We're going to talk about political campaign marketing, how to market existing products, how to recruit staff, how to thank your suppliers, how to thank people for their donations, and how to build a healthy organization.

We've got a lot to cover today so I'm going to be relatively brief and give a few different examples. Hopefully you can find something that works for you.

I'm going to start off with employee loyalty programs. There's a bunch of different ways that you can use promotional products for employee loyalty programs. There are different themes that you can use. You can use apparel. You can use desk items. Or you can have even personal items.

Some of the apparel items you may have seen before are jackets, t shirts, hats, and caps. They're all great things for different loyalty programs, depending on what you're running. But if you want something that will stick around their desk and remind them over a longer term, mugs, calendars, calculators, mouse pads, clocks. All those types of things that are functional and useful and will stick around for a long time.

Now when you get into personal gifts, it's a great way to build loyalty within your organization.

You can do everything from house and home items to just different ornamental items. For the house and home, a cheese set is a great thing to give. A wine opener. Oil and vinegar cruets and salt and pepper shakers. This all, of course, depends on who your employees are and what you're giving it to them for.

Ornamental items are also great, especially if they've had a lot of years of service. Things like plaques, mantelpieces, art glass, all those types of different things are great when you're looking to reward and recognize employees for their loyalty.

A more retail type of way to use promotional products is a thank you with purchase. One of the most popular ways to do a thank you with purchase is an on pack design. When we say "on pack," we mean something that is actually on the packaging associated with the product.

A lot of times you'll see a large product with a sample piece of a product as an on pack. This is another example of one thing that you can use as a promotional product that people keep around. Say you're a beverage company. You could use a glass or an opener as part of your on pack.

Now, in addition, you can also do in pack promotions. You can do things like toys. I'm sure you can recall toys in your cereal boxes as you were growing up.

There's also proof of purchase redemption. If you want to give them something larger like a t-shirt or jacket or some type of a keepsake, they can have multiple proofs of purchase, send them in, and you will send them a promotional product. It's a great way to give a thank you with a purchase.

Another great idea is to use promotional products to thank customers. Everything in the holiday season, if you see the gift baskets. They're great corporate gifts or, if you want to, you can also give personal gifts. Something like a watch or a piece of crystal, or most importantly, a personalized item.

People have a much higher percentage chance of keeping something that actually has their name on it. Not your logo necessarily, but their name. If you give them something with their name they will remember who gave it to them and you don't necessarily have to brand it to the nines. But you do want them to keep it over the long haul.

Another very popular and engaging use of promotional products is to recruit students. Now, a lot of students when they go on the campus are away for the first time. They may or may not have everything that they need, and they may not have thought of everything that they need, so it's a great way that you can give a useful promotional product, and at the same time advertise to them. Things like desk items, pens and jotters, notebooks and clocks, they're great because they'll stay around throughout the years, all through university or college, and they'll have a great brand recognition associated with your brand.

Now, there are other items that you can do. You can do things like lanyards so that the students can keep their keys. Texter gloves are very popular now with all the touch screen devices out there. In the north it's cold and you don't want to have your hands exposed and trying to text, so they actually have great gloves out there that you can just remove the fingertip and text with just a fingertip, or actually have the stylus type glove fingertips on them.

There are also stickers and t shirts depending on, again, where you're going to be giving these out and how they're going to be using them, because t shirts go a long way to the student crowd. And then, another way to use it is at the career fairs. There are a lot of different noisemakers and things like flying monkeys, bottle koozies, key chain flashlights, and stress balls that are just fun, interactive things that will help get your brand out there and are a great way to be engaging with that type of a target market.

Product launches are great for promotional products and getting people engaged with your brand. I'm sure you've been by somewhere that you've seen the balloons and the signage associated with a new product launch, but you can also do themed giveaways. Depending on how your launch is going and what it is that you're launching, there's a lot of different options out there for you.

Along those lines as well, engaging use is to build awareness. Now, if you're looking to build awareness for your brand and your product that you're launching, or even just building awareness for the overall company, you can do this multiple ways. You can do it with the media by giving them something useful and functional like a jotter or pen or USB drive. You can do this online through a lot of different promotions where they can sign up online and get a free gift, or even as a referral. Great ways to build awareness and build your business.

Event giveaways are a fantastic way to help build your business by using engaging promotional products. There are all kinds of locations, depending on if it's an outdoor fair, if you're at a trade show, or if you're at a product launch. What you want to do for events if at all possible is target people before the event, when they're actually at the event, and as a follow up after the event. If you can do all those three things you will have a much higher percentage chance of engaging with them in a great way that will help them to become a long term customer of yours.

Another option is a sales promotion. You can do a lot of different things with sales promotions. There are reward programs, there are different sales volume programs, and there are channel programs that you can have with different customers. So, depending on how you actually go to market if you have a distributorship or sales reps in between you and the end users, there's a lot of different things you can do to incent them with rewards and gifts.

You can do a tiered type program where if they sell a certain amount of product or reach their goals, they get an item that's quite nice, and if they exceed their goals, they get an item that's even nicer. And if they exceed that and exceed that, then they get a trip. There are alot of different things that you can do to try and build your business that way, and it's very engaging to get them interactive, and then they also compare one versus the other. Well, I got item one and you got item two, next time I'm going to have to try harder to get item two.

So, the next really effective way to engage people with promotional products is by rewarding loyalty. I mentioned this briefly before, but internally you can give years of service awards, you can give awards for reaching production targets, and even giving rewards and incentives based on safety. So, if you have a manufacturing production environment and safety is a big concern because of the high risk involved in the manufacturing process, you can do all kinds of great things.

For example days of no injuries reported, because whatever you spend on a promotion like that will be miniscule compared to raised fees for insurance and things like that should you unfortunately have an accident.

Now, there's other ways to actually reward loyalty, and those are external. So, with customers you could give a gift with purchase, or you could give a years as customer gift as a thank you for being such a loyal customer. For your stakeholders, you could give, say for example, a leather portfolio or a letter opener, something like that so that the people who are involved in either the board of directors or your supplier base or someone who's involved and has a heavy stake can get something that has the company logo on it as well.

And don't forget about those vendors. I mean, you can give awards and thank you gifts, because without them a lot of times your company wouldn't necessarily be where it is today. You need good partners to be able to be successful.

Another great engaging use is a presentation leave behind. Say, for example you're going to have five or 10 people in the meeting that you're going to be talking to. It's a great way to give pens and jotters and padfolios, people to take notes. The worst thing that could possibly happen is, you're in the presentation and they're really engaged in what it is that you're doing, but they don't have anywhere to write anything. So, this is a great engaging way.

Another way to engage people using promotional products is as a fundraiser giveaway, a great way to thank people for donations, a great way to set goals for people. T shirts, if it's for example, for a run, sport bottles. There are different awards for the highest donations from a person in that organization. There's a lot of different ways they can use it.

As I mentioned before, another way is to build trade show traffic. You can do this when you're actually in a trade show environment by simply having something that is a noisemaker, similar to what you would do for a recruiting event. But, you can also do this by having lanyards, badge holders, and tote bags at the event, so people who may not have even known that you were there at the event, all of a sudden your branding is everywhere and they may say, hey, this could be a good company to investigate. Why do they have such a large presence at this show? Why is everybody advertising for them by carrying around their products? Maybe I'll go check them out. So, it's a great way to build trade show traffic.

Another engaging use of promotional products is political campaign marketing. I'm sure having gone through multiple, multiple elections, you know all of the different applications. You've seen all the noisemakers, you've seen all the stickers, you've seen the buttons, and the temporary tattoos, and the signage, and everything else that has somebody's name or political party screaming out at you.

There's a reason why this is all so popular. It's because they really do work. They're very engaging, and they help people make a decision when they're actually at the voting booth, because they've been so familiar and recognize the name of the people who are on those products that they've got.

One of the best and highest uses of a promotional product to be engaging is to market your existing products. So, you can use referral programs, sales incentive programs, awareness programs. Anything that you can do to work with your existing customer base is much more cost effective than trying to generate new leads. If you've got an existing client base who are happy with your service, you can give them promotional products so that they can refer you to others.

Another great engaging use is recruiting staff. You can use loyalty programs within, giving them length of service awards, say, apparel, plaques, and gift baskets, or even recognizing their anniversaries with pins and keepsakes and mantelpieces. But you can also use this as part of your corporate social responsibility programs.

So say for example, you could give everybody at a rebuild or everybody at a charity event the same t shirt or the same jacket so they're all there as a team, and everybody who is there knows that they're part of that team helping out. And you can even get some great publicity as a result of that, so your PR efforts, you can give USBs and jotters and notebooks to all those different media people who do show up that match your t shirts and sweatshirts and jackets and things like that.

Another great engaging use is to thank your suppliers. Giving them plaques, gifts, and awards as a thank you is a fantastic way to actually get better service, and in some cases depending on your industry get better pricing, have better relationships, and get things done. Because if you can't deliver, nobody's going to buy your product either way, so it's a great engaging use of promotional products.

Further, with the not for profit sector, you can give great thank you's for donations. The stress toys, a tumbler, a ribbon, something small because in an environment like that you don't want to give out something too big. They want their money to go to help the charity.

The final most engaging use of promotional products is to keep a healthy organization. Your people are your greatest asset and without them you're not going to be successful. Things like pedometers, calorie counting skipping ropes, exercise kits, massagers, body mass indicator scales. There are a lot of different things that you can do to help keep your people happy and keep them healthy so that they can know that you really reinforce everybody's health and well being. And overall, it's a great way to foster loyalty within your team.

Thanks so much for reading. Hopefully that's given you a few different ideas as to how to use promotional products to engage your audience.

I wish you luck in your next promotion.