Effectiveness of Promotional Merchandise for Marketing Brands

Contemporary marketing era calls for innovative ideas to lure customers to buy your brand. Thus, marketers have come up with an extremely effective advertising tool known as promotional products. These promotional products are used as giveaways to employees, business associates and customers with the intention of increasing your brand awareness and exposure. 

The fundamental aim of promotional products is to reinforce your marketing message, like with all other marketing tools. Any brand needs different mediums to reach its target audience, promotional products are just another way of creating publicity for your brands. Promotional products constitute a significant part of the interactive marketing strategy as they allow you to connect with your target market on a different level. 

Promotional products are customizable and for that reason they add an element of tangibility to your brand, other than its core physical products. They give substance to all your advertising efforts, and always make your brand stand out no matter whether they are branded stationery, shirts, baseball caps, mugs, jewelry, key chains, gift items and the like. 

Since promotional products are one medium that engage all five senses i.e. the target audience can see, hear, touch, taste, and even smell them, they have a greater impact on their perception of a brand. These promotional products not only leave a long lasting impression on the audience, but have readily measurable effectiveness. 

What’s more is that these promotional products come in pretty affordable rates, and offer great value and usability to customers, while strengthening your brand’s awareness and recall. Marketers can use promotional products as gift items to clients, employees and customers, sales items for Corporate Social Responsibility causes, as mass giveaways in trade shows and other special marketing events, and as rewards for your vendors and distributors. 

The process of effective branding includes using various marketing constructs for keeping the demographically diverse target audiences engaged with the brand. Promotional products allow you to create a place for your brand and company in the target market’s minds. So if your company is looking to build its brand equity then creating brand awareness is the first step towards the goal, which can be effectively achieved by transferring your brand logo to promotional items that you can give away to promote your business. 

Importance of Promotional Merchandise in Marketing

Promotional products can help you: 

• Drive traffic and prospective customers to your brand’s stall in a trade show. 
• They help develop a greater consumer response rate to your direct mail campaigns. 
• With their help, you can increase your referrals, and consequentially, the business returns. 
• Increase employee morale and as a result, their productivity level. 
• They boost brand loyalty and help customers retain your brand in the top of the mind category of recall. 
• Constantly remind customers of your brand’s existence. 

Through using promotional products, you can increase your brand’s awareness and its involvement with customers in a cost-effective manner. They help in brand reinforcement by improving the advertising returns, meanwhile also increasing the power and awareness of your brand. Furthermore, they work like an incentive for potential customers by compelling them to buy your brand in order to avail the free promotional products. For that reason, promotional products are always a part of a smart marketing strategy.

The Importance of Branding For A Start-Up Business

A brand is your business, company, and product offerings personified into one dynamic compound, powerful enough to take you to the pinnacles of success or run you to the ruins. For start-up business an effective branding strategy is all the more important in order to avoid the potentially fatal blind spots for new business enterprises. 

Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page

Social media marketing has taken the world by storm and taken many businesses to new heights just because of its extensive reach. Facebook has rapidly become one of the most powerful social media networks. If you want to make the most out of your Facebook presence, you need to maximize your influence on this particularly potent platform. Along with your overall digital presence, you need to optimize your brand’s Facebook fan page as well. 

Social Media Marketing

In the recent past, there has been a flurry of new means of communication between people; the social media networking websites are the in thing these days. These virtual hubs have been there for a long time in the shape of MySpace, Orkut, Hi5, and others but it wasn’t until Facebook became one of the biggest online communities in the world. The fact that if Facebook were a country, it would be the fifth largest after China, India, the U.S, and Indonesia is mind boggling; with over 200 million users worldwide, marketers, positioned in some of the most desirable companies in the world have started taking Facebook very seriously now.

Twitter Marketing

Twitter is a micro-blogging website which has rapidly grown in popularity because of its ease of use and data streaming option, along with great interactivity. With currently 190 million users registered on Twitter, it is another social network used by marketers for promoting their products and services. 

Facebook Marketing

In today’s world of information technology, the number of prudent customers grows exponentially every day as people get access to knowledge which is readily available. Research shows that people do not believe what marketers tell them anymore, like they once used to. It has been found out that only 14% people believe in advertisements, the rest 78% buy products and services upon recommendations of other users. 

LinkedIn Marketing

With social media ever expanding and spreading its tentacles everywhere, it has become highly important for marketers to not only be present at these platforms but actively participate in them. LinkedIn is a great business network, where you can find valuable connections and business opportunities if you know how to market yourself. 

Squidoo Marketing

Squidoo adds great value to your internet marketing arsenal by allowing businesses to increase their online presence’s visibility. Generating high volumes of online traffic for your corporate website has become easier with the advent of Squidoo as part of Web 2.0 technology. 

Reddit Marketing

Reddit is a social bookmarking and social news sharing website where you can share content that you like. Its most important feature is authenticity and no tolerance for self-promotion. With 829 million page views last year, Reddit is a powerful social marketing tool. 

Digg Marketing

Digg has gained popularity because of its user promoted content sharing. In a world where everything is manipulated by the internet giants, Digg provides a relief to companies looking to generate genuine traffic to their website. 

Internet Marketing - The Million Dollar Opportunity

The usage of internet has grown across the globe by leaps and bounds, and it has come to embrace everything be it business, education, healthcare, information or just about anything else. With a gigantic number of users businesses today have come to include internet marketing as a crucial part of their overall marketing strategy. 

Video Marketing

The online business world plays by slightly different rules than the brick and mortar one. Marketing has taken up new dimensions with the ever increasing use of multimedia and internet. When combined together these tow give us the tool known as video marketing.

Joint Venture Marketing

When you collaborate with some business entity for a specified period of time to pool resources and better cater to the needs of the target market of both, it is known as a joint venture. Now you can take your internet marketing campaigns a step further by forming a joint venture with a business entity, more preferably with your affiliate marketing partners. 

E-mail Marketing

As technology advanced and people devised of new ways for communication and information dissemination, e-mails became a wide-spread way of sharing knowledge and keeping in touch, among other things. In time marketers also reached out to include e-mails as a marketing medium in their arsenal for business growth and development. 

Pay per View Advertising

Pay per View advertising (PPV) is a mode of internet marketing; it is adware traffic provided by major online advertising networks like Media Traffic, Adonnetework, Zango, etc. These advertising networks publish your ads as pop-ups or pop-unders every time a user, who has a certain adware installed as a part of some toolbar, application or game, searches a chosen keyword or a URL. 

Pay per Click Advertising

Pay per Click advertising (PPC) is a mode of internet marketing, whereby you have to pay the hosting service every time a visitor clicks your ad. Cost per Click (CPC) is the cost borne by companies for redirecting visitors to their own corporate website. 

Online Classified Advertising

With the ever rising costs of marketing your products, marketers were unable to meet the budgets and demanded an increase fairly often, this lead to decrease in the company’s profitability. To overcome the sky-rocketing cots of advertising, marketers have devised many relatively lower-cost marketing alternatives, one of them being classified ads. 

Google AdSense Advertising

Google AdSense is a powerful internet marketing tool in the sense that it lets you integrate online advertising in websites. These adverts work through the Pay per Click and Pay per Impression methods. Google maintains, manages, and sorts these advertisements. 

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is a highly effective internet marketing tool; whereby you embed you advert in to a web page which are visited by a gargantuan number of internet surfers. It is a sure shot way of creating and increasing you brand awareness, and piquing the interest of target customers. 

Security Issues on Social Networks

Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are immensely popular and powerful social platforms; therefore, they are a target of lot of security issues. In order to secure your accounts against any possible harm you need to be very prudent with Facebook. 

How to Combat Hacking & Spamming on Social Networks

As the popularity of social networks grow tremendously so do their security issues. Cyber crimes are becoming more rampant on social networking websites because of carelessness and lack of information on the users part, and strong preventive steps on these websites part. In order to safeguard yourself against the threats of using social networks at the hands of people trying to risk your privacy for their own purposes, you need to be aware of all the possible ways they can exploit you.

Social Media Marketing: YouTube

YouTube has over one billion users; with such a huge number of users it offers a platform with huge potential for businesses to target and promote themselves at. 

Social Media Marketing: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is business networking website with around about 100 million users. Since LinkedIn is used by all professionals and business people, it is a great medium for getting in touch with your prospective business clients, as it is a huge B-to-B interactive portal; while also keeping a tab on your competition. 

Social Media Marketing: Twitter

There are about 190 million people who tweet on Twitter. It is one the fastest growing micro-blogging and data streaming sites. Twitter has high-profile users which makes it more popular among people, for they can follow their icons; which is why Twitter is one of the most profitable internet marketing forum.

Social Media Marketing: Facebook

With over 500 million active users, Facebook is no doubt a powerful Social Network, which is rapidly growing in use and popularity still. You wouldn’t find anyone who is not a member of Facebook now. So just imagine what Facebook could do for your business with its influential conversation and advertising forums. 

Social Networks in Contemporary Business Scenarios

With the advent of the age of Information Technology, the way people do business has drastically changed. In today’s business world, every organization or concern has an online presence i.e. a website. These websites are a platform for promoting your business on the internet. Meanwhile also attracting customers and providing your target audiences information about your products and services. 

Web 2.0 Marketing

The Internet has completely redefined the way we interact and do business in today’s world. Nowadays, it has become the core of all functions for businesses because of its ability to reach millions of people all across the world, any time. 

Web 2.0 is a technology born from the synergy of multiple web-based platforms. It is an amalgamation of software and applications which allow better interactivity between users.

Monetization

The purpose of internet marketing is to ensure the success of e-businesses. Success of any business whether online or a brick and mortar one translates to profit maximization. A business can only make profits through income generation; the process of generating money on the internet is called monetization. 

Successful SEO Strategies

For internet marketing success Search Engine Optimization is the most crucial tool. By implementing Search Engine Optimization practices and techniques you can move towards establishing a place for yourself among the top search engine hit results, thereby, increasing your visibility. This leads to online traffic generation which instigates sales leads, and eventually customer conversion. 

SEO - Further Explained

Keyword research is the key to success in the online business world. Your e-business will only succeed if you have effective internet marketing strategies, and at the heart of successfully marketing your product offerings online lies a comprehensive keyword research. 

Blogging for Marketing - Further Explained

Blogging has taken a whole new dimension especially with online marketers aiming to reach new horizons with the help of internet to attract their target customers. Knowing that blogging is a powerful internet marketing tool an ever increasing number of e-businesses have started blogging about their company, products and services. 

Successful BackLinking Strategies

Generating and maintaining a substantial amount of online traffic for your e-business is a tricky and tough job but crucial nevertheless for your website’s success. For the reason that back linking increases your search engine visibility, it is an integral SEO tool.