Promotional products and branded merchandise work. Several research and surveys have found promotional products to be one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your products or services.
The question is, how do you make promotional products work for you?
Do these issues sound familiar to you?
- Order fulfillment is too tedious and time-consuming.
- Branded products don’t arrive on time.
- Lack of system in tracking orders delays the process.
- Difficulty in managing purchases causes stress to managers.
- Failure to monitor the process leads to overspending in some locations.
- Low-quality promotional products disappoint attendees in your biggest annual event.
- The logo printed on shirts was not the latest company logo.
- Remote teams distribute branded apparel that had not been approved by the quality control team.
If those sound familiar, you’re not making promotional products work for you.
If you’re using promotional products year after year, you need to put in place a long-term solution that will streamline the entire process of ordering and reordering branded merchandise for your marketing campaigns or human resources initiatives.
The solution?
Set up an online company store either for internal (company-wide) or external purposes.
Why You Need an Online Company Store
If you value efficiency, quality and consistency in your branding and marketing campaigns, setting up an online company store might be the single solution that will solve multiple problems in your organization.
In this article, I’d like to share with you some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from having worked with various brands in creating a system and setting up their online company stores.
Here are the 8 key benefits of building an online company store for your organization:
#1: Enjoy the benefits of having an efficient, centralized distribution system
Having an efficient, centralized distribution system is a problem for most companies that use promotional products in various locations on a regular basis.
In general, an efficient system removes all the headaches associated with the stress of not knowing how budget was spent or how the branded items were distributed. Through an effective reporting feature, an online company store can track all essential information, including orders and reorders, for you.
#2: Eliminate the need for a physical inventory
Eliminating the need to do a physical inventory and to maintain a storage area for your promotional products brings a huge convenience and helps you save time and resources.
Having an online company store provides you with the ease of real-time inventory and a complete record of all transactions. Plus, there’s no need to think about minimum orders and the promo items or branded merchandises will always be on stock as they can be delivered on demand.
#3: Ensure consistent branding
Every marketing team dreams of having a system that enables them to ensure consistent branding across the different departments and locations. Every marketing professional knows the huge benefit a company could get from distributing promotional items that are consistent with the overall corporate branding.
What needs to be consistent?
- Branding specifications, especially the logo design and color scheme
- Brand-specific artwork
- Brand-specific promotional products
By setting up an online company store, which becomes a centralized location with brand-compliant products, all of these worries about inconsistent branding will finally have a long-term solution.
#4: Control your spending
Whether you’re using promotional products as part of your marketing campaigns or leveraging them for employee engagement, staying on budget is critical.
With an online company store, you can set the amount approved for each location or department making it easy for the marketing team or your employees to stick to the approved budget.
#5: Boost employee efficiency
Order fulfillment can be tedious and complicated. But with a centralized system that allows ease of ordering, employees, including the marketing team or operations team in charge of product procurement and distribution internally, will regain their focus and concentrate on bringing results, rather than spending time on a process that can be automated.
If your team needs product giveaways for the next week’s event or trade show, ordering is easy and hassle-free!
#6: Increase employee morale
Incentivizing employees with branded products of their own choice can go a long way. Employees who are appreciated are more engaged, hence more productive and more capable of contributing to the company’s bottom line.
With a simple touch of creativity, your company can launch an incentive program that rewards top performers or appreciates employees who go the extra mile by giving away branded items of their choice.
You can also use branded swags to liven up team building activities like sporting events, weekend-long retreat, company picnics, etc. Your creativity and the excitement employees would feel for receiving branded items will surely boost employee morale.
And it’s a surefire win for your company, too. Why? Every time they use your promotional products, they get to promote your company. Employee advocacy goes a long way.
#7: Ensure consistent quality
Vetting a promotional product distributor is quite a huge responsibility for your organization. You have to assess the quality of the products they offer, their reliability in the delivery, and their willingness to recommend the best items to add to your inventory.
Once you’ve found a distributor that consistently delivers quality products and fast turnaround, you want to ensure everyone in the organization enjoys that same quality and reliability.
With an online company store set up for you, everyone in the organization, regardless of location or department, will order promotional items only from your trusted distributor.
#8: Save time, reduce cost
All the benefits pointed out above will certainly lead to your team and organization saving a ton of time and reducing a lot of costs as you minimize manual administration and simplify order fulfillment.
It’s a win-win solution to your company’s promotional product needs that will boost your marketing ROI.
Wrapping Up
With an efficient system in place through an online company store, your team — whether it’s the operations team, the human resources team or the marketing team — will be relieved of the tedious cycle of ordering and reordering promotional products and branded merchandises for internal or external purposes.
And they can focus more on what matters to your business: maximizing return on investment for your branding and marketing campaigns or employee engagement programs.
