One of the earliest lessons I learned about marketing was that every contact with your customer is an opportunity to build your business. Promotional and business gifts are one way that you can build brand awareness about your products and services in many different ways and situations. Here are just some of the ways that you can use business gifts to increase your company's visibility and promote your products and services.

Customer Retention: Turn Mail Orders Into Marketing Opportunities

Do you ship actual products to your customers? If you do, you have an ideal opportunity to put your brand name directly on your buyers? desktops and in their hands. When you package each and every order, it should include a promotional product that your customer will want to use. While catalogs and coupons for future orders are important for return business, you'll get far more response to those if you also include a promotional gift with your company's name on it. In a recent survey by the PPAI (Promotional Products Association International), 76.1% of those surveyed reported that they remembered the name of a company that had sent them a promotional product in the past 12 months. 62% had made a purchase from the company, and 45.2% reported using the promotional item they'd received at least once per day. In addition, 55% of those surveyed said that they expected to keep and use their business gifts for 1 to 2 years. Translate that into the number of times that they will see your brand name or logo, and it's easy to see why business gifts are such an amazingly useful promotional tool.

Customer Prospecting: Distribute

Business Gifts at Community Events

The opportunities to contact your customers and potential customers don't start or stop with those who have already bought your products. Community events and trade shows offer excellent opportunities to market your business and increase brand awareness using promotional products. It's a well-known maxim in the advertising business that people will nearly always choose a name with which they are familiar, so your goal in community prospecting should be to make your name very well known in the community. When you associate your company with community events and hand out little items with your company name on them, you are making sure that your name is seen, and continues to be seen, by those who are likely to use your products and services.

Image Branding: Positioning Your Company

with Business Gifts and Events

Of course, you can also build brand image and awareness at the same time by choosing the events with which you associate your company as carefully as you choose any promotional business gifts that you hand out at them. Sponsor a table at the local fair and give away promotional key tags and water bottles to give your company a ?community-friendly? face. Court the young and trendy market by sponsoring and handing out promotional buttons and car stickers at music festivals and skateboard competitions. Draw in the upwardly mobile young professionals with business gifts meant to appeal to them at wine tastings, golf classics and other posher entertainments.

There are many ways that business gifts can be used as a tool in your marketing and brand-building strategies. For more ideas and suggestions, talk with a representative at one of the UK's number one suppliers of promotional products and business gifts.