How to Choose the Best Performing Promotional Products at the Lowest Cost
Promotional products come in all shapes and sizes. Practically any product you can think of can be made to display a logo and serve as a promotional product. You can put your logo on anything from expensive crystal to a banana with food-grade ink.
However, not all products perform well as a promotional product and, therefore, are not effective in fully promoting a sponsor's brand. The challenge is to find which products perform the best and are available at the lowest cost.
An Effective Promotional Product
An effective promotional product is one that performs best on the key metrics. It's one that (i) represents a company or organization's brand or message well, (ii) enjoys high recognition, and (iii) creates a favorable impression of the sponsor to the user, and to others who see it.
While cost is certainly a factor, effective promotional products can be both expensive and inexpensive. With over 1 million products in the online promotional product databases, how do you choose the best product? It's actually very simple.
There are three things you should look for in every good promotional product and the best performing promotional product will have these characteristics:
- Useable and Functional - a top promotional product must be usable and functional. If the product is not useable and functional, most people, especially Millennials - the largest buying group in the U.S. - will simply not use it. They will likely discard it and the sponsor's investment in it will be wasted. Products have to be practical and offer immediate, tangible value for people to appreciate them and use them often.
- High Brand Impressions - the second most important element in choosing a top promotional product is impressions or views. An impression or view is when someone sees the sponsor’s brand, logo, or message. This is extremely important, since impressions are what the sponsor is actually paying for. This is why a logoed version of a product will cost more than the same product without the logo. The opportunity for a branded product to be seen by the user, or others in the user's circle of influence, is the key to why promotional products are such an effective form of advertising or brand advancement. Therefore, it’s easy to see that the best products offer the highest number of potential impressions of the sponsor’s brand. Ideally, you want a product that is used daily and even many times per day, as a high number of impressions (i) increases the product’s promotional value, (ii) leads to a higher level of recognition of a company's logo or message, and (iii) could possibly increase business for the sponsor. Conversely, a low number of impressions minimizes the product’s promotional value and potentially deprives the sponsor of business that could have been realized with a more visibly recognizable product.
- Cost - while cost does not necessarily determine whether a promotional product will be effective, it does make one product more attractive over another, if both products offer a similar number of potential brand impressions. Total cost, or more importantly, cost per impression (cost efficiency) is a strong consideration in determining which product to purchase. Given an equivalent number of brand impressions, the more cost-effective products lead to more cost effective marketing campaigns. Products with the lowest cost per impression offer the highest value and the best use of a sponsor’s ad spend.
According to ASI's 2023 Ad Impressions Study (https://media.asicentral.com/resources/Ad_Impressions_2023.pdf), the promotional product with the highest number of total brand impressions is outerwear, followed by T-shirts, hats, drinkware, and writing instruments. These are the top five promotional products in the $25 billion promotional industry. Outerwear enjoys approximately 327 potential impressions per month. Writing instruments, long considered one of the least expensive promotional products, are approximately $1.00 per 1,000 impressions.
Unfortunately, while outerwear offers a high number of potential impressions, it is often expensive. Conversely, writing instruments are inexpensive, but they offer fewer impressions than the other top four products.
What is needed is a product with the highest number of potential brand impressions at the lowest cost per impression.
Where do you find such a promotional product?
SteadyStraps® Brand phone straps, a new product in the promotional industry, offers the best numbers in both categories. It’s 5-star rated and offers the highest brand visibility and use frequency over the current best products in the promotional industry.
Because people check their phones 150 - 300 times per day, displaying a sponsor's brand on the back of smartphones capitalizes on the best advertising real estate in the country today. At 4,563 potential brand impressions per month (compared with outerwear's 327 impressions per month) and at a cost of only $0.07 per 1,000 impressions (compared with writing instruments at $1.00 per 1,000 impressions), SteadyStraps® Brand phone straps offer 14 times the number of potential impressions over the #1 product in the promotional industry and is 1/14th the cost of writing instruments.
Here is a chart summarizing this data:
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To learn more about the promotional value of SteadyStraps® Brand phone straps, please visit: https://steadystraps.com/pages/for-brands and email us at sales@steadystraps.com or call us at (203) 628-2233.