Promotional Marketing and Technology: Making the Most of Your Marketing Budget

There’s more to promotional branding than just putting your logo on branded merchandise. There are often times advanced logistics and information exchange in even the simplest promotional programs. Other times complicated programs can be greatly simplified using advanced technologies. Still other programs take advantage of the advanced marketing and merchandising capabilities provided by digital technologies. What types of technologies your organization can benefit from is dependant upon your needs, and in this article we will outline three different types of tech implementations that have served to make them more cost-effective.

Seems Simple Enough, Right?

One of our e-commerce clients recently came to us with a seemingly simple request; they wanted to have an online store with 10 basic products that could be customized with a combination of color palettes, a choice of multiple designs, and custom imprinted text for their dealers. They wanted the dealers to be able to choose their options and then preview the custom product live in real time as they built it.

It sounded simple enough when explained, but there were several issues to this program that lent some serious difficulties. When you looked at all of the possible combinations, the number of actual combinations that were to be produced numbered in the thousands, creating the potential for costly issues in production, logistics, and massive management time. Also, the programming involved to create the preview within the e-commerce combined two completely different platforms through the use of 4 different coding languages.

We were able to build the live shopping cart platform, and provide an exciting and efficient live preview for the dealers as they built their shirts, thus creating an exciting interactive experience. More importantly, the supply-chain integration that was built in saved countless hours of manual data entry and error checking for the program. Once the order is placed in the online store, a “run sheet” is created for program administrators that takes the provided customization information and reproduces it in list form and visually, creating a “proof” for every order, and virtually eliminating the need for error checking. The end result was facilitating an extremely complex program efficiently through technology.

There’s Got to be an Easier Way!

Another of our clients, a well-known big-box retailer, came to us with exactly the opposite problem, they were managing a program that was very simple in nature, yet they were spending literally hundreds of hours per month managing the program. The premise of the program was this; they had an employee recognition program in which each month, a manager would choose an employee that excelled in performance, and would order them a custom employee recognition kit. However, there were a few things that were seemingly difficult to reconcile: each employee could only win once per calendar year, they needed a way to remind locations that forgot to pick a recipient for each month that they need to participate, they needed a simple way to account for all of the orders, and they have hundreds of locations to manage.

The problem was that the program had been all managed through emails and manual data checking and reentry. What we did was to build them a secure software platform that took the individual orders, provided the necessary data checking, and provided the reports in a format that they could easily use. In the end, the software reduced the management time dramatically, slashing hundreds of hours from the projected management time.

I’ve Got My Products, Now What?

Powertex provides a wide variety of clientele with e-commerce, merchandising and marketing solutions. Every day, we use high technology e-commerce and e-marketing to help our clients sell products to their customers. We combine technologies such as electronic gift certificates, coupon codes, email blasts, online sales and detailed website analytics to garner sales.

When necessary, we often take an active role in the electronic marketing on behalf of our clients. We build and compile legitimate email lists, deploy targeted email campaigns, and measure conversion rates and sales numbers. We also work with many of our clients to offer electronic cross-promotions through online database sharing and cross-linking. Through the use of various interconnecting technologies, we have been able to help many of our clients grow their sales and cost-effectively maximize their promotional marketing investment.

If you have a promotional marketing or branding program that isn’t quite living up to its potential, let us help. We can analyze your programs, free of charge, to see what kinds of technological solutions we can implement to solve your information exchange issues, logistics, labor investment, or marketing potential. Get more bang for your buck with smart solutions from Powertex.

To learn more on how you can maximize your promotional marketing budget through the use of technology, contact Powertex today at: Phone (800) 588-7111 Email: customerservice@powertexgroup.com.

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