Standing out in today’s crowded marketplace is challenging. You want to ensure that your marketing efforts are stellar so that your corporate clients remember you and have a positive experience with your brand. Ultimately, this encourages brand loyalty and happy customers. But how can you achieve this goal?
The answer is by using gifts for your marketing strategy. In fact, corporate gifting is a unique approach to keeping clients happy, satisfied, and loyal. So, whether you’re in the B2B or B2C space, corporate gifting has become an absolute must. If you want to find out how to leverage the power of gifts through corporate gifting to boost your marketing strategy, this post is for you.
Keep reading to find out more about the power of the perfect present, unique corporate gifting ideas, and the importance of measuring returns on investment as a result of your efforts.
The Power of the Perfect Present
If you’re still not convinced and you’re wondering: “Is corporate gifting an effective marketing tool?”, the answer is a definitive “yes”. Below, we look at a few of the reasons why this is the case.
Emotional connections
Giving gifts is an age-old tradition and corporate gift giving hasn’t been left behind. That’s because an increasing number of businesses are realizing that they can build positive brand associations, stronger relationships, and foster loyalty among their clientele through the perfect gift. Ultimately, this increases the emotional connection between the recipient and your brand, and this is a strong way to ensure a happy customer experience through emotional connections.
Brand awareness
Apart from the emotional connections that can be established through corporate gift giving, there’s a lot to be said for brand awareness. When you give a corporate client a branded gift, and they use it, they are acting as walking billboards for your brand. They can answer questions about your business, spread the word about it, and in turn, this can increase your brand visibility to a wider audience.
Relationship building
It is human nature to feel happy when one receives a gift. And the same is true for corporate clients. Gifting, done the right way, has the power to strengthen your business’ ties with your clients, employees, and partners. That’s because gifts are often unexpected surprises that delight and create a memorable and favorable impression.
Strategic Gifting: Beyond Pens and Totes
If you’re thinking about generic branded gifts such as mugs or pens, you’ve got to go beyond this line of thought in today’s crowded marketplace. You need to stand out from the crowd and offer your corporate customers gifts that they will remember and cherish. The last thing you want is for your gift to be relegated to the back of some cabinet, or worse, thrown away, due to its lack of usability, personalization, and its obvious nature. This is why strategic gifting should involve the following three elements for greater impact and levels of success:
Personalization matters
If you haven’t realized this by now, now is the perfect time to understand a core gifting concept. And that is that personalization matters. Using your customer’s name or initials on your gift, personalizing it, and even engraving it is a way to say that you’ve put thought and effort into considering them and their needs. In turn, this will foster a closer emotional connection and a stronger relationship between you and your clients, meaning that they will value and remember your gift more than the others vying for their attention. Tailoring your corporate gifts to the recipient’s preferences and values is therefore of ultimate importance.
Data-driven decisions
Another key consideration you should think about when thinking strategically about your corporate gifts is making data-informed decisions. When you carefully study your customers and their values and preferences, as well as the data you have available for them, you can foster a much more personalized experience. Consequently, a personalized gifting experience is more likely to be remembered, valued, and appreciated. This means your business will be top of mind for your customer when they are looking to reestablish or continue their relationship with your business.
Beyond the obvious
Mugs and pens are nice gift ideas to receive. However, they’ve been done so many times that they have become the obvious choice for unimaginative organizations. You need to offer creative gifting ideas that go beyond the usual suspects to truly surprise and delight. That’s where Totally Chocolate’s selection of a broad arrange of premium dark, milk, and white chocolate truly shines. With the ability to personalize and engrave your chosen chocolate, surprise and delight will be the order of the day when your gift recipient unwraps their beautiful package to receive a universally loved gift that has the power to create strong emotional bonds and memorable experiences.
Measuring the ROI of gratitude
Believe it or not, it is possible to measure the ROI of corporate gifting campaigns. And what is more, it’s something you should be doing.
In order to do so, you need to use metrics that are specific to your goals. For example, you can measure brand awareness after a corporate gifting campaign. For this purpose, you can track social media mentions, an uptick in website traffic, or even monitor the results of your brand surveys before and after gifting corporate gifts.
Another idea to consider is to measure customer retention rates. To do so, you should monitor churn rates and compare these with the period before and after the gifting event.
When it comes to your employees and their morale, consider conducting employee satisfaction surveys before and after gifting. Other metrics to monitor include tracking absenteeism as well as productivity rates.
A final and not least important metric to monitor is the number of sales leads you receive. If you are targeting clients, you should track the number of leads generated or deals closed after the gifting event.
The Art of Thoughtful Gifting
The art of thoughtful gifting involves considering other aspects as well. For example:
- Timing is everything: You should consider the importance of aligning gifts with holidays, milestones, or company events.
- Authenticity counts: Showing genuine appreciation is vital and you should avoid using gifts as mere transactional tools.
- Sustainable choices: With a great focus on sustainability today, it’s vital that your gifts are eco-conscious and socially responsible, as part of your gifting practices.
Conclusion
In summary, the role of corporate gifting in B2B marketing has important and tangible benefits for the business giving the gifts. There is a lot of value in corporate gifting as a powerful marketing tool.
To stay ahead of the curve, consider exploring the latest Corporate Gifting Trends for 2024 & 2025 to make your gifting strategies even more impactful.
And if you are looking for corporate gifts for marketing purposes, we encourage you to implement strategic gifting in your own marketing efforts by giving the best, most universally loved, memorable, and delightful gift possible: the gift of chocolate.
Whether you choose a 1 lb or 2 lb chocolate bar to have engraved or personalized or you’d like to offer luxury tasting boxes to your customers, our premium selection of dark, milk, and white chocolate hits the spot every time.
Explore our broad range of chocolate gifting options now and take a unique approach to corporate gifting to align with your marketing purposes.
