The Redbows Promotional Gifts Blog

With the World Cup just over a week away, the UK seems to have run out of promotional stress footballs. Lets hope the England team get to the final. I wonder what the next hot promotional gifts will be when they win?

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.

I’ve been wondering whether the Labour government or any of the political parties should be advocating a little retail therapy. Firstly as we all know it does you good to have a splurge from time to time. Secondly UK retail needs it, as does manufacturing, services and most other industries. But not every silver lining has a clould behind it. Look at this week’s news – we hear that over 12,000 retail stores have shut up shop over the last year or so. Now you have to delve a little deeper here because there is a missing statistic – how many have moved to an online operation only i.e. Woolworths? Whatever the stats say though we all need to keep investing and spending. We just need to make it more strategic and thoughtful. Looking at our own ecommerce statistics, I am amazed at the sales growth of some of the promotional products we supply – such as bags and stress gifts. We have even recently supplied bespoke stress shapes including a handheld speed camera – yes they even sent us one to model from….great fun. What do these trends tell the Redbows team? That people are stressed and being subjected to a flood of stress balls and shapes? Or that buyers are getting out into their markets and ‘bagging’ all those special offers? I am not sure what the answer is. All I know is that if you are strategic and focus on growing your marketing momentum, your sales will follow.