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5 Tips
for an Effective
Branded Merchandise Strategy

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Branded merchandise is a highly efficient strategy for building brand awareness and promoting products and services. It is a great way of connecting with your customers at a personal level, and can help to boost your market influence if you get it right. This article outlines five tips for achieving an effective branded merchandise strategy.

1.   Settle for high value and usability

The first rule for using branded merchandise is to provide your customers with products that have great usability. Consumers value functionality, and the more value an item provides, the more likely your brand will stay on top of their minds. Use a service like OGO to create amazing branded apparel designs, and be sure to focus on lifestyle promotional products like t-shirts, hoodies, water bottles, hats, bags, and journals.

2.   Choose quality over quantity

Your promotional products do not have to be loud or too many for them to have an impact. Make it a priority to provide your customers high-quality items over producing lots of salesy and low-quality products. To make your branded merchandise more impactful, you can use them to support relief efforts such as Ice Nine’s limited edition t-shirts that were used to raise funds for Australian wildfire relief.

3.   Have a variety of themes to suit the moment and need

You need to embrace cross-cutting themes that you can use for reaching out to a broader customer base. Lack of theme flexibility can hurt your strategy as your branded merchandise can quickly become boring. Familiarity breeds contempt, which is why you always need to alter the messaging and distribution plan of your merchandise. This will allow you to easily target different demographics while making your marketing campaigns more exciting.

4.   Make use of automated ordering

There is never a foolproof marketing strategy, and every business needs to tweak its outreach efforts to have greater market impacts continuously. The same applies when creating branded merchandise, as you need to ensure the right target group receives the right items. A simple way to refine your outreach efforts is to utilize automated ordering to know who is ordering what items and from what location. This will provide you with data that will enable you to make smarter decisions on the kind of merchandise a specific customer group appreciates.

5.   Maximize your return on investment (ROI)

Every opportunity to connect with your customers is a chance to promote your brand and improve sales. Before you come up with a branded merchandise strategy, you need to be clear about your goals. Do you want to increase sales, boost brand recognition, or inspire conversation?  You will also need to consider how each of the goals factor in your messaging, the amount of money you will need to use and the distribution strategy. Defining metrics for the goals you want to achieve will help you to truly maximize your returns.

Endnote

A great branded merchandise strategy and authentic messaging engage customers and potential customers in ways traditional marketing can’t. These tips will help you create an effective branded merchandise strategy.

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AMNPLIFY – DB