” People need to receive an impression of your brand approximately 5 to 7 times before they will remember it.”

If your company has a distinct and memorable logo, it can be a powerful marketing method to get it on logo branded merchandise. In the event you don’t have a good logo, it may be worth the time and money to come up with a good and memorable design that reflects your brand. You should think about hiring a graphic artist to get it right because a good logo can help you in the long run as you build your company and brand. In our internet world, so many companies only focus on digital advertising methods. To some, branded merchandise with your company name and logo on it seems like a throwback to an age where businesses placed an ad in the local phone book.

Business owners who downplay the significance of physical merchandise with custom engraving or custom embroidery on it to promote a brand are ignoring a powerful marketing avenue. We’ve all seen a pen with the name of a bank on it or a recyclable shopping bag bearing the name of a supermarket. There are many ways that such logo branded merchandise can boost your business.

• Builds Brand Recognition

When you advertise, you should know to be pushing your brand in addition to focusing on your individual product offerings. Let’s say you have a business that sells nutritional supplements. Any time someone needs a supplement for a particular reason, you want them to think of your company as the solution to their need. This is why companies have their brand and logo on the actual bottles of product. Using logo branded merchandise as a marketing method allows you to be promoting your brand before they’ve even purchased any of your products.

Every pen, refrigerator magnet, desk calendar, gym bag, water bottle, or other pieces of merchandise with your name and logo on it is an ad for your brand. Every one of these items is in someone’s hand while they’re writing a note, on the front of someone’s refrigerator, on someone’s desk, being used to carry someone’s gym clothes or being used to quench someone’s thirst. Most critically, each time they use or even pass by this logo branded merchandise, your company name is becoming more ingrained in their consciousness. People need to receive an impression of your brand approximately 5 to 7 times before they will remember it.

• Boosts Brand Loyalty

Let’s say someone has already purchased some of your companies products. Beyond obtaining a constant flow of new customers, turning one-time buyers into repeat customers should be a major emphasis of any businesses’ marketing efforts. After all, these are people who already bought from you, and assuming it’s a quality product, they probably already had one good experience with your brand. You probably pay a fair amount of money for every customer you get in terms of time invested in SEO for your website, money poured into online or print ads, and other methods. These customers are valuable, so you need to keep them!

Logo branded merchandise is an excellent way to accomplish this. Sending them a metal water bottle marked with the custom engraving of your brand, as one example, would go a long way toward keeping you in their thoughts every time they quench their thirst. A baseball cap that keeps the sun out of their eyes would be much appreciated while serving the dual functions of keeping your brand on their mind and also being seen by anyone they pass by outside. Sixty-five percent of a company’s business comes from existing customers. Logo branded merchandise can be an excellent way to keep their attention from wandering away from your brand when it’s time to order something similar again.

• Creates an Additional Flow of Leads

As a business owner or manager, you know that a constant supply of new customers is how you grow your company. The key to new customers is a steady supply of new leads. This is why you undoubtedly have a website that you’ve gone to great lengths to have optimized for the search engines and why you may also be doing online paid ads and other similar outreach.

Having logo branded merchandise with custom engraving or embroidery showing off your business name is simply an additional source of leads. Eventually, people are going to have a need for the products or services that your company offers. How convenient it would be if, at such a moment, they are passing by a refrigerator magnet or glancing at a desk calendar showing them your company. Some items, such as a pen, for example, will probably be mislaid and end up passing through many people’s hands over; however long it lasts before the ink runs out. Every one of these pairs of hands is a potential prospect for your business, and getting more information about what you offer is as easy as a search for your company name on their phone.

• It May Present Targeted Marketing Opportunities

Target marketing is one reason; for instance, that search engine optimization is considered an online marketing method with a high return on investment. If you’ve optimized your website appropriately, it should be coming up in search results when people are specifically looking for what you have to offer.

Logo branded merchandising potentially offers similar opportunities for target marketing. Suppose you sell products that are bought by people who are into health and fitness. In such a scenario, you could increase the chances of your logo branded merchandise ending up in the right person’s hands through custom engraving of your name and logo on water bottles and fitness trackers. Also, custom embroidery of your logo on yoga mats, running belts, and gym bags would help hit your target market of people interested in health or fitness products.

• You’ll Stick Out Above Competitors

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the popularity of digital marketing in today’s world will cause many companies to overlook logo branded merchandise as a promotional method. That gives this promotional lane exclusively to those businesses that do see the value in it. If a customer ordered something from you and from a competitor over the past couple of months, they’ll have to make a decision on who to reorder from again. If they are contemplating this decision while quenching their thirst with a metal water bottle bearing the custom engraving of your company name and logo, you just gained a leg up in this competition.

• It Serves as a Useful Business Card

Business cards are an age-old prospecting tool in the business world. Depending on your industry, you may give them away to all comers at industry trade shows and have a little cardholder on your retail businesses’ counter for customers to take. Business cards have one general problem. They are good for you but don’t really do anything for your customer or prospective customer. If you hand a business card to someone, they will probably either throw it away right after leaving or stuff it in their wallet where it will languish until they clean out their wallet one day and possibly toss it in the trash then.

Contrast this with branded merchandise. A baseball cap with your branded custom embroidery on it is something they can actually use. The same goes for a pen, calendar, t-shirt, travel case, magnet, key chain, bottle, or any other logo branded merchandise bearing your custom engraving, embroidery or printing. You may want to ditch your business cards completely and substitute a fairly cheap branded item, such as a magnet that has all the information your business card had on it.

• Establish Trust and Confidence

When you are a consumer, it’s hard to know who to trust. There are certainly online review websites, but some companies may be too small or new to have many reviews yet. With intuitive and affordable website builders available today, it is incredibly cheap and easy to create and host a website nowadays, so a pretty-looking website is no guarantee of anything.

Especially if you are a fairly new business, merchandise that bears your name and logo with custom engraving or custom embroidery makes you look more trustworthy than many competitors. They’ll know that this merchandise costs you money, so it shows that you take your business seriously. This translates into more confidence in them wanting to buy from you.

• Engender Goodwill in the Community

Beyond deciding what types of logo branded merchandise to order and what to put on it, you have to decide how best to distribute it. It’s smart to send them to actual customers in the same box with any product they order, so you’re also not paying any separate shipping charge. You may want to keep some smaller items on you to give out like business cards, as discussed earlier. Another method you shouldn’t overlook is donating some of it to local charities and community organizations. Items such as tote bags, hats, water bottles, pens, and the like will bear your custom engraving or embroidery, so everyone will know the company that was thinking about their local community when it’s in need.

Creating Your Logo Branded Merchandise

You certainly have many options when it comes to promotional items that can have custom engraving with your name, logo, and perhaps one or two other bits of information. There are certain general principles you should stick to when creating your merchandise.

• Choose the Best Product for Your Business

As far as the type of promotional product you go with, you should figure out if any would fit your kind of business particularly well. An earlier example under the section about targeted marketing opportunities mentioned a company in the fitness market choosing a water bottle, yoga mat, gym bag, or fitness tracker for custom embroidery or engraving. Be creative in your product choice. For example, a dentist might use a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a tooth.

• Keep It Simple

There are certain types of products that you can’t get away with printing or engraving as much information on and some that you can. If your branded merchandise is a t-shirt, for example, no one will want to wear it if it makes them feel like a walking billboard with a bunch of contact information. Your primary focus is promoting your brand, so have your logo and company name if it’s not a part of your logo and perhaps a company motto or tagline at most. You can get more involved with other types of products, such as a refrigerator magnet, where you can add contact information.

• Go With Quality

Remember that this merchandise will be representing your brand. For this reason, you want it to be of good quality. If people get a cheap t-shirt that tears easily or a plastic pen that leaks ink easily and it has your brand on it, that’s the impression they’ll have of you.

Where to Source Your Merchandise

There are many companies online that sell branded merchandise to help you grow your business by putting memorable products into people’s hands. One of these is Chi-Chi. They have an incredibly wide selection of branded merchandise, branded apparel, and branded print material and signs. They have what you’re looking for regardless of whether you need key holders, plastic or metal water bottles, pillboxes, magnets, baseball caps, t-shirts, jackets, or dozens of other items to show off your brand with custom engraving, printing or embroidery.

They specialize in helping businesses of all sizes connect with and build lasting bonds with their customers and clients. Their merchandise is of the highest quality, so no one who receives your logo branded promotional items made by them will have anything but the highest opinion of your company and products. They will work with you to combine creativity and affordable pricing with helping you come up with the perfect customized merchandise to build your brand quickly and professionally. Contact the branded merchandise experts, Chi-Chi LLC today.