Everyone loves free. As you are trying to increase the knowledge of your potential partners about your business toward your portfolio quality products, having a few diverse five promotional products will give you a leg up on all competition.
Be careful as to what you give away, however. Although everyone will certainly accept a free gift, it will not always accomplish what it was meant to if the following guidelines are not followed.
– Relevance to your brand
– The ability to start a conversation within a social group
– Cost-efficient
– Unique
The t-shirt is one of the best tried and true promos. The right shirt can provide your company with a billboard that can also serve as a conversation piece. Here are some of the ways in which the right t-shirt design can help your business.
First of all, the t-shirt is one of the highest ROI promo materials that you can choose from.
In high volumes, t-shirts have a relatively low cost per unit. This means that even the smallest start up company can afford to give t-shirts away in order to gain the exposure that they will bring to the business. The manufacturing of high quality t-shirts is also much more viable for a small company than ever before. You do not have to deal with cheap iron on shirt tattoos – you can create a fully screenprinted model that can stand up to even professional scrutiny. With this in mind, you may opt to sell your t-shirts rather than give them away.
Secondly, a t-shirt can spread the word much more quickly than perhaps any other promo material.
Although many other promo campaigns have been tried, there are very few that have been able to outpace t-shirts for sheer exposure. Everyone has to wear a shirt, so it might as well be your shirt that people wear, right? If you focus on people with large social circles, you gain exponential amounts of exposure without paying for any additional PR.
We talked with T-Shirt Champions who added, “T-shirts that are made for a specific purpose can also do a great deal to prioritize a special event within a local community. Consider setting your design up like a band would for its tour. Even after the event has passed, the people who continue to wear the shirts will advertise your business so that people will ask about the next event. You can also garner the popularity of a previous event in this way.”
Third, a great design can serve as a product in itself.
If you end up with a t-shirt design or a logo that begins to have a life of its own, then you have basically created another line of income for your business. Consider some of the most iconic logos in the world like the logo for Nike or McDonalds. These companies were able to create a completely different revenue stream for themselves by selling merchandise, with Nike taking the market for accessories to an entirely new level.
For this reason, you should never gloss over the logos or the slogans that you put on a t-shirt. You should consider every t-shirt, even the ones that you are giving away, as a potential source of additional revenue for your company. Give them the time that a new revenue stream deserves before you just toss the idea away as a promo gimmick!
