Preparing for Event Season
As a marketing manager or events manager, event season is a key time of year to generate interest in your business. Whether you’re hosting an event or conference, or exhibiting at an industry trade show, it’s an opportunity to showcase your business’s products and services to attendees and build & develop key strategic relationships with relevant members of your industry.
The key to a good event is in the preparation. Knowing what you want out of the event helps you to better understand what you need to put into the event. Especially if you’re the one hosting. Whether you’re simply building an event stall to exhibit or you’re curating your own event with all of the bells and whistles, it’s always best to give yourself plenty of time to plan.
One of the trickiest, but most crucial parts of event marketing is your branded merchandise. Most people consider this to be a simple part of the process, and often it’s left to the last minute as an afterthought. However, branded merchandise, freebies, tote bags and collateral are the tangible, lasting impression you’re going to leave on your event attendees.
When the dust settles, these physical reminders of your brand are key to extending your marketing message and triggering brand recall long after your event has finished. Getting your branded merchandise right is crucial to a successful event that generates business interest and sparks valuable business opportunities long after the doors close.
Don’t Leave it to the Last Minute
One of the greatest arrows in your quiver is time. When you’ve got plenty of time, you can complete sufficient research on branded merchandise suppliers to ensure you get quality printed merchandise at a fair price. Last-minute orders can often lead you to stretch your budget to meet the brief, or cause you to compromise on quality in favour of a solution that hits your deadline and budget requirements.
Time also enables you to create a plan for your branded merchandise and achieve cohesion between all elements. Maybe you’re looking for branded clothing with a design that complements and colour matches your branded nick-nacks & freebies? Finding a supplier that can achieve cohesion between these elements is often tricky, as custom merchandise from ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ suppliers will often lack quality in favour of providing a range of options.
You will also want to consider your printed carrier bags. Are you looking for a standard natural-coloured cotton tote bag with a multi-coloured design? Or perhaps you want a tote bag in your branded colour with a simplistic, single-colour design? Maybe a fully custom, high-quality paper gift bag is more reflective of your brand? Certain options may have different lead times, and orders left to the last minute may have to compromise on levels of customisability in favour of a quick turnaround.
Though we primarily supply bags, we’ve got years of experience working with brands attending events, looking to develop cohesive branded merchandise ranges. Our team go above and beyond to help brands fulfil any requirement. We don’t just print on stock we’ve got lying around, we utilise our industry experience to source the best quality products that match your brief, budget and expectations.
Helping Create Your Branded Merchandise
We're the experts when it comes to printed merchandise, helping you achieve cohesion between all your branded products and assets. Whether you're attending or hosting an event, we can help take the stress away from planning out your branded merchandise by leveraging our experience to help bring your visions to life.
Get A QuoteWe’ve also worked with hundreds of brands that need a last-minute solution for their event bags. Maybe your branded merchandise and printed carrier bags were the last thing on the list, or perhaps you’ve been let down by your current supplier? Our experienced team can achieve even the tightest turnarounds on even highly custom requirements. If you need bags or branded merchandise quickly, give us a call on 01438 873840.
Creating the Perfect Branded Merchandise
Branded event merchandise isn’t about creating colourful printed pens, badges and notepads that bring people to your stall for 30 seconds. It’s not about creating t-shirts and tote bags that will end up in the back of someone’s closet (or worse, the bin). It’s about helping customers to recall the emotions and feelings they went through during the conversations they had with your salespeople and the experience they had with your brand. Branded merchandise is now your business card of 20 years ago, and the quality and cohesion of your offering has to match the professionalism and value of your brand.
We believe the most important part of your branded merchandise is your branded event bag. When people are walking around at your event with your printed bag, or using it for shopping long after your event has concluded, these people become walking advertisements for your business. Not only this, but reuse of a printed carrier bag also means that your event attendees are consistently seeing your brand in their home. With people seeing 4,000-10,000 ads every day, exposing prospects to your brand on a consistent basis (without having to pay for advertising) is not only effective, but cost-efficient.
Though generating hot leads can often be the primary requirement of an event, for the marketing team, an event can be fruitful for demand generation activities too. Branded merchandise is a fantastic tool for filling up the top of your sales funnel, as many event attendees won’t always be ready to buy. Whether they simply don’t need your product or service, have an existing business relationship with a competitor, or they just aren’t yet at the stage of needing what your business does, there may be a point in the future where this changes. Building good relationships with even the coldest leads and providing them with branded merchandise can help with brand recall when they reach the lower stages of the funnel. Whether it’s in a year’s time, or 10 years’ time, these sales can be attributed to the very first touchpoint with that prospect: at your event.
Let us Help
With our years of experience and wealth of positive customer reviews, you can rest assured that we know what we’re doing when it comes to branded merchandise and promotional event bags. We’ve worked with top brands across a range of industries. For example, we regularly work with Formula 1 teams, creating branded merchandise for their season-opener events. Recently, we worked with Years.com to create branded carrier bags as well as custom counter bags for their attendance at Crufts that worked cohesively to meet their budget and quality brief.
Email us at enquiries@carrierbags.co.uk or call us on 01438 873840 to discuss your requirements.
