A Guide to Using Promotional Products in Corporate Events

Corporate events, from conferences to trade shows, provide companies with a platform to boost their brand recognition, connect with new customers, and reinforce relationships with existing ones, while also engaging with employees. Effectively utilizing promotional products provide the best way to capitalize on the opportunities presented by corporate events. The careful, strategic use of branded products can go a long way toward making a lasting impression on clients, visitors and staff members, and ensuring that your brand will be carried out of the event to make an impression on even more potential customers.

However, achieving the desired effect with branded promotional products is not something that should be left to chance. It is important to choose your branded products carefully, design them mindfully, and have a strategy in place for their use and deployment. In this comprehensive guide, we will explain how to develop a powerful branded product strategy. We will begin by highlighting the benefits of these products for your corporate events, before touching on how to create branded merchandise that is both practical and high in quality. The guide will then show you how to establish your corporate brand identity with your promotional merchandise, how to establish an unmissable presence, how to choose the best corporate gifts, and how to take your branding strategy into the online realm.

5 Steps to Corporate Event Success

There are a few important points to bear in mind throughout the entire process to ensure you get the most from your corporate event, from the planning and design to the closing of your event. These points should be reflected in every step of your promotional strategy.

#1. Ensure you understand your audience. This is the first step in designing effective branded products is to fully know who your intended audience is. Once you understand you they are, you can ask yourself: What would they appreciate? What products will they use? What will resonate with them?

#2. Know your brand identity inside-out. Understand its visual elements and colors, and why they have been chosen.

#3. Eye-catching design with value. Think about how you can combine eye-catching design with practical value. Giving clients something they can use, which also happens to carry your branding, is the best way to ensure that your promotional products make a lasting impression.

#4. Set measurable goals. Set measurable goals for your corporate event strategy. Gauge your success by tracking the distribution and use of your promotional products.

#5. Choose the right supplier. Finally, make sure you choose a promotional product supplier who understands your brand and your event needs, and can work closely with you to choose and design the best products.

The Benefits of Promotional Products in Events & Conferences

The first question you may have is, “Why use promotional products for events and conferences at all?” There are at least two good reasons why promotional products are essential:

1. Increase visibility: Your branded items should serve as bold representatives of your company and brand. Both at the event, and afterward, these products should make your company stand out, and make a strong and lasting impression on the people who use them, as well as those around them. Brand visibility leads to brand recognition, which means it is about so much more than just making your brand clearly visible. Branded products will actually affect the way people feel about your brand. Your gift items should promote positive feelings toward your company and what it represents. This ability to help you build positive relationships is the true value of branded products.
2. Extend the life of your marketing: Your branded products should keep working for you long after your event has ended. They will bolster your reputation and brand recognition long after you have said goodbye to your last visitor and packed up your stall and equipment. Offer useful, attractive, clearly branded products that your visitors will enjoy using for a long time after the event.

Creating Quality & Practical Branded Merchandise for Events

Creating the best branded merchandise for your events starts with a thorough understanding of your brand and your audience. Having a thorough knowledge of both will enable you to choose the ideal products, and design your branding accordingly. You can then start generating product ideas that are in line with your brand guidelines. Having whittled your options down to the products most likely to represent your brand in the most powerful way, you can then start designing your merchandise. You don’t have to do this on your own. If you work with Red Iron Branding Solutions, we will help you design merchandise that is attractive, functional and that boldly represents your brand. We will then print your merchandise in the required quantities and, once you receive them, you can begin applying your merchandising strategy.

Where most people get stuck is the decision of what items to choose. There are plenty of options available, and the choices can be overwhelming. As already mentioned, the best way to narrow your choices is to have a good understanding of your audience, brand, and the specific event. Most often, however, the most popular product choices can actually be fitted to any strategy. Perhaps the most popular choice is drinkware. Branded drinkware is relatively easy and affordable to produce, and they will always be appreciated. From Coffee or Beverage Cups with a Sipping Lid, to Hot and Cold Beverage Bottles with a Slide Lid or a Large Car Cup Holder Beverage Bottle with Slide Lid, everyone needs something to hold their coffee on their morning commute. With today’s fitness consciousness, everybody can use a cold beverage container like a Leak Proof Bottle with a Stainless Carry Bar or a Levian Cola Shaped Bottle with a Leak Proof Lid for their water or energy drink. With any of these in their hands, your visitors, staff and customers will be walking brand representatives whenever they are on the go!

Custom Tote and Messenger Bags are also very popular corporate gifts. Everybody needs someplace to put that water bottle with their gym clothes, notebooks or laptop.

A Cotton Two Tone Deluxe Tote Bag or Canvas Shopping Bag with Handles will be great for that corporate employee to put his or her branded drinkware along with gym clothes, lunch and other assorted items they need for a day on the go. A Canvas Document Bag in either natural or colored canvas is great to hold a notebook, tablet or laptop as they make their way from home to office or meeting to meeting.

For those last-minute items, a Cotton Canvas Pouch with fun colored Zipper can be just the thing!

Establish Your Corporate Brand Identity with Promotional Merchandise

Well-chosen and well-designed promotional merchandise can be a powerful tool for establishing and promoting your brand identity. People will always be happy to receive your branded gifts, but the important thing is to select ones that reflect and represent your brand.

Quality, Utility & Relevance of Promotional Gifts

Promotional items serve as extensions of your brand and business, reminding your customers about your business and all it represents. There are three key factors that you must consider as you select products that will represent your brand. They are quality, utility and relevance.

Choose Quality over Quantity

When it comes to promotional items, always choose quality over quantity. When you select promotional items, rather focus on fewer, higher quality options, than on many cheaper ones made to a lower standard. Quality speaks well for your brand in every context, from your core products and services to the promotional items you choose.

Then, think about the purpose you want your promotional items to serve. How would you like your clients to use your product, while also ensuring that your brand gets continuous promotion? Would they be better with reusable bags, or do they need water bottles for sport and exercise? Focus on creating products your customers can and will use. Finally, make sure that the products you choose and the messaging you put on them are relevant to your brand, your event, and your audience.

Create Unmissable Presence with Custom Event Branding

If you want to maximize your impact at your next corporate event or trade show, you need to begin by creating a brand presence that is absolutely unmissable. The key to making yourself stand out is to devise a coordinated, on-brand promotional strategy that incorporates every element of your custom event branding. Pop-up tents, table covers, chair covers, backdrops and banners, feather flags – everything you use in your stand – must work with every other element to embody and project your brand.

Here are four steps you can follow to create a really effective brand strategy:

1. Know your brand identity: This is all-important, so make it your primary focus. Every effective live event branding campaign starts with a thorough understanding of your brand: your brand values, identity, key messaging and visual identifiers.
2. Set your event goals: What do you want to achieve with your marketing? Who are you trying to reach? What metrics can you use to measure your results? The promotional materials and gifting options you choose will depend on whether you are aiming to increase brand awareness, generate new leads, or increase your engagement with existing customers.
3. Design your branding: With your brand identity and event goals in mind, you can then create a visual design that is aligned with them. You probably have already established your colors, logo and other core branding elements. Now you need to decide how these will be arranged and mobilized in this specific branding campaign.
4. Go beyond just designing your space: You need to give your visitors more than just a welcoming space in which to meet you. You need to add experiential elements that will engage all their senses, place your brand in the palms of their hands, and enable them to carry that brand out into the world. Consider some branded swag – bags, drinkware and more. These will complete your event branding experience 

Corporate Conference Gift Ideas that will Impress Attendees

The challenge is always to come up with gift ideas that are unique and that your attendees will love enough to use every day. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, so don’t think too hard about it. The point is to choose, from the options available, gifts and other branded items that stand out, that are of good quality and that your audience will love to use.

As you plan your corporate gifting strategy, keep these five factors in mind:

1. Costs: Draw up a detailed budget and resolve to stick to it. There are corporate gifting options to suit all budgets, so just be sure to set a framework you can work within.
2. Branding: Think about how each item can be marked with your brand and help your customers and prospects to engage with it on an ongoing basis.
3. The themes and topics of the event: Think about the themes of each event and then try to customize your branded items to fit them.
4. Cultural sensitivity: As you choose your gifts and design your branding, make sure that you are being inclusive and creating gifts that will appeal to people of diverse backgrounds.
5. Utility: Choose items that your customers can make a part of their daily routine, and they will be sure never to forget you or your brand.

Virtual Event Merchandise to Engage Online Audiences

In recent years, online events are becoming more and more common, so now we are faced with another challenge: how to bring all the benefits of in-person promotional products into the virtual world. Branding can play just as effective a role in virtual events as they do at in-person ones. Here are five tips to help you devise a successful online promotional strategy:

1. Choose a theme for your event: Let your theme inform every part of your event. Look at how it can be integrated into all your materials, physical and virtual. Your theme brings cohesiveness into all your communications, uniting them both visually and conceptually.
2. Place your logos and branded items so that they can be seen onscreen: Whatever promotional materials you place in your space, none of it matters if it is not visible to your attendees. With this in mind, consider your logo and promotional material placement very carefully. 
3. Offer virtual event bags to entice attendees: Offering incentives through corporate gifts such as swag bags. These can be given away as rewards for early sign-ups. When the bag is delivered to attendees, it will create an increased sense of excitement and make them more likely to show up and engage in the online event.
4. Encourage merchandise unboxing videos: Unboxing videos are popular, so why not use them as a tool to promote engagement? Record a video of you unboxing your swag, and then encourage attendees to do the same when they receive theirs.
5. Send a thank you gift after the event: Always ensure that you take the time to thank your attendees for giving you their valuable time and attention. It is easy enough to do this with an e-mail, but why not go one step further and send them a gift?

Red Iron Brands is Your Corporate Promotional Product Solution

At Red Iron Brand Solutions, we take pride in handling our clients with special care. Our 30 years of experience in the industry allows us to offer great ideas to our clients. With our expertise, you will be sure to maximize your branding impact, whether through in-person events or virtual event merchandise. Contact us or call 800-325-3824 for more information if you are planning on using promotional products at your next corporate event.