If you’re familiar with our blogs, you probably are a self proclaimed expert at knowing what kinds of swag there is on the market, but have you heard about swag management? Swag management isn’t as well known. Most companies have a specific way of managing their swag stock, and doing so has led to incredible perks such as saving time and increased profit.
What is Swag?
If you’re not familiar with the term ‘swag’, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Swag is a promotional product or item used to create brand awareness in the form of a tangible object. Business swag is not the same as the pop culture version of swag, which usually refers to someone’s style or the way they carry themselves.
Swag items range from customized stationery and water bottles to apparel and backpacks. There are also advanced swag items like wine or pint glasses and customized cutlery or cheese boards. Swag items help foster brand awareness with popular and usable materials. Swag and promotional items can be used in virtual and live events, as gifts for employees or clients, and for giveaways. Some brands combine marketing techniques with swag handouts in the form of sales and incentives for customers who purchase a certain amount of product or referrals of other customers to the brand.
While swag has proven incredibly useful for brands in marketing campaigns and brand awareness, the day to day details of effective storage, distribution, and management can be overwhelming for employees with other company duties.
How Can You Utilize Swag Management?
When you make the commitment to use promotional materials, swag management has to be factored into the plan. In addition to securing competitive pricing, shipping schedules and storage are priorities that cannot be overlooked. But the daily packaging and shipping out of swag can be the biggest challenge of swag management.
To overcome this obstacle, YouInkIt has an incredible swag management platform that makes swag acquisition, storage, and distribution easy and painless. Trying to accomplish strategic swag management on your own can take up large amounts of time and energy that you could be putting into other, more important business practices.
What Happens If You Try to Manage Swag on Your Own?
Take a small, growing business with not a lot of large marketing opportunities. Your business goes to a few networking events to promote your company. At these events, your business can encourage new customers to come buy your products and can advance relationships with new people to become potential employees.
Eventually, you can hire on sales associates or representatives that will go out and advertise your business and products for you. Your representatives would want to take along swag with them on their business excursions, to give out to potential customers and clients.
Taking on the challenge of swag management as an office or business manager is quite the task. For every event, you need to set up a table or booth with all of your equipment, literature, and swag items, and make sure that you’ve ordered enough inventory of each item prior to the event.
If you or someone you work with has been tasked with developing the designs for new items, you will need to ensure that communication with your promotions provider is frequent to ensure that your provider has enough time to fulfill your desired requirements. All of these steps do not equate to the full process of swag management.
Picking up and storing your items is the second half of the swag management process. Thinking about storing your swag can be nightmare fuel. Your mind may wander to the thought of a junk filled supply closet or endless bins filled with unused products in an empty room.
After finding a place to store your items, you’d have to individually package and ship out each item for each event. You could use public or private owned shipping companies like the United States Postal Service or FedEx. All of these steps cost a fluctuating amount of money each time you perform them.
All of these steps don’t even cover the event of an emergency, like if a sales associate runs out of a specific swag item to give out. In the event that you would have to ship out the item that your associate does not have, you would have to put off whatever task you are working on to get that item shipped out, meaning your other duties are put off or put on pause.
How Do Swag Management Platforms Work?
There are so many issues that can arise from managing your own swag, from running out of items to not having specific sizes or kinds of swag that your hire ups, employees, representatives, or customers are interested in. Using a swag management platform like YouInkIt would solve every swag management problem your company could encounter. YouInkIt has a highly professional team of swag experts that have endless options for every team’s swag needs.
When working with your YouInkIt representative, sourcing a product will never be an issue. They have an extensive catalogue of products that you can order for your events and gifts. If you don’t see something that interests you, contact your representative and they’ll take down a description of what you want and source the product for you.
YouInkIt also handles the shipping and storing of your swag materials. All you have to do is pick out the designs and items you’re interested in and upload the designs to YouInkIt’s platform. YouInkIt will handle all of the logistics of shipping your items to you and storing your excess items. Excess swag can be stored at their warehouse, and whenever your business needs it for events or gifts, your swag is just a couple of clicks away from your doorstep.
Using a swag management platform like YouInkIt helps take the responsibility off of your shoulders and onto theirs. Now, you can task some of your employees to be in charge of fulfilling more swag orders with the click of a button.
How to Use Swag in Multiple Ways
Swag can support your business in other ways outside of promotional event material and gifts for people you work with or potential clients. Swag has been proved to work hand in hand with leading marketing programs and customer success. Providing swag to potential customers gives you a higher chance of them purchasing your products or services.
Using Swag Effectively
An example of this can be seen on every college campus. When student apartments are looking for new residents, they often hold giveaways on college campuses. A few staff members of an apartment complex came to a local Houston university to promote their leasing specials. To do this effectively, they provided students with a balloon dart game to play. To play the game, they asked students to scan a QR code with their mobile devices and fill out a survey about which apartment model they would be interested in.
After the students had filled out the form, they were given darts to throw at a bunch of balloons on a piece of foam board. Inside each balloon, was a piece of paper that had a swag item written on it. If students were able to pop a balloon, then they would receive whatever swag item was written on the paper. If they weren’t able to pop a balloon, they would receive a small parcel with fruit snacks and a sticker with the apartment name on it.
This activity was extremely effective when engaging students with the apartment complex. The apartment staff had all their balloons popped by the end of their visit and all of their swag had been given out. The swag they had brought included t-shirts, water bottles, dad hats, and lanyards. All of these students left the activity wearing or carrying their swag items, which gave the apartment complex free advertising and built up their brand awareness.
Giveaway Campaigns
This Idea is called a Giveaway campaign, which is when a business uses a giveaway to attract potential customers and generate more profit. Giveaway campaigns require four simple steps. Set a goal, use the right tools, choose the best prize for your audience, and advertise your giveaway.
Choosing your goal is the most imprortant step because its what your campaign will focus on. Consider goals like increasing your social media following or generate more sales of users in a certain demographic. Using the right tools is the next step. This means having a way that your audience can enter your giveaway or play your game. This can be done online or in person. Choosing a prize is the next step. You’ll want to make sure the prize is targeted at your audience, so don’t give out Children’s swag to college students for example. Last but not least is to promote the giveaway. You can do this on social media platforms or through a customer email base.
Ready to Get Started?
Utilizing swag management platforms can help make your giveaway campaign successful by housing all of your giveaway items. However you choose to market, advertise, or give out your swag items, YouInkIt is the swag management company for you. Schedule an appointment with one of our representatives today to get started on creating, sourcing, storing and managing the perfect swag for your business or company.
