Common Mistakes When Choosing Promotional Gifts

A lot of decisions go into picking and choosing the ideal promotional gifts—from traditional apparel and flash drives, to more innovative products in the leisure department, finding the perfect freebie to gift your clients and promote your business can prove to be a daunting task. Yet, despite long hours of searching and designing the perfect gift, we still do it. And it’s a good thing–why not surprise your clients and show them you value their loyalty to your company?

However, there are some cases when you feel down on your luck–your orders arriving late, thinking you’re spending too much or too little money, and the absolute worst–the client not liking what you picked out. How to avoid all of these little mishaps? What are the main problem areas to avoid or try to work around when looking for a promotional gift? I’m not gonna lie to you, there’s lots of obstacles and some may be hard to avoid. So, to make it easier on you, here are the main mistakes to avoid when shopping for a promotional gift.

1. Different Strokes for Different Folks

We’re all very different from one another, so never expect your client, business partner, or employee to show the same amount of excitement you’re expecting them to. While you may think you’ve hit the nail on the head with your choice of gift, the recipient may not agree. But there is no reason for this to discourage you—unless you know the person intimately, it’ll be hard to guess what type of present will tickle their fancy. Something practical and made for everyday use is always a safe choice.

2. Be Sure to Order on Time

There’s a huge difference between buying something in a store and ordering it online. In order to avoid the commute, long waiting queues, and the disappointment of not finding the exact gift we were looking for, we tend to opt for online purchases, since the internet presents an incredibly practical and overall quicker option. However, there are some unspoken rules to online shopping—rule number one is to always place your order in time! No matter what the shipping information says, you’ll want to make sure your gifts get here even sooner than intended.

3. Stop Focusing on the Price

When choosing gifts, we often find ourselves on one end of the ‘price spectrum’—either we’re looking at buying a very cheap or an overly-priced item. Of course, the reason for this is that we are constantly deciding between sticking to our budget (which is insanely important when buying a bigger quantity of products), and wanting to impress the recipient with something new and exciting. Now, here your best bet is to find some sort of a balance between price and quality. Do remember, however, that a high price does not always mean a better quality, and vice-versa. What you should be looking for is a happy medium between the two.

4. The Same Gift Over and Over Again

Wouldn’t you personally get incredibly bored of receiving the exact same pair of socks on every single birthday or Christmas day? Even if your gift was praised the first and perhaps second time around, that does not mean you should be sticking to the same exact gift each year—no matter the occasion. While we are talking about promotional gifts, it’s not just about the promotion—it’s also a great way of saying thank you to your employees. And what better way to do it by showing them you put some thought into their gift?

5. Try Thinking Outside the Box

Why should every promotional gift include a T-shirt, pens, and a USB stick? Why not think of something new and original? Think about what is currently trending, and work with that in mind. Better yet, what’s one thing that symbolizes your company? If you’re working towards a cleaner environment, why not come up with sustainable gifts for your colleagues? Perhaps a pair of sunglasses made of wheat fibre might do the trick?

6. Don’t Settle for Quantity Over Quality

For some reason, when buying gifts for whatever occasion, we tend to forget about the saying “less is more”. We’re inclined to buy a bigger number of items, hoping the recipient will be too distracted by the quantity to notice the poor quality. This, naturally, should never be the case—especially when it comes to promotional gifts. What message do poorly made products with your own logo on it send out into the world? It’s better to put our best foot forward, and surprise our clients with something of high quality, even if that means gifting them only one item.

Hopefully, this short list does its job in helping you avoid the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make when looking for the perfect promotional material to gift to their clients. What about you? Do you know of any other mistakes one should avoid? Share them with us in the comments below!