The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

As we get ready for the festive Christmas season it is no surprise that promotional advent calendar enquiries are shooting through the roof.  This year we have provided a fairly unique range of chocolate calendars in both desktop and wall formats. There are also small and large versions and we can offer a range of print options including a part or full printed, postal cartons and even printing behind the doors. There is a twelve-days promotional advent calendar this year but alas no working day one due to the way the seasonal holidays fall this year. If you want to go the ‘whole hog’ we can also supply sweet-filled Christmas Crackers and chocolate baubles to decorate client Christmas trees. All great fun and a superb way to promote your organisation and generate goodwill. See the Christmas Collection on our new Promotional Sweets Store.

What makes an essential corporate gift? When we recently refurbished the existing Redbows website we thought long and hard about where the website should fit into our on-line marketing strategy. Being neither a full blown database-driven website nor a micro-website or portal, just what purpose should the updated website serve? And so we thought about our customer base and the market place. Just what do people want at this moment in time – the answer was simple. To keep it simple and give the best possible value for money offers and promotions. So this is what the website now provides under the tagline ‘Essential Corporate Gifts‘. The website provides access to our best offers in pens, pencils, rulers, keyrings and other promotional gifts – all at the lowest possible prices and formed in such a way as to form the ‘essentials that every marketing manager needs to have at their disposal.

Promotional Gifts exist for a reason – to get response and increase the ROI (Return-On-Investment) of a marketing campaign. But how often do you measure the ROI and where do you actually begin? To answer this you have to set some strategic objectives for your campaign. Let’s take the example of using stress balls to direct people to a new website. Every campaign needs objectives because if you do not know where you want to go, you won’t know how to get there. So set them. Make them SMART – specific, measureable and timed etc. Secondly, choose a promotional gift that ties into the campaign theme. And finally capture response data for analyis and comparison to the campaign objectives. As an example, let’s take a campaign centred around reducing stress at work.  Perhaps a stress armchair is chosen and printed with the website address and a ‘call to action’ – giving people a reason or incentive to visit the new website. Then in the website monitoring and tracking software – Google Analytics or some other stats package, measures are set to capture the number of visits to specific pages and actions such as requests for further information and sign ups to programmes. Once the data has been collected over a given time period, it can then be compared to the campaign objectives – the strategic objects set in terms of number of visitors and actions.  Off course you cannot measure everything and there is a trend in some organisation for ‘analysis-paralysis’. However, simply spending marketing budget is not enough in these economic times when every business action has to make positive contribution.