A Complete Guide to Start Promotional Products Business

Do you remember how many billboards you saw in 2020 or this year? I’m sure your answer might be NO. In this scenario, it is very difficult to even think about leaving our homes for anything. During the pandemic, almost every industry is poorly hit, including promotional products businesses.

Pandemic taught businesses to find out new ways to survive and serve customers. Every company runs promotional activities online and offline to get more customers and drive their sales. And all these techniques changed during the pandemic.

One of the major drawbacks which companies face today is grabbing and keeping the attention of customers.

During the time when many businesses were closing, the ecommerce market stood still. More than ever, people started ordering everything online. According to research done by Statista, it is estimated that the ecommerce market will grow by 6.54 trillion US dollars by 2022. The increasing demand has also raised competition in the ecommerce market and less attention span of customers. It becomes even more challenging for companies to strive.

Additionally, it increased the demand for promotional products businesses and their web to print services. If you want to start promotional products business and want to know how you can stay in the game, this guide is for you.

Quick outline of complete guide:

• Promotional Product Business Online/Offline
• How to Start Promotional Products Business
• Steps to Launch Promotional Products Business Online
• Different Marketing Tactics
• Vendors for Getting Promotional Products
• Things you can Sell as Promotional Products

Promotional Product Business Online/Offline

Now, this is the primary question you must be asking yourself. Here, the answer is clear; you need to start promotional products business online.

Why?

The above research showed us how much ecommerce is booming. Today people prefer ordering almost everything online from the comfort of their home. The COVID here worked as a cherry on the cake; in this new normal of social distancing, customers are ordering online to stay safe.

Some of the significant benefits it brings to online promotional business products are you can enter into global markets. Yes, you heard it right. Initially, it might be difficult, but it helps you have a better return on investment, increase sales, have a global customer base, and more.

Another major thing is you get to know your customers’ needs in more detail. Your own eStore will provide you the freedom to make all business decisions, provide support round the clock, and you will have full autonomy of business processes.

If you are thinking about taking your promotional products business online and need guidance, then our experts can help you at every phase.

How to Start Promotional Products Business

Starting promotional business involves multiple complexities. But, to help you and reduce your burden these are certain steps you need to follow. Implementing these strategies will give you more clarity and help you lead your business better.

Decide Budget

When you plan to sell promotional products online, the first step is to decide your budget. Having clear and concise planning is necessary. It will help you to strategize and plan your next year or quarter. Not only this, but a clear budget will help you to attract more investors, reduce all unnecessary investments and spending.

Apart from this, it helps you improve your decision-making, manage resources, and monitor your business performance.

Decide Business Plan

Running promotional products business requires you to have precise planning of your next steps. You need to define your plans very accurately. Include things like plans for next quarter or year, get clients and retain them, define marketing strategies, etc.

Making business plans will help you at every phase and provide you clarity about different segments of your business. It will also help you have a broader understanding of your market, focus on bringing more investors, and keep an eye on the budget.

Decide Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is a very crucial part. It gives you insights into your customers, their requirements, and creating products accordingly. There are two ways you can sell promotional products online, i.e., B2B and B2C. Depending on your business model and requirements, you can decide whom you want to target.

In the case of promotional products business, it’s better to start B2B. You will have a fair chance to get bulk orders. Reach out to companies, NGOs, sports academies, etc., talk about your company and how you can help them.

Once you sign a contract with any company, you can help them promote their business using different products such as pens, mugs, t-shirts, pen drives, etc.

Legal Procedures

Going through all legal procedures to register your company is essential to start promotional products business. Reach out to the business registration office in your area and fill in the required forms. Each district has different formalities, so make sure to read procedures to register your business. Once needed formalities are completed, and you get a green signal from this office, you are all set to start your business.

Pro-tip: Be ready for lots of paperwork.

Logistics:

Once your business is registered, your next step is to reach out to a logistics company as your store is online. Contact multiple logistics companies in your area and places you plan to ship your product. Make sure that they are experienced and have good services. One of the unique selling points of eStores is timely delivery. Of Course, we don’t have to aim for fast delivery like Amazon, i.e., the next day. But, make sure that your product gets delivered in 3 to 4 business days.

Good and timely delivery will help you embark a long-lasting impression on your customers. It will also make you their first choice when they plan to purchase or order some promotional products.

Facing issues in understanding these steps or want more guidance on how to start or things to consider while starting promotional product business. Then we are here to help you, reach out to our experts and we will help you at every stage.

Steps to Launch Promotional Products Business Online

Tie-up with IT Companies

When you plan to sell promotional products online and are confused about where to start from or what to do. Then, reaching out to IT companies like us should be your priority. They will help you at every step from scratch.

Why IT companies over freelancers?

When creating a website, there are lots of complexities. It starts with researching, designing, development, security, deployment, and maintenance. Each of these phases requires a dedicated team to handle all complexities. If you are planning freelancers, it might become difficult to get your entire eStore up and running and hinder quality.

Whereas, with IT companies like us you can easily depend due to large experienced team members. Each phase has a dedicated team assigned, which makes the process faster without affecting the quality. Hence tying with IT companies like us is a wiser choice to develop your eStore.

Features That Matter

After signing a deal, your next step will be deciding on features. Start with market research, study your competitors, understand your customers’ requirements, and decide the features of your eStore. Following are some of the standard features needed to sell products online:

• Multiple payment modules like UPI, Stripe, Credit/Debit cards, Net banking, etc.
• Social media sign in options
• Add to cart
• Add to wish lists
• Personalized recommendations of purchased history
• Good UI/UX and easy navigation
• Multi-language support

And more……

These are some of the basic features when it comes to developing an eStore. Further, you can decide features according to your business and customers’ needs.

Choose the right technology platform

There are multiple technology platforms available in the market for developing ecommerce platforms. It can often create confusion while selecting, as each of these platforms are good in their own. Thus, to overcome this confusion, let’s have a quick brief about them,

When we talk about ecommerce technology then Magento, Shopify, and wooCommerce are leading options. Other technologies like Php, Dot.Net, OpenCart, etc., are not used much.

Magento Design Tool

It is a go-to solution when dealing with businesses. The timely security updates, SEO friendly, and scalability to handle complex processes makes it stand out. Apart from this, the admin can handle multiple stores easily; make any changes needed in the code during configuration. It’s an open-source platform, and so it has large support of developers and resources like blogs, videos, articles, etc.

Additionally, Magento has more than 900 themes and is a leader when it comes to B2B and international websites. Majorly because of its open-source, enterprise-focused, and cloud edition PaaS.

Shopify Design Tool

Talking about Shopify, they are leading when it comes to SMB solutions. Mainly designed to keep the ecommerce audience first. Widely known for its easy navigation, appealing UI/UX, and more than a thousand themes. If you are a beginner in the ecommerce industry, Shopify makes it easy for you to set up a store in a few hours. Additionally, it is very easy to install apps, manage catalogs, and a complete SaaS-based solution.

Moreover, its hosting and security services are included, which is beneficial for beginners. No more struggles of handling servers or learning the complexity of SSLs.

WooCommerce Design Tool

Many people prefer having their ecommerce website in wooCommerce because of the strong CMS support. wooCommerce has a 1000+ themes and its large community support makes it easy to develop websites. Developers can easily plugin third-party tools without worrying about extra charges and can completely customize their code as per need.

The combination of wooCommerce and WordPress has made it a go-to solution for many developers due to the great demand for robust CMS. It is a perfect solution for companies who depend more on CMS. The major weakness of this platform is the constant need to have a developer for maintenance.

Below table shows some quick comparisons between each of them:

It is seen that Magento and Shopify are leading in the ecommerce sector. They are a go-to solution for many eStore developers because of the scalability they provide.

Pro-tip: Experienced IT companies can help you in selecting the right platform.

We can see that each of these platforms is best suited according to your need. If you still need further guidance to start promotional products business online, you can reach us. Our technical experts will be happy to help you and provide solutions according to your needs.

Your Unique Selling Point

There are already many promotional companies in the market, which means a lot of competition. In such a competitive market, it can become difficult to sell promotional products online. Hence, this is when you need to define your USP, i.e., one thing which makes you stand out from the crowd.

If you haven’t thought about it yet, don’t worry, we have an answer for you.

Your USP can be Customization.

Yes! You heard (read, I mean) it right. Currently, there is a huge demand for customized products in the market. People are ready to pay anything for custom products.

Gone are the days when you were creating designs on your customer’s behalf. In the era where everything is going online, you can provide your customers with third-party tools to create custom designs.

While you plan to start promotional products business, you can integrate our Product Designer Tool on your website. When you reach out to your customers, you can talk about customization and ways they can create custom designs.

Our Product Designer Tool makes it easy for your customers to create custom designs from an extensive library of fonts, images, and more. Once the design is ready, they can place orders directly from the website. This entire process is easy and avoids unnecessary back and forth.

Below are some of the significant benefits of the BrushYourIdeas Product Designer Tool:

• Supports all technology platforms like Magento, Shopify, wooCommerce, Php, Opencart, API integration
• Feature-rich library with font types, images, clip-arts, object handling, and more
• Mobile-first approach to creating designs on the go
• Design a wide range of products like mugs, t-shirts, hats, pin buttons, etc.
• Easy integration and configuration on the admin side

And a lot more features. Try our tool and see how useful it is for your business and customers. And ways it can add value to your organization.

Different Marketing Tactics

Once your website is launched, the next step is marketing. Marketing is vital to make your business reach more people. There are multiple ways you can market your website and business. Let’s see them in brief:

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing plays an important role when you want your website to rank on search engines. There are two ways to do it, i.e., PPC and SEO. If you want immediate results and quickly rank your website, then PPC is the best option. Whereas SEO takes some time to make your website rank and get organic traffic. Both of them are best in their way, so depending on your needs, you can decide.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the best way to reach out to more customers. Today almost every person uses social media, and marketing products on it has become essential for businesses. Create your businesses’ social media account and post your products. Further, using the right tools, you can know your customers in detail and understand their needs. This data helps you to make your product better and serve your customers better.

Influencer Marketing

Social media has given birth to influencers. It resulted in an entire new vertical known as influencer marketing. You can reach out to social media influencers, explain your services, sign a deal, and market your products. It’s a new way of marketing and has a lot of potential, especially when your target is GenZ and millennials.

Creating a proper marketing strategy and executing it is important. The correct way of marketing will help your business a lot. If you want expert advice, then you can reach us. Our marketing experts have decades of experience and have helped many businesses to upscale their services and reach more customers.

Vendors for Getting Promotional Products

When you plan to start promotional products business, your major concern will be reaching out to vendors. You must be selling multiple products online like; t-shirts, mugs, pin buttons, hats, pens, caps, and a lot of other products. For each of these products, you will require a vendor who will supply them to you.

To do so, reach out to experienced vendors who can help you supply all these products and make sure about the quality. You can either order them in bulk and stock them in inventory or order them according to customers’ demands.

Things you can Sell as Promotional Products

There are multiple promotional products which you can sell. But, as you will be dealing with B2B, your product needs will be based on your customers’ needs. That can be; company special t-shirts, bottles, mugs, etc.

Here are the top ten things which you can sell as promotional products:

Many companies are leading in providing such promotional products to their employees as well as meet up attendees for free. It is an important part of the branding and marketing of their business.

Over to you

Initially it is challenging to sell promotional products online. But, this market has a huge scope if you start in the right direction. Follow these steps to set your eStore and see how your business shines in the competitive market.

It’s time to bring your business online and bring new ways to reach out to more customers. If you are looking for expert advice and need guidance on how to start promotional products business online, you can reach out to us. Our experts are industry leaders and have helped many clients set up their entire business from scratch.

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