Tips for Budgeting for Promotional Products
Budgets for promotional swag often get overlooked or wrapped into budgets for other efforts and then often get overlooked or end up being a last minute add-in to specific efforts or campaigns.
Setting a budget for promotional products can help your team be more strategic in the use of swag across all of your marketing, sales and employee appreciation efforts. It can also help you save money as ordering in bulk upfront reduces costs, including per item pricing , set-up fees and shipping.
Here are some things to consider when setting a budget and creating a plan for your 2020 promotional products needs.
Integrate Swag into Overall Strategy
Tie your promotional products into your marketing messaging and strategy. In your planning for 2020 you have probably developed some themes for your messaging or campaigns or employee initiatives. The swag you choose should reflect these themes.
The possibilities here are endless, so this is a chance to be creative with your swag. Planning in advance can give you more team to design something unique and attention grabbing. Having a set budget will help find the products that will work for your attention grabbing ideas and ordering swag that your customers and employees will want to use. Nothing is worse than scrambling at the last minute to find the right promotional product or giveaway.
Plan for all your swag needs in advance
If possible, work across departments if possible to determine company-wide needs? Or at least needs for each office.
How many trade shows are you attending sponsoring? WIll you be using direct mail efforts in your Account-Based Marketing Strategy or your Sales Development efforts? Will you need customer appreciation gifts? Employee recognition prizes or gifts?
Making Educated Quantity Estimate
Estimating quantities can be difficult, but if you can use your lead generation goals as a starting point. How many attendees will the events you are attending have? Will you be trying to give out promotional items to everyone that attends or only high-value prospects. How many leads do you plan on reaching out to as part of your direct mail Sales outreach? Do you need different products for these different prospects? These are the types of questions you’ll need to answer in advance. Once you figure out this number add roughly 10% to that quantity and budget. You’ll always be able to use extra swag, running out would be worse.
Swag as Part of Your Overall Strategy
Tie your promotional products into your marketing messaging and strategy. In your planning for 2020 you have probably developed some themes for your messaging or campaigns or employee initiatives. The swag you choose should reflect these themes.
The possibilities here are endless, so this is a chance to be creative with your swag. Planning in advance can give you more team to design something unique and attention grabbing. Having a set budget will help find the products that will work for your attention grabbing ideas and ordering swag that your customers and employees will want to use. Nothing is worse than scrambling at the last minute to find the right promotional product or giveaway.
Order in Bulk
Use these tips and order your swag in bulk, in advance. This will save you money! All products have price breaks at higher qualities. Set-up costs will be reduced and not having to rush production and shipments to meet last minute needs can be a huge saving.
Don’t have room to store bulk orders or don’t want to manage an inventory of swag? We have a solution for that! Check out our Swag Inventory option. We’ll even send the swag to where you need it – nobody will miss printing shipping labels and packing boxes!
