What Products & Services to Promote, plus Branded Apparel

When you represent your business or employer, you too become a commodity. Regardless of your age and pronouns, and whether you like it or not, you are a walking advertisement and people will notice what you wear. As such, it’s a great idea to use this to your advantage.

The branded apparel that you wear and carry are great conversation starters. You could be at a meeting or out for drinks with friends, and someone will surely ask about the logo on your shirt. This presents a great opportunity for you to tell them about your business and add a new contact to your network.

Promotional product companies can be pricey and require a high volume of product to be purchased with your logo, however, there most likely are individuals or small businesses in your area who offer screen printing and embroidery services. All you have to do is purchase the apparel or bags, and mail them to the printing company.

We’ve done exactly this for our business. Shirts were purchased at Target for $10 to $15 a piece and screen printing altogether costed $35. Don’t be afraid to wear your branded apparel anywhere – to the grocery store, meetings, happy hour – because you never know when you’ll meet a new referral partner or client.
Now if you’re needing branded apparel for more than a couple people, a promotional product company may be a better fit for you.

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Deciding What Products or Services to Advertise For

Piggybacking off the previous lesson, if you’re like us and provide a wide array of solutions for clients, it’s imperative to select the right solution to promote, so that you stay within budget.

Regardless of how you promote a product or service, we recommend to focus on promoting solutions in either of these categories:

• A new product or service
• One that earns the company the most profit (revenue minus expenses)
• One that brings the company reoccurring revenue (i.e. monthly or quarterly)
• A product or service that may not have high demand but has the least hassle

If you’re on a budget or are currently in a tough economy, you don’t want to promote products or services that are expensive to produce and are time consuming. Here’s a real-life example of the final category listed.

As a company, we enjoy doing graphic design work the most because it allows us to stretch our creative muscles. Plus, when a design project is done, it’s done. There rarely are requests from clients to make changes once a project is complete. Unfortunately, design projects are not the most revenue consistent, compared to requests for social media and advertising services.

Seeing as our team enjoys design projects the most, we decided to advertise that service on Facebook. After 2 weeks, the campaign wasn’t performing well so we reverted to an ad-free strategy of promoting design services on our newsletter. With patience, design projects started showing up from current and referred clients.

Aside from making a strategy adjustment, we decided to switch our ad platform from Facebook to LinkedIn. We selected an organic strategy to target new contacts in a niche industry, and run a slow yet steady campaign to attract folks in the health industry. While LinkedIn ads are pricier than Facebook ads, LinkedIn’s newsfeed is less cluttered and distracting than Facebook’s, so we liked our chances of converting more with our LinkedIn audience.

Moral of the story, even if your low-cost campaign isn’t high-performing, the results will help you narrow down the platforms and target audience that’ll bring you your ideal clients.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re listening to this in 2022 or later, tough economic climates can make running a small business or sales strategy very difficult. In the words of many successful mentors and athletes, “Don’t Give Up”. Know there is always a solution to a problem and know that facing challenges simply come with the territory of running a business. Creativity and craftiness will help you discover ways to allow your business to thrive, no matter the circumstance