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Just How Effective are Promotional Gift Items?

Making decisions on how to spend your marketing budget is tough. There seem to be ever more marketing options for businesses. Deciding how to spend those resources strategically and effectively can be overwhelming.

promotional gifts

The use of promotional gift items is a tried and tested method for creating brand awareness as well as providing recurrent promotion. However, the temptation is often to spend that money on a marketing approach that has a more demonstrable ROI even if that ROI is less.

That can be understandable, particularly when those expenditures have to be explained to an accounts department at the end of the year. Ultimately, this approach only does yourself and your business a disservice. Business benefits from the most effective marketing, not the marketing that is easiest to account for.

Fortunately, the PPAI conducted a study into the effectiveness of promotional gift items. Some of the figures in the study might surprise even the biggest proponents of Promotional Gift Items.

Action and Reaction

Two of the main areas the study looked at were how consumers felt about promotional products and how they acted on promotional products. According to the study 83% of those interviewed liked to receive a promotional product with an advertising message. Almost half said they would like to receive them more often and 38% said they felt that promotional products worked as a continuous reminder of the advertiser.

Those surveyed were also asked how they would respond to promotional products being handed out at an event, trade show or shopping centre. While only 23% said they would take any type of promotional product, 63% said they would take a product that they found to be useful. This illustrates how important utility is in the deployment of promotional products.

This is why items such as pens are so consistently effective. But taking note of the weather forecast could make a promotional umbrella particularly effective on a rainy day.

Interestingly only 5% said they would take an object primarily because they found it to be attractive. Just 3% said they would never pick up a promotional product meaning promotional gift items can potentially be effective on 97% of people.

Continuous Promotion

The final part of the study looked at the persistence of promotional gift items. Respondents to the survey were asked to recall the product, the advertiser and the message of a promotional gift they had received in the previous two years.

Astonishingly, 76.2% of respondents were able to recall all three pieces of information. This figure illustrates one of the key benefits that promotional gifts have over other forms of promotion: staying power.

To show how this works those conducting the study asked about promotional items respondents had in their house. 55% had a promotional item in their bedroom or storage space, 74% had an item in their work space and a huge 91% said they had at least one promotional item in their kitchen.

Promotional items engender affinity with customers by giving them a gift for free. They also serve to continuously reinforce your branding and company messaging, especially if that promotional item is the mug your customer drinks coffee out of every morning.

The diversity of promotional capabilities that branded gifts provide means they really cannot be left out of a comprehensive marketing campaign.

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