Can you really measure the ROI of promotional merchandise?
Any marketer will tell you there is more to the measurement of campaign success than simply the number of leads and their quality. Your marketing campaign might be about increasing customer feedback or brand awareness. It might be about engagement of a specific audience or the launch of a new product. In each case, there will be different metrics to measure success.
Branded merchandise can be a valuable asset in almost all marketing campaigns. What’s important is being able to prove that! You need to understand what metrics will highlight the success of your campaign, and how we can relate them to promotional merchandise.
Here are some suggestions:
What to measure in your next branded merchandise marketing campaign
- Distribution
Look at the reach of your promotional merchandise. How many people came and collected items at events, or how many promotional packs were delivered.
- Exposure
Record social media statistics on posts that feature of highlight your promotional merchandise for the campaign. Likes, shares, comments and mentions are all useful numbers. Maybe consider a social media competition based around winning your branded merchandise and record the number of entries.
- Brand Awareness
Got contact details? Why not send out digital questionnaires to the recipients of a promotional gift to try and measure brand awareness. Did they recognize the brand on the promotional gift? Can they recall the brand or the branding? Did it change their perception of the brand? Are they more likely to use them?
- Engagement
Instead of handing out your promotional merchandise directly, give codes for free redemption of your swag and measure the number of people who login and redeem an item. If you use a merchandise pop-up store for product redemption, you can view all the reporting stats on there.
- Traffic
If your gift comes with a card or flyer encouraging people to a specific page on your website, it can be easier to track that gift’s impact on web traffic. You could also print a QR code on the gift tag, literature or on the item itself, that leads directly to a page on your website, and measure the traffic you receive after your marketing campaign launches.
- Leads/Sales
It can be difficult to directly link branded merchandise to sales numbers. One way would be to send discount codes with your branded merchandise and monitor the number of them that are used when purchasing your products. Another would be to bulk send, rather than stagger, distribution of merchandise and see if it leads to an upwards sales trend. If you do include a QR code with your merchandise, you could also use Google Analytics to look at the number of sales conversions based on traffic directly from these. You could even create a custom landing page that the QR code directs you too.
Ideas and suggestions?
If you’ve found different metrics to show the success of branded merchandise in marketing campaigns, or just new ways to track them, we’d love to know. Our team is always looking for new ideas to share with clients or influence our product choices.
If you would like to talk to us about using branded merchandise as part of your next merchandise campaign, get in touch on sales@arcadiaonline.co.uk. We’d be happy to discuss the best products to ensure success as well as ideas to measure effectiveness.
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