Employees are advised to attend trade shows they are more likely to project a professional image. Always ensure staff looks smart and display a company logo on their clothing. It’s important to be polite and confidently familiar with the products on display, the general public love to ask questions, in return expect to be greeted by happy knowledgeable staff. Employees should always be proud to promote their company.

There are many trade shows in the United Kingdom; one of the most popular is held at NEC in Birmingham’s. These shows offer a vast array of products from baby clothing to ecommerce essentials. Whatever your company is selling there is a place for you at trade shows. Remember, to be successful at a trade show you need to plan your campaign carefully.

Everyone understands the benefits of drinking water. The question is, what do we drink the water from? One suggestion would be to drink from promotional water bottles provided by Just a Drop, their bottles contain bespoke corporate logos or specific messages they are ideal for many purposes, be that board meetings, trade fairs even in our schools.
Just a Drop are one of the main suppliers of biodegradable water bottles in the UK, their products are totally ethical and allow companies to advertise their products in an environmentally friendly manner. Drinking water from plastic bottles that are not biodegradable causes major environmental issues. The UK’s landfill sites are struggling to cope with polymers that take over 1000 years to degrade; this is causing the global community a major headache.

Just a Drop provides promotional water bottles in a variety, of shapes, sizes and colours. They offer expert advice and suggestions on logo designs and branding. They guarantee to provide their clients with a first class ethical product.

I am proud to recommend Just a Drop as the most ethical supplier of promotional water bottles in the United Kingdom.

Lee Anne Lewis – Business Services Online Ltd

Some of the most successful marketing campaigns have developed an instantly recognized brand or logo, which will be easily recalled by large numbers of the general public. These successful marketing campaigns are usually the result of a sustained and widespread exposure of the logo and marketing messages across a range of media. The more often they are seen with the right associations, the greater the recall. This builds a very strong brand image.

Strong brand images are built through a range of advertising and marketing methods designed to reach the identified target market for that particular business. These usually include printed and visual media of various kinds, and perhaps supported and reinforced by promotional merchandise.

The value added to a marketing campaign by carefully chosen promotional merchandise cannot be underestimated. Whereby a printed advertisement in a magazine or newspaper, or a radio or television advert may create a moment of engagement and recognition, the nature of any of these media is fleeting; there one minute and gone and perhaps forgotten the next. The benefits of using promotional gifts is that they can appeal to some or all the senses at once, and the more engaging a gift is, the more powerful it will be as part of your marketing strategy. A well-chosen and executed promotional gift will magnify and consolidate the impact of the message and branding images, both immediately and over time when the gift is used repeatedly and may become part of the recipients everyday life.

Choosing the right promotional goods is crucial. You need to portray the appropriate image for the brand you are supporting. This can be reflected in the perceived value of the promotional gift, or the relevance or aesthetic quality of the merchandise. It needs to be pertinent and useful while also characterizing the desired image and style.

Promotional items don’t have to be costly to be effective. A well chosen inexpensive gift could be distributed on a large scale by many various means, and prove to be a very cost-effective marketing tool. While using your chosen promotional items to consolidate your links with existing customers, they can also be incredibly helpful in encouraging business from new customers. Additionally, using branded items within your company offices and workplaces develops brand awareness and loyalty among your employees too.

As part of a whole marketing strategy, the use of well considered promotional gifts is extremely valuable to the success of the campaign as a whole. Often the branded merchandise will still be used and useful long after the main campaign push is over, and serve as an ongoing reminder of the brand. In this way your marketing budget keeps paying for itself over and over again. Let’s face it, as things are in the marketplace at the moment, everyone’s capital needs to work harder than ever. With promotional gifts you get more branding punch for your pound.

Many people have therefore turned to the relatively new phenomenon in ‘bottled water’ and the arguments as to the extra health benefits from bottled water as opposed to normal tap water have emerged. There are people that state the bottled water contains no added health benefits, based on their tests of locally treated water supplies. But there are still others who believe the opposite. Whatever you believe, there is one certainty, and that is that every time you go out into the street, the park, the beach, just about anywhere, you are almost certain to see someone with a bottle of water.

Now there is a new trend aimed at companies and businesses of all shapes and sizes. The concept of ‘customized’ or ‘promotional’ water supplies, has almost taken the promotional items market by storm, and it makes perfect sense. Virtually everyone drinks water, and when we visit restaurants, hotels, bars, and even in the company cafeteria, we are more likely to be handed a ‘bottled water’ these days as opposed to the vendor pouring us a glass from the tap. Millions and millions of people all over the world are buying bottled water from supermarket shelves, and you can almost guarantee that in times of global trouble, turmoil or threat, this is one product that most people will be stockpiling.

Labels are very advanced these days, with vinyl and/or environmentally friendly materials being used, that are waterproof and chemically treated to last a lifetime. As long as the bottle of water sits on the shelf or in the fridge, in someone’s hand, car or on the bike, your brand could be what people are seeing. Having a large bright logo makes it all the better to see, as bottled water will almost always be in clear packaging, with a bluish tinge, and anything bright stands out very clearly for all to see.

If you are responsible for the promotional advertising for your company or business, or if in fact you are newly considering promotional items for your business to use to gain awareness, you would be well advised to check out the benefits of making ‘bottled water’ one of the options you investigate.

For further information on this new approach to promotional branding, you can contact promotions@justadrop.co.uk

Deciding what the promotion is intended to do, is the first step in deciding on promotional branding and the products that will or should be used to promote the campaign. Is it to serve as an incentive for people to participate in a survey? Will it be used to launch a new product or service? Or is it intended to generate new business? These are all things that make promotional branding a great idea.

When this decision is out of the way and there is a clear understanding of the purpose of the campaign it is a lot easier to work on the tactical side of the equation. Coming up with ideas, is always best done when you know what the anticipated results should be. On top of this though is the importance to recognize the companies existing image, and branding, and your new campaign and promotional activity should align itself with the existing brand.

A promotional item is “any item imprinted with a logo or slogan and given out to promote a company, organization, product, service, special achievement or event.” Promotional products are often deemed much more practical than other forms of marketing, because the advertiser/promoter benefits from repeat exposure each time the recipient uses the item. In some cases, as with pens, a recipient may have that pen for months, and use it each time they write a cheque or a note. This means a lot of repeat exposure for the advertiser, and not only to the recipient, but also to people around him or her at the time.
Promotional products are deemed more practical than other forms of marketing and advertising activities since advertisers benefit from repeat exposures every time a recipient uses their promotional product.

If we look back over time and ask various advertisers the question “are there any tested and proven items” that continue to be successful promotional products, we find the answer to be “Yes there are”

Some of these include calendars, pens, caps, key chains, fridge magnets, mugs, among a list of many others. There are also umbrellas, day planners, desk accessories, business card holders, and others. With an estimated number totaling more than 1,000,000 products in the market today that are suitable for promotional branding, there is no shortage to choose from. This number will continue to grow, and one of the popular ones at the moment is USB drives.

Promotional products and the correct positioning of them in the marketplace, is known to strengthen the relationship with people, particularly a companies target audience. They can help to secure a positive awareness of your company and its image, and build awareness to issues that are important to you.

Continuously keeping an eye out for new and fresh promotional ideas will ensure that your company is always at the cutting edge. Products that were hot last year may not be hot again this year, and customers just love to have something that is not in the market on a wide scale. Novelty items that present something unique are always favoured by most people.
The other encouraging aspect of keeping your product fresh is that people who have it will talk about it to others, thus doubling the possible exposure to your brand.

Just a Drop provider of promotional water, cookies and sweets are already seeing an increase in orders for promotional drinks, John Godfrey the Managing Director, stated, “Our promotional drinks products generally pick up in the spring as companies look to get their orders in early, sales are already up 30% on this time last year. This is not a surprise, even in this difficult market the trend of businesses searching for interesting unique branding opportunities is set to rise.

The decline of sales in the US has brought the idea to revamp and eliminate the tagline in order to bring the brand up to date. Coca Cola also added a new formula to the brand, naming it “New Coke” at one point, but the brand label did not attract a lot of consumers, so it was also dropped in 2004.
Coca Cola is the leading soda brand worldwide and has sold out about 1.7 billion cases of Coke Classic in the US in 2007, for example. This was revealed in the Beverage Digest. This only proves how well advertisement labels and promos can affect the perception of people and how well they can influence them when it comes to choosing certain products.

What The Coca Cola Company isn’t realizing is that people are starting to get smarter. Nowadays, we actually read what ingredients each product contains and it should come as no surprise that, in the future, fewer and fewer people will choose to drink something as unhealthy as sodas. Hopefully it’s a trend which can’t be reversed by a marketing campaign for a change.