11 KPIs You Can Spike With Promotional Product Advertising!

If you’ve been doing promotional product advertising or considering it, but you’re unsure which metrics you can really impact in your business with it, this article is for you. Here, we’ll discuss 11 key performance indicators you can impact with promotional product advertising.

There comes a time in every business where there’s a hurdle.  The hurdle could be:

• keeping the employees or losing them to competitors
• increasing sales
• decreasing overhead
• diminishing safety issues
• or more…

These obstacles can be detrimental to any business if they’re not taken care of.  Many people often look for solutions, but don’t think about how promotional product advertising could help to solve each of these detrimental issues.  In this article, I’ll be showing ways promotional product advertising can be used to drive some of the most ailing key performance indicators “thru the roof”!

A Little Scenario

In a previous post, I showed how promotional products were used by a bootstrapped company to go from $0-$596 million in less than 3 years!   Take this scenario for example…   You’re a startup entrepreneur whose started your business a little over one year ago.

You’re in the process of building your lead generation system.   You’ve been studying how to get more traffic and leads to your business, so you’ve been directed towards internet marketing, but the results are slow, and you wanted to build much faster.

As a result, you decide to get into advertising, and you blow thru hundreds of dollars on Google and Facebook ads, but you only had a few sales.  Now, you’re wondering what can you do to increase your conversion rate, drive more sales, and get more optimal key performance indicators–this is where other form of advertising like promotional product advertising can be thrown into the mix.  Added onto scenarios like this, promotional product advertising works perfectly to drive these other 11 key performance indicators…

1. Customer Acquisition

Every entrepreneur faces the balancing act of acquiring a sufficient number of customers to cover their overhead and leave them with profit.  There are many ways to spike customer acquisition, and we’ve discussed quite a few on the blog, however, one of the less talked about ways to acquire customers is thru promotional product advertising.   With promotional product advertising, you can:

• Use a branded item with a high perceived value as an added incentive for people buying a product or service you offer
• Track leads by suggesting respondents mention a buzzword in exchange for a gift when they arrive to the location you’ve set
• Incentivize buying by suggesting “The 30th buyer will recieve…” or another scarcity offer connected to a promotional gift
• or, simply inform people about your business using something like a business card or other promotional product

There’s many other ways promotional product advertising can be used to increase customer acquisition, but those are three effective ideas that work very well.

2. Client Retention

Once you’ve acquired the customer, it’s much cheaper to keep them than to acquire new ones.  As a result, it’s paramount to focus on ways you can incentivize client retention, and promotional product advertising is a perfect way to do that.

In a previous post, on customer rewards programs, I talked about incentivizing people to have long term buying habits.  You can reward the buying behavior you want by using promotional product advertising.   For example, many stores give out branded cards that the customer can punch a hole into whenever they make a qualifying purchase.

When the customer reaches a certain purchase milestone, they earn a gift (promotional product).   Programs that couple promotional products to incentivize long term buying behaviors work well in comparison to similar companies without them.

3. Client Reactivation

For a number of reasons, a customer may cease using your service.  Maybe they experienced financial difficulty, had a shortage of time, wanted to try out a competitor, or some other reason you may never know.

In cases like this, the customer could be a loss IF you don’t have a process for rewarding client reactivation, and promotional product advertising is perfect for that!   You can send an offer to suspended or deactivated accounts offering a branded product in exchange for reactivating their service.  Incentivizing reactivation can work extremely well to rekindle old relationships with previous customers.

4. Revenue Enhancement

What business doesn’t want more revenue?   Often times, businesses look at increasing more traffic, raising prices, or lowering expenses to increase revenue, but they overlook promotional product advertising.

With promotional products, you can trigger the law of reciprocity and you can increase the perception of your brand.   When people receive a meaningful and useful gift as an incentive for upgrading current service, to become a customer, or as a result of some action that drives company revenue, they often respond in appreciation for the gift.

5. Safety, Hazard Awareness, and Injury Prevention

As an employer, you’re liable for injuries employees may have, which can be a huge burden.  Simple mistakes can have big and expensive repercussions.  Safety programs help to eliminate frivilous mistakes, decrease liability claims, and can even lower insurance.

Promotional products like anti-slip mats, ergonomic aids, and industrial prevention measures like ear plugs, coveralls, or face masks can drastically cut back on injuries in the workplace, and can eliminate waste or misplaced items of another brand.   Promotional product advertising can serve as a way those who interact with your brand can have a greater outlook, it can serve as a way to increase employee confidence and morale, and it can be a way to prevent safety mishaps simply by adding promotional product advertising.

6. Lifetime Customer Value

If customer acquisition, retention, and reactivation increase, then it’s likely the lifetime customer value has also increased.  Lifetime customer value is one of the most important metrics for a business to watch.   It tells how much money an average customer spends over the life of their business relationship.

For example, how can a company like Starbucks who sells their drinks for low prices afford the very expensive marketing methods they use?  Not because of their individual customer sell price, but because over the life of their customer relationships.   They know each customer purchase averages at $5.90.

Each customer returns an average of 4.2 times per week, which means on average, the customers spend $24.30 per week.  If they take the data from one week and calculate their lifetime customer value, they’d know each customer spends an average of $14,099 over the life of their business interactions.

If they receive $14,099 on average per customer, then they can use that figure to decide how much they’re willing to spend to acquire a new customer or to retain one. When a company has a low lifetime customer value, it’s likely, they need to do their customer journey mapping again, and identify pain points in their processes.

They need to identify where they’re losing their customers, and find a way to repair their product or service offering.  While promotional product advertising or any other form of advertising can’t cover up bad service, it can be a ingredient to help improve a service.

7. Employee Acquisition

Employees are one of the most valuable components of a growing business, and good employees are the minority.  When you’re recruiting, you want to attract the highest level talent for your business, therefore, you’re impression matters.

If talented people perceive your brand in a negative light, it’s likely, they won’t be ready to commit large chunks of their time to help bring your business vision, mission, and purpose to life.   Promotional product advertising can help to incentivize high quality talent to consider working for you.  Whether you decide to set up nice tables at job fairs, send promotional gifts to key talent, or give away a custom binder to new hires or potential hires, promotional product advertising can drastically influence your brand reputation.

8. Employee Retention

If you have talented employees, you want to keep them.  Key talent that meshes in your organization can be like finding a diamond in the rough.  According to stats published by TinyPulse, 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their work was being appreciated, and recognition programs have proven to lower voluntary turnover by 31%!

If you want to keep key talent in position, you need to recognize them for what they do for your organization.   Promotional product advertising can be used to reward performance, hard work, attendance, commitment, or whichever behaviors you want to see more of.

When trophies, vacations, or other promotional incentives are used to reward behaviors, it takes sight away from the monotony of the day to day tasks, and focuses the attention on a bigger goal.  When the attention is on a bigger goal within your organization, your retention will increase, and your organization can stabilize and grow without constantly having to train, recruit, and adapt to new people.

9. Fundraising and Sponsorship

Fundraising can be tough.  You might have a good objective, but raising the funds to execute it can be a hangup.  Silent auctions, sending thoughtful gifts to prospective funding sources, or raising awareness with promotional products has been proven to work for many organizations.

Haven’t you heard organizations say, “For a donation of (set amount of $$$), we’ll send you (promotional item)”? Or,  “Sponsors that pledge (set amount of $$$) will recieve (promotional item) with their pledge”?  Those that raise funds do this because it works.

Some people will like the promotional item more than giving funds or sponsorship, others will like the pair, and some will simply want to give funds and reciprocate the kindness of the added gift.

10. Lead Tracking

Some forms of advertising are difficult to calculate ROIs.  As a result, many advertisers are simply throwing money away, and they don’t even know it.   Advertising like billboards, radio ads, television advertising, newspaper advertising, or magazine ads are said to work, but often times, advertisers are not calculating the effectiveness.

With 1.26 billion dollars going to TV advertising alone, wouldn’t it be nice to know how much return on investment was coming back in the form of sales?   That’s where promotional product advertising can some in.   Campaigns with a promotional product tie-in like, “Mention this ad and receive…” can help to track leads from a campaign that otherwise has no built in lead tracking system.

If you use promotional products to track advertising spend, you can re-appropriate funds based on returns rather than simply paying out money because you feel the “advertising obligation”.   Sometimes, the things we guess would work may not actually work, and tracking leads can help to determine that.

11. Vendor Relations

There’s an inner circle relationship based earning system within every industry.  When someone knows your name and you’ve treated them well, they’re eager to expedite things for you, prioritize priority issues, and help you meet objectives.   If you don’t have a good relationship with your vendors, you could experience lots of difficulty in business.  Rather than prioritizing your business, expediting things for you, or helping you meet objectives, they could be:

Indifferent about you and your business Strict about making you adhere to processing times Only willing to go over and beyond to meet objectives when it’s in their best interest Or, even worse, they could be intentionally difficult to work with.

As said by George Elliot, “It will never rain roses: when we want more roses, we need to plant more trees”.   If you want better vendor relations, you have to plant more seeds towards it, and promotional product advertising can help with that. A nice promotional item can break the ice, help keep your business top of mind, and form the basis for changed interaction.

Final Words on Key Performance Indicators You Can Drive Thru The Roof With Promotional Product Advertising

The goal of this article was to show the many ways you can use promotional product advertising to benefit your business and others at the same time. Promotional product advertising is one of the only methods of advertising that can have a recurring and valuable benefit to the advertiser and recipient.  If you have questions or concerns about this, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments section.  I’d love to help you out!

If you would like to get started with promotional product advertising, check out my promo product reviews and my buyer’s guides

Recommended Posts if You’re Looking for SWAG Dealers:

• Zazzle Review
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Now, it’s Your Turn…

Have you used promotional product advertising in any of these ways?  What were your results? If you haven’t tried promotional product advertising before, what are your thoughts or reservations? Leave your comments below.