Which giveaways, premiums to get for your company's marketing activities

Whenever I go to a trade show, or receive a premium as a gift from a company, it always speaks volumes about who the company is, what they represent and can even affect if I want to do business.

Repetitive and redundant Premiums:
In reviewing all the premiums I have received from companies over the years, they tend to fall in a very small range of types of items:
+ Office Supplies (pens, mouse pads, monitor screen cleaners, notepads, calculators, etc)
+ Clothing (Polo's, polar fleece, t-shirts, etc)
+ Bags or carriers of some sorts (backpacks, laptop carriers, book bags, etc)
+ Other - (blankets, golf tees, stress toys, mini fans that hang around your neck and other gimmicky things)

The Saturation problem:
Living in the Silicon Valley, I cannot tell you how many times I have seen company branded premiums for sale at someone's garage sale. And, admittedly, if you looked in my closet, you would see an assortment of these things in boxes (and generally not being used).

I think we all initially happily take these premiums with greedy appreciation. I think it is the hunter and gatherer in us all. The idea of getting something for free, appeals to most everyone.

But when you take it home and realize you only own two notebooks (one personal and one work) and you realize you now have a total seven laptop bags (all premium items with different corporate logos, of course), the space these items take up to store and the practicality of having a whacked ratio of bags to notebooks, then suddenly that new laptop back is something you have to donate to Goodwill, sell in a garage sale or give to a needy college student.

Is this how you want your good marketing dollar investments to end up? --I would hope not.

How can you avoid the problem:
So the best solution is to seriously think about how and what premiums you want to invest in.
The best way to do this is look at your marketing plan, your company core values and what types of venues are these going to be given away (tradeshow, customer gift, promotion etc).

Here are some key questions to ask yourself to help you further define what giveaway to select and leverage
( inspired by article from frugalmarketing.com and I have added some of my comments, and insights below as well:
1) What do you want to achieve by giving away a premium item?
Drive Brand awareness? To qualify for the premium, do they need to complete a call to action like sign up for your online newsletter (lead generation)? etc
2) Who and what size is your target audience for receiving the item?
Based on your audience what types of items might they actually desire and USE?
3) Where and how will it be distributed
Is size a consideration in how you distribute it?
4) What is your budget?
Of course any customer would love a new convertible BMW as a premium, but unless your product has a multimillion dollar price tag, you have to be realistic about what you can spend per customer, based on how many premiums you need to acquire for your marketing activities.
5) How will the item encourage a customer or potential customer to do business with you?
6) What associations could the premium have to a customer
Is it Fun, organization oriented , helpful and efficient, etc?
7) Is there a way to track the effectiveness and ROI of the premium?

But at the end of the day, the biggest result we are looking for is if it helped us maintain the satisfaction of our existing customer base, and of course, also if it helped our business developement efforts and gained new customers.

In future posts, I will try to call out some premiums that I find interesting and unusual that have the potential of being highly effective with your potential customers and existing customers. (depending on, of course, if they are would match your target market, fall within your budget and if they fit in your strategic marketing activities)

Search Engine Optimization –

Generating the right key words and key phrases for your website, industry and market segments

When I was hired on as a consultant at a major multi-national logistics company, one of the projects I worked on was generating a ROI driven national online marketing program, and one of the deliverables was a list of keywords and key phrases to be used for the organic and paid search engine optimization part of the program.

What resources to use to generate your initial list?

Since I was not intially familiar with the industry, the first thing I did was work with the product marketing team and also did a lot of research online. My initial goal was to build a very large catch-all list that covered all possible words and phrases that could be searched by our end customers.
By working cross functionally, I was able to compile a list of industry words and terms that were appropriate to what our customers might be searching under. Since this was a logistics company (B2B), I also looked at industry magazines and websites to add more words and phrases to the list. This was all in addition to using the keyword generators found through multiple sources (see Google, Overture -Yahoo, and Wordtracker links below)

How to refine and prioritize the list

When it came time to refine this large list of key words and phrases there were several factors I looked at:

+ Ranking in major search engine optimization
Tools like Word tracker, Yahoo/ Overture and Google keyword tools + What words and phrases were showing up for the competition
+ How well the word or phrase most intuitively matched to the company solutions and the customer pain points
+ Which words was the logistics corporate parent already paying for, on order to prevent cannibalization

How to define your lists:
Paid versus Organic (Natural) Search Engine Optimization Lists

Once the list was refined and re-reviewed and approved by the cross functional team, I organized them into two lists, paid and organic search lists.

Since I was working with a tight budget, my strategy was to maximize the entire prime list of key words and phrases for our organic website optimization and carefully prioritize and pull out of the list, the keywords and key phrases that we would use for the paid optimization, through Google and Overture (Yahoo!). There were two main factors I used to define which words would be selected for the paid list.

+ Which words and phrases had the best chances of driving (ROI) a purchase or transaction on the website, once they clicked -through
+ What words and phrases would help us best reach other strategic marketing goals the company was trying to achieve

After this list break down and having put together a solid national online marketing program, I informally presented to the Director of Product Marketing and the VP of Marketing and was able to explain the process and decision making that went into it. It was successfully received and both gave their approval of the program.

In some other blog post, I will speak more about the national online marketing plan I built and some of the best practices that came out of that experience.

Welcome to my Online Marketing Blog

Why this blog:
Over the years, I have done lots of online reasearch on the best practices for Marketing and I have been lucky enough to come across lots of ideas and links that would be great to consolidate into one area.

In addition to using this as a way to highlight what is interesting out there in the Marketing world, I am also interested in occaisionally discussing other business things like: cool accessories for the office, women in business, green practices in the work environment, etc.

Subjects that really interest me in Marketing field include:

+ Ovearall Online Marketing Programs

+ Search Engine Optimization
+ Viral Marketing
+ Effectiveness of all ranges of marketing tactics
+ The psychology of marketing:
customer online experiences, universal body language communications, strategic language use to influence effective marketing

My background:
I am located in the South Bay in Northern California and have a BA in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing, but would like to pursue getting my MBA.

Recent Activity
For the last 3 years I have been consulting three major Fortune 500 companies (FedEx, Symantec and HP (HPShopping.com)

~ I have provided such services as project management for global scale partner store experiences
~ Launched over 200+ skus and managed inventory merchandised and marketed these products through their full lifecycles
~ Generated a National Online Marketing program using the best practices out there
~ Worked with vendors to generate online sales tools, flash demos and developer tools
~ Acted as product evangelist to in communications and training for sales teams and call centers agents
~ Investigated sales inhibitors and generated a plan of action to counter internal and external objections

This blog will allow me a forum to keep a thumb on the latest trends in marketing and continue to increase my knowledge base, as I am always happiest when I am learning something new!

Also I am always open to hearing about new marketing tactics or strategies, that are groundbreaking, cool and innovative. So please feel free to share.

Lets get started!
May the Best Marketer Win!
Holly Hansen