Branded merchandise can be one of the best and most versatile tools for brands to start introducing into their marketing strategy, but how do you nail it?

Stick around to find out because we’re spilling all our secrets on creating the best-branded merchandise to help put your brand on the map and showcase your brand culture, personality and more.

Let’s dive in!


What are Branded Promotional Items?

Branded promotional items vary from brand to brand and can be anything from postcards to inflatable chairs, designed and customised to broadcast your brand to your target audience. They’re used to promote a vast array of things from emerging brands to new product launches, events and everything in between.

Promotional items such as caps, t-shirts, water bottles and tote bags amongst the most popular are typically given out by companies for free, which means it’s important to pick the right ones that will work for your brand and its audience.

So if you’re giving them away for free, but paying for them…why use them?

We’ll tell you!


Why Use Branded Items?

Branded items serve a variety of purposes from increasing brand awareness to serving as part of your customer loyalty schemes and even creating experiences and events that help bring your brand to life. But do they actually work? Yes absolutely.


According to American research conducted by the Advertising Speciality Institute customer appreciation, loyalty and engagement, all increase thanks to the effective implementation of promotional merchandise.


So, what are the benefits of branded merchandise?


Brand Awareness

Branded merchandise not only gets your brand name and logo out there, it creates ambassadors for your brand and increases a strong sense of social proofing for potential customers. Every time a customer uses a t-shirt, tote bag or other branded merch you’ve created a link between your brand and real people supporting, endorsing and sharing it.


Customer Loyalty and Rewards

Branded merchandise and promotional products are also a great way to thank long-standing customers for their continued support, welcome new customers and even reward customers for achieving milestones with your business or brand. Rewarding your customers helps them feel valued and increases customer loyalty and retention. According to the British Promotional Merchandise Association, customers are up to 75% more likely to convert into returning customers if you’ve incentivised that loyalty with something like branded merchandise.


Experiences and Events

In a digital age, it can be difficult to accurately convey the unique experience your brand can offer customers and create tangible relationships with your brand and its users. Cue branded merchandise. Used in the right ways and at the right moments, you can utilise promotional items to craft experiences that offer customers a glimpse into the personality of your brand. The same can be said for events, amplifying and elevating your events with promotional merchandise can help convey your brand much more effectively than exclusively using digital channels.


Seizing Marketing Opportunities

Having a healthy stock of promotional items that work well for your brand can help you seize opportunities to market your brand creatively, without having to plan these in advance. Utilsing services such as our Swag Stores helps you stay on top of what you need and manage your inventory of merchandise wherever you are, whenever you need it.



What Makes Good Merchandise?

By now you should understand the importance of branded merchandise and how this can amplify your brand in all the right ways. So, what’s the right branded merchandise for your brand? What works for one brand, won’t always be a one size fits all solution so it’s important that you consider a few things when picking your promotional products to help you maximise their impact, your budget and achieve results.


Knowing your Audience

Understanding your audience and how they align with your brand is one of the most important considerations when picking the best branded merchandise for your brand. Ask yourself questions such as ‘how do our customers engage with our brand?’ ‘Whay do we deliver or offer as a brand?’ ‘how old are our customers?’ ‘what are our customers’ hobbies and interests?’. Having a strong understanding of your target audience, their habits, their problems, and their demographics will help you pick promotional products that align with the personalities within your audience, ensuring they’re both practical to them, and impactful to your strategy as a brand.


Setting Your Budget

Before you commit to rolling out a strategy implementing branded merchandise, take a second to set a realistic budget. In doing so, you can help prolong the life of this strategy and maximise it’s impact ensuring consistency between new and existing customers and their experiences and expectations with your brand. There are plenty of cost effective options when it comes to promotional items and sometimes a little token is all it takes to make an impression so rather than blowing your budget on one run of items, consider extending that budget by choosing creative promotional products that align with your brand but allow for you to build a consistent brand experience over time.


Setting Your Goals

Everyone’s goals will be different, depending on what the brand wants to achieve by incorporating promotional items into their marketing strategy; whether this is generating more brand awareness, helping launch a new product or line or supporting an event or experience being hosted as a brand. Setting your goals in ways you can measure their success will help you define what is and isn’t working for your brand. Whether you want to increase conversions, increase sign ups, increase engagement at events or simply get your brand name and logo out their amongst the masses identifying these goals will help you choose the best promotional products for the job.


Promotional Merchandise Ideas

There’s plenty of factors to consider when choosing the perfect promotional products for your business or brand, but it’s still easy to feel like you’re drowning in choice even when you’ve filtered it down. So at long last, let us share our wisdom on some of the best merchandise ideas to get your creative juices flowing and help you make your mark with promotional products.


Unique Promotional Products

Branded Games and Activites

Whether snap, jenga or a mind teasing puzzle, branded games always come in handy when there’s time to kill and are an easy win for audiences of all types.

Branded Home Accessories

From candles and decor to practical items, branded homeware is another great choice for creating a unique promotional product, paired with creative artwork and branding these pieces can be really cool additions sure to impress your audience.

Branded Tools

Practical and popular branded tools will get used by your audience whether they’re multitools, tape measures or torches these items aren’t your average branded giveaway items but pack a punch when it comes to making an impression.


Popular Promotional Produts

Branded T-shirts

Branded t-shirts and hoodies are always popular at events and serve a dual purpose of helping your event leads look the part while also inviting potential customers to feel a part of your brand.

Branded Bags

From rucksacks to tote bags these are not only great for creating and storing swag packs but are eternally practical making them the first things to be whipped up from any event stand.

Branded Water Bottles and Flasks

One of our most popular products are branded water bottles and flasks, seeing use straight away at events these will immediately put your brand out there and will be used time and time again gaining valuable exposure for your brand and its logo.


Making Merchandise Easy

At Swag Box, we make swag easy from our pre-set packs bursting with best sellers to our custom build-a-box and swag stores that give you more control. We offer versatile solutions that help you achieve the perfect branded merch without the headache, whether you need a one off shipment or want to roll out easy branded merchandise that’s tailored to your needs. Book a discovery call with us today to discuss your options and we’ll help you unlock the potential of branded merch.