Leave behinds are a marketing staple in any business that does door to door sales, but they can be perfect for creating a lasting impression in any business. A leave behind is by definition anything that you leave behind you after a visit, but the primary examples are business cards, brochures, door hangers, magnets, calendars, water bottles, and a variety of other promotional products.
There are a few questions you should ask yourself when you intend to incorporate leave behinds into your marketing plans. You need to ask how much information you want to leave with the customer? Is the item relevant to your business or market? And how do you plan to distribute the materials?
Distribution
First, we will cover distributions strategies. The most obvious strategy comes in to play if you are doing door to door sales. If you can get in front of a potential customer, it is especially important to leave, at bare minimum, your contact information in the form of a business card. You should also leave them brochures that remind them about your product or service. An excellent way to do this is to prepare a sales folder that stores all the relevant information a customer might need, this can be left after a conversation or simply left with the receptionist if you are unable to meet with anyone. Another distribution strategy is to utilize tradeshows. When it comes to tradeshows, promotional products are a staple of marketing strategies. This is where you will want to have a variety of different items alongside your informational brochures. Make use of the more inexpensive promotional products, like pens and hand sanitizers, for these shows since you will most likely hand out a large number of them. Obviously, the higher quality and more useful a product is the longer a potential customer will use it and the longer your name will stay in front of them. But this also drives up the cost, so finding a nice balance is important for tradeshows in particular. The third strategy and what we believe is the best of the three, is to leave your leave behind with a customer once your service is completed. A happy customer can be an endless source of referrals and a great way to make sure that a customer remembers you is to provide them with a useful promotional product. Depending on what your business is you may have an opportunity to leave a notepad or some other promotional product at a customer’s house or if the customer travels to you then you should make sure they always leave the transaction with a promotional piece.
Relevant
Another strong opportunity is to consider if you can leave a relevant product with your customer. If you are trying to sell phone plans you can leave products that are relevant to phones like screen cleaners or useful items that go on the back of phones. We know of a plumber that left branded plungers behind for his customers, talk about a unique product. As a printing company we like to leave behind notepads and calendars with potential and past customers. This keeps our name on their desk for as long as they as the notepad lasts. We have found this to be the most effective product for us. So, it may take a little creativity to come up with a useful product that is relevant to your business personally, but it can definitely pay off if done correctly. Now a product does not have to be uniquely relevant to you, it can also simply be relevant to your customer. We have seen a lot of success with branded cups and water bottles, the type that keeps your drink cold or warm for long hours. It is worth it to invest in the nicer cups because customers will sometimes use these for years and can lead to countless referrals. Another successful product we have seen is branded tote bags. These can be anything from reusable shopping bags to nicer bags that people take with them to the beach. If you can give a customer a useful product that they appreciate, it will constantly have your name in front of them for months to come.
Information
The final question to consider is how much information you want to leave with the customer. This can help you decide exactly what type of product you want to go with. If you simply want to build name recognition then a pen, magnet, or sticker can work. If you hope to leave your contact information you will need to figure out how to attach a business card with a product. And if your goal is to leave product or service information then you will need to go with something like the folder package suggested above.
Hopefully, these questions will help you implement leave behinds into your marketing plans this year. They can be highly effective at increasing repeat customers and getting referrals. We recommend them to all our clients. Good luck with your marketing goals this year!
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