The embroidery and promotional products industry is growing by billions of dollars each and every year.
The reason is that companies are realizing that embroidered gear and promotional products have a critical role to play alongside digital marketing as well as print advertising via magazines and brochures.
Actually, the promotional marketing industry is allowing businesses of all sizes and walks of life to compete on a larger stage and extend their brand reach.
There’s absolutely no reason to sit idly on the sidelines and miss out on the benefits that the promotional marketing industry offers.
Creating Mass Exposure and Increasing Customer Appeal
With so much emphasis moving towards digital advertising and content marketing, there’s now a huge counterbalancing focus on reaching customers in the real world in ways that increase brand awareness and increase a company’s appeal.
All of these goals are forwarded as companies embrace embroidered apparel and promotional products. Branded products also frequently end up doing double duty in that they can be used for trade shows, networking events, corporate outings, or everyday customer outreach.
Everyone has a need for promotional products (e.g., apparel, pens and mugs), which means that they stay in circulation longer and work towards increasing a brand’s reach for literally years.
A full 77% of customers who receive promotional products claim that they keep those products for two years or more (on average) because of those products’ usefulness in their lives.
The Embroidery Industry Is Much More Than Apparel
The majority of people that you see every day are likely already using a promotional product at least once a week, and promotional products tend to hang around. In marketing terms, this “hanging around” means more repeat exposure for businesses.
In fact, three out of five of customers will probably keep a given promotional product for two years or more. That means that a company’s message will cross paths with hundreds of people and potentially create thousands of ad impressions.
Branded Gear Increases Impressions, Exposure and Brand Reach
In the digital marketing world an “ad impression” is essentiallydefined asthe amount of times that a digital advertisement was viewed by someone online or the amount of times a particular ad appeared on a webpage.
In the promotional marketing industry, an impression stands in for how many times prospective and loyal customers see a company’s brand emblazoned on a promotional product.
The more impressions you have – and the more times that people see your brand out and about on shirts and other promotional products – the more likely the chances that companies start getting local attention and build serious momentum.
Because their products are everywhere and their brands are readily recognized, the top companies in the world can get an unbelievable amount of mileage out promotional products and company apparel with a familiar color scheme and easily recognized logo front and center.
The more that customers are exposed to a brand, and the more that companies diversify their promotional products, the more that these same companies can put that marketing magic to work for their bottom line.
Works Equally Well for Small and Large Businesses
The thing about embroidered and promotional products are that they work well for both small and large businesses, but for somewhat different reasons. While each can expect an uptick in exposure, promotional marketing is acting in a slightly different way depending on business size.
If you’re already an established business with a widely recognized brand, you probably already have a pretty impressive level of brand recognition and can count on the fact that customers will make the right associations between your company, brand, logo, and products.
The name of the game then becomes brand equity, or the product premium that customers are willing to pay to get a given product over a competitor’s or generic alternative. So, what should larger companies do?
Use embroidered gear and promotional products to remind customers of what they do well and why they’ve developed such a stellar reputation. A marketer might, for instance, try incorporating a new tagline out on promotional materials (e.g., “#1 Dealership in California”) to grab more attention.
Promotional gear also works well for aspiring, smaller companies in that it allows them to achieve mass customer outreach on a more constrained budget. In this case the name of the game is actually increasing exposure and brand reach: Putting your name on the map with customers is the first step towards achieving lasting customer loyalty.
