A Guide to Creating, Designing, and Marketing Merchandise for Brand Growth

If you want your brand to turn heads, you need to come up with visually appealing promotional merchandise. Promotional merchandise can do quite a bit for your brand.

From boosting your brand recognition, creating emotional bonds with clients, and discovering which products are popular among consumers, all this can be done with promotional merchandise.

But before you say it’s not worth it, let’s find out why your business needs merchandise, and how to design, create and market it later.

Reasons why your brand needs promotional merchandise

Just like every business owner, you’re probably wondering how necessary is brand merchandise. You’ve already invested quite a bit in a website, print materials, and social media accounts. So, do you need to spend more on merchandise? 

A brand merchandise is only as beneficial if you put some effort into it. But, yes, there are benefits to brand merchandise. Let’s check them out.

Customer attention

Brand merchandise can help you capture customers’ attention. Of course, this will largely depend on your brand, logo, colors, and other elements. Your merchandise will be successful if you create something that people will wear, use, or display often. 

If you create good merchandise that people will want to wear, everyone will see your logo and brand message.                                                                                                                           

More revenue

Just like with all investments, investing in brand merchandise and seeing results will take time. Unless you have a YouTube channel with thousands of followers, don’t expect your brand merchandise to start selling quickly. 

However, over time, merchandise can get you more revenue. So, investing in brand merchandise is beneficial in the long run.

Customer engagement

Advertising your business and investing in social media marketing can be expensive. A much more affordable option is to let your customers do the marketing for you. How, you wonder? By creating brand merchandise.

Branded merchandise presents a fresh avenue for connecting and engaging with your customers. Encouraging users to share photos of themselves with their new merchandise, and perhaps providing incentives for doing so, can further enhance this connection. What this means is that merchandise is a great way to engage and connect with your customers.

Define your target audience

When starting a business, you need to be aware that you won’t be able to please everyone. Your business won’t appeal to everyone. That’s why you need to identify your target audience.

Similarly, when planning to launch your merchandise, you need to think about who is your audience. Who are your most loyal customers? Why do they like your brand? And other similar questions. Answering these questions will help you create effective merchandise.

However, it’s not just your customers that you have to think about. If you don’t like your merchandise, how will the customers? You should also think about what you love about your brand, what it stands for, and its personality. All this will help you create merch that you’ll be proud of and merch that people will love.

Pick products that match your brand

Let’s start by saying that brand merchandise isn’t just pens, calendars, and mugs. Yes, this is the cheapest and most common merchandise, but that’s not all there is.

There are much more successful brand merch pieces that won’t get thrown away or forgotten easily.

Branded merch works best when people can see it. So, it’s crucial to come up with merch options that will get you visibility and that people will want to wear, use, and display somehow.

Some of the most popular brand merchandise these days includes hoodies, bags, caps, water bottles, creative custom stubby holders, T-shirts, power banks, and journals, to name a few. Always go with items that will be highly usable because the greater their usage, the more customers will advocate for your brand and spread awareness.

Designing your brand merchandise 

Designing the merchandise is the best part. The only rule here is to make sure that your merch is unique, different from everything else, and most of all, that it reflects you and your brand.

Standing out can be pretty tough these days, and just putting a logo on a shirt is not enough to achieve this. What you should do is research, do a lot of brainstorming, and consult with your product designers and stakeholders.

As mentioned before, when coming up with a concept, think about yourself as well as your target audience. Consider what your audience loves about your brand, and also what makes you different from competitors. Then, think about what you want your merch to look like.

If you can, collaborate with other brands that already have similar merchandise. Their expertise may come in handy and you’ll be able to create something unique.

Once you’ve done all that, you can start creating a prototype of your brand merch. This is a crucial step, as it will give you a physical representation of what your mech will look like in the end. It will also help you figure out and identify potential blind spots. 

Market your merchandise

Since humans are visual bearings, the best way to promote your merch is with pictures. Pictures, images, photos, videos, and other visual tools can help you draw attention to your merch.

Social media is still the best channel for promoting a business. You can create organic social media campaigns that promote your merch. Then, you can also use social media to spread the word and tease something new and in that way, create buzz around your new product.

You could also offer incentives and limited-time offers to get people excited about your new merch.

Of course, influencers and fans can help you spread the word by posting content on their pages, which will be a great form of word-of-mouth marketing.

Selling brand merchandise

Just selling your merch in your brick-and-mortar stores isn’t enough anymore. A webshop is a must nowadays, so if you still don’t have it, now is the perfect time to create it and start selling your merch.

Make sure you link your webshop to all social media profiles and posts. This will allow customers to land directly on your website once they see the ad.

Bottom Line

In addition to all the proven marketing strategies, brand merchandise is yet another that can pay off greatly. Your brand merchandise can have many benefits if done right. Hopefully, this guide convinces you to take your chances and create your brand merch.