4 Things to Do Before Ordering Promotional Magnets for Your Business
Promotional magnets can be incredibly helpful tools in getting the word out about your company and brand. While they may not always be the first marketing tools that come to mind when you consider ways to expand your business, they’re affordable to make, easy to distribute, and can serve as more permanent reminders than your average signage, billboard, or even web ad.
For those reasons, we strongly recommend promotional magnets if you find them appropriate for the type of business you’re starting or already running. At the same time however, there are a few things you should do before ordering these magnets in order to make sure they’re as effective as possible.
1. Decide Which Kinds of Magnets You Want
Keep in mind first and foremost that not all promotional magnets are the same! While you might have a certain type of product in mind — say, a refrigerator magnet or one for a car bumper — the truth is that there are a lot of styles and purposes to consider. A post on ‘7 Ways to Market Your Business with Promotional Magnets‘ published here last March gives some idea as the variety at hand. The post noted car magnets, calendar magnets, custom die-cut magnets, and even business cards crafted as magnets, to name just a few. Before making your order, you should consider these options and how they might relate to or speak to your target market. You don’t have to pick just one, but having some strategic ideas in mind is always a good plan!
2. Ensure Your Business’s Name & Brand Are Unique
If you’ve started a business in any official capacity, you may have literally had to make sure that its name is unique from the beginning. ZenBusiness’s advice for new LLCs goes into some depth on how this process works and why it’s necessary. But to summarize, you generally can’t register your business with the state unless said state’s database or the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office show that its name is unique. We mention this simply so that no one orders magnets with a given name only to then register a company and discover that the name has to change. Beyond this fundamental issue though, it should also be said that a catchy and appropriate name, logo, and general look will always be most effective on a magnet…. All the more reason to keep things unique!
3. Determine Your Best Point of Contact
In addition to serving as raw brand exposure, a successful promotional magnet will give consumers an easy way to contact you or check out your business. Today, that means that including a web address and/or website is a virtual necessity. However, it should also mean making one or two social media handles visible. If you haven’t already given some thought to which social channels you want to promote your business on, Entrepreneur’s breakdown of social media for businesses is a handy starting point. It mentions Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter as some of the main options today (we’d add Facebook), and though each has its own benefits, we’d recommend selecting at least two to really make a point of being active on. Your business’s page or address for each of these same two should be on your promotional magnets.
4. Consider Your Marketing Timeline
A few years ago Business-2-Community wrote about refreshing brands, and the resulting article is worth perusing and considering before you set about ordering your promotional magnets. The crux of the piece is that your brand should be updated occasionally — such as after a major change, in advance of a specific ad campaign, or simply every so often if things get stale. Now, if you’re at the point of ordering magnets, you should be looking to make your current branding stick for a while (no pun intended). But it’s still worthwhile to consider your marketing timeline so that you can plan ahead. If you know you’re rolling out a new product or service in another year, for instance, you may want to order additional magnets to reflect that change in advance.
These magnets can really be excellent tools for expanding brand awareness and keeping your business on customers’ minds. And by considering the points above, you’ll be able to make the best strategic use of them.
