marketing Message
Certain swag items work for every business — pens, T-shirts — but a large number of promotional products only make sense for businesses in specific fields. This helps a company maintain a cohesive brand story and consistent marketing messages for its audience.
For example, a company branding itself as technologically innovative should offer a variety of promotional tech swag whereas a company with soft, feminine branding might offer candles, cosmetics pouches, canvas tote bags, and the like.
It wouldn’t make sense for a tech brand to offer nail polish or sleep masks because their target audience probably doesn’t want them and definitely doesn’t expect them.
Collaborate, Customize, and More
To take your swag to the next level, you should look for ways to create swag that is totally unique to your company. Aside from your brand name and logo, you might add customizations like recipients’ names or the event where the swag is distributed.
Even further, you could work with other businesses whose products coordinate well with yours to design cross-collaborative promotional products that customers can’t find anywhere else.
Swag works — or, at least, good swag works. If you put the time and energy into developing promotional products your audience likes, you will see your efforts pay off in the form of customer loyalty, name recognition, and more.
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