Shaking off your worries, you gather the names and addresses from your rep and get those items packaged up and shipped. You’re a go-getter, so of course you’re willing to help, despite the fact the neglected tasks of your core job function are steadily mounting. However, she’s all out of her personal stash, so she asks you to do it. She wants to send a mug and a notebook to 5 of her key prospects. While you’re grappling with this, you get a call from one of your sales reps. This process alone can suck up hours of time, and let’s face it - it’s about as enjoyable as chewing sandpaper. Perhaps you get stuck with this if you’ve gone to the event yourself. Next, you cross your fingers that your items arrive to the trade show venue on time.Īfter the show, you have to rely on your attending team to package up anything that wasn’t used and ship it back. Or worse, maybe you even need to head to the post office or UPS store to send them yourself! Then you need to manually package them up, order shipping labels, and schedule them to be picked up. You also have to locate those items, likely diving into a disorganized and scary swag closet. If you’re designing new items, you need to work with your promo products supplier, and probably need time to ensure your colors and quality are on-point before approval. If you’re an office manager, or a marketing manager or coordinator, you’ve got quite a bit of work cut out for you.įor each of your events, you have to orchestrate your booth set-up and ensure you have enough swag ordered in time. They come to you whenever they’d like to send some swag to key prospects and new customers. You also recruit a handful of employees every several months.įurthermore, you’ve got a couple outside sales reps in the field, preaching your company’s gospel. You go to a couple trade shows per year and host a handful of your own events. Let’s say you’re a typical growing company. Consider a real-life example from my own experience. We touched on the tactical side earlier, but it boils down to how much swag consumes your time. We’ll consider two approaches - one a bit more tactical, one more strategic, but both important in different ways. Printfection has developed an online swag management platform that helps hundreds of customers manage and distribute swag on the fly - but let’s get to the meat of this post and address why you should even care about swag management in the first place. Swag management is the process of purchasing, storing, and distributing your promotional merchandise in an automated, scalable fashion that saves you precious time and headaches.Īnd most people don’t realize there are solutions out there, swag management platforms, that help you accomplish all of this. From procuring items to fulfillment, with a few clicks of a button you can save hours of time. There’s also the ongoing pain of trying to maintain accurate inventory counts.Įver prep for an event or class of new hires only to realize you’re out of water bottles or t-shirts? We’ve been there.Īll of this can be a huge time suck to whatever department(s) get tasked with it (very often it’s Marketing!) Ain’t nobody got time for that! That’s where swag management comes in. It can even mean taking time out of your day to drive to the friggin’ post office to ship items. Then manually selecting items and packaging them for shipment for your various initiatives.Finding some sort of space or closet (or swag “dungeon,” as our customers often call it) to store everything.Having the items drop shipped to your office.Researching suppliers from which to order.The big problem with swag is this: while it’s been shown to be highly effective at generating awareness and revenue, no one wants to manage it. Some really smart ones even use swag in their marketing, sales, and customer success efforts to incentivize leads and reward customers for certain actions, like referrals (we’ll touch more on this later). Swag can range from custom t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, pens, notebooks, water bottles, webcam covers, backpacks, and the whole host of things you’ve seen if you’ve ever graced a trade show floor.īusinesses use it to raise brand awareness, give away at events, deliver to new employees, reward customers, etc. Unfortunately, the term ‘swag’ often causes confusion, so let’s first clear that up.īy swag, we’re referring to promotional merchandise, or promotional products, among many other terms. We’re not talking about one’s stylish confidence though. Yet, most companies are already managing swag today - and doing it better can lead to tremendous benefits in saved time and increased revenue. Swag management is hardly a popular term on Google.
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