A Complete Guide to Start Promotional Products Business

Decide Budget

Starting a promotional business involves multiple complexities. But to help you and reduce your burden, there are certain steps you need to follow. Implementing these strategies will give you more clarity and help you lead your business better.
When you plan to sell promotional products online, the first step is to decide your budget. Clear and concise planning is necessary. It will help you strategize and plan your next year or quarter. A clear budget will help you attract more investors and, reduce all unnecessary spending.

Apart from this, it helps you improve your decision-making, manage resources, and monitor your business performance.

Decide Business Plan

Running a promotional products requires you to plan your next steps precisely and define your plans very accurately. Include plans for the next quarter or year, get clients retain them, and define marketing strategies, etc.

Making business plans will help you at every phase and provide you with clarity about different segments of your business. It will also help you have a broader understanding of your market, focus on bringing more investors, and keep an eye on the budget.

Decide Target Audience

Knowing your target audience is a very crucial part. It gives you insights into your customers, their requirements, and how to create creating products accordingly. There are two ways you can sell promotional products online, i.e., B2B and B2C. Depending on your business model and requirements, you can decide whom you want to target.
However, in the case of the promotional products business, it’s better to start B2B merch business. You will have a fair chance to get bulk orders. Reach out to companies, NGOs, sports academies, etc., talk about your company, and how you can help them.
Once you sign a contract with any company, you can help them promote their business using products such as pens, mugs, T-shirts, and pen drives,etc.

To make the process of designing and creating custom promotional products easier, consider using an online product design tool.

With the easy-to-use software, your customers can create their own designs, and you can fulfill those orders with ease.

This way, you can create a strong online presence, reach a wider customer base, and provide a more personalized experience for your customers.

Legal Procedures

Going through all legal procedures to register your company is essential to start a promotional products business. Reach out to the business registration office in your area and fill in the required forms. Each district has different formalities, so make sure to read the procedures to register your business. Once the required formalities are completed, and you get a green signal from this office, you are all set to start your business.

Pro-tip: Be ready for lots of paperwork.

Logistics:

Once your business is registered, your next step is to reach out to a logistics company, as your store is online. Contact multiple logistics companies in your area and the places you plan to ship your product. Make sure that they are experienced and have good services. One of the unique selling points of the eStores is timely delivery. Of course, we don’t have to aim for fast delivery like Amazon, i.e., the next day. But, make sure that your product gets delivered in 3 to 4 business days.

Good and timely delivery will help you make a long-lasting impression on your customers. It will also make you their first choice when they plan to purchase or order some promotional products.

Step 1: Tie-up with SaaS IT Companies

With SaaS companies, you can easily rely on a large, experienced team. Each department, be it development, quality assurance, or UI/UX, has a dedicated team assigned, which enables the process to be faster without compromising on quality. Therefore, partnering with professional tech companies is a more prudent choice for developing your eStore.

Features That Matter

After signing a deal, your next step will be deciding on features. Start with market research, study your competitors, understand your customers’ requirements, and decide the features of your eStore.

Following are some of the standard features needed to sell custom promotional items online:

• Multiple payment modules like UPI, Stripe, Credit/Debit cards, Net banking, etc.
• Social media sign in options
• Add to cart
• Add to wish lists
• Personalized recommendations of purchased history
• Good UI/UX and easy navigation
• Multi-language support

And more……

These are some of the basic features when developing an e-store. You can decide the features according to your business and customers’ needs.

Choose the right technology platform

There are multiple technology platforms available in the market for developing eCommerce platforms, which can often create confusion when selecting one, as each platform has its own strengths. To overcome this confusion, let’s have a brief overview of them.

When we talk about eCommerce technology, Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce are leading options. Other technologies like PHP, .NET, OpenCart, etc., are less commonly used.

It is a go-to solution when dealing with businesses. The timely security updates, SEO-friendliness, and scalability to handle complex processes make it stand out. Apart from this, the admin can easily manage multiple stores and make any necessary changes to the code during configuration. It’s an open-source platform, so it has strong support from developers and resources such as blogs, videos, articles, etc.

Additionally, Magento has more than 900 themes and is a leader when it comes to B2B and international websites. Majorly because of its open-source, enterprise-focused, and cloud edition PaaS.

Talking about Shopify, they are leading when it comes to SMB solutions. Mainly designed to keep the ecommerce audience first. Widely known for its easy navigation, appealing UI/UX, and more than a thousand themes. If you are a beginner in the ecommerce industry, Shopify makes it easy for you to set up a store in a few hours. Additionally, it is very easy to install apps, manage catalogs, and a complete SaaS-based solution.

Moreover, its hosting and security services are included, which is beneficial for beginners. No more struggles of handling servers or learning the complexity of SSLs.

Many people prefer having their eCommerce website in WooCommerce because of the strong CMS support. WooCommerce has 1000+ themes, and its large community support makes it easy to develop websites. Developers can easily plug in third-party tools without worrying about extra charges and can completely customize their code as per need.

Apart from that you can also connect your eStore with the design tool for promotional products using an API.

The combination of WooCommerce and WordPress has made it a go-to solution for many developers due to the great demand for a robust CMS. It is a perfect solution for companies that depend more on CMS. The major weakness of this platform is the constant need to have a developer for maintenance.

The following table shows some quick comparisons between each of them:

 
It is seen that Magento and Shopify are leading in the eCommerce sector. They are a go-to solution for many eStore developers because of their scalability.

Pro-tip: Experienced IT companies can help you selecting the right platform.

Each platform is best suited to your needs. If you still need further guidance on setting up your e-store with a promotional product designer tool, check out the designer tool below to learn more!

Your Unique Selling Point

There are already many promotional companies in the market, which means a lot of competition. In such a competitive market, it can become difficult to sell custom promotional items online. Hence, this is when you need to define your USP, i.e., one thing makes you stand out from the crowd.

If you haven’t thought about it yet, don’t worry, we have an answer for you.

Your USP can be Customization.

Yes! That’s right. There is a huge demand for customized products in the market, and people are ready to pay anything for them.

Gone are the days when you created designs on your customer’s behalf. In the era of everything going online, you can provide your customers with third-party tools to create custom designs.

While you plan to start a promotional products business, you can integrate the Product Designer Tool on your website. When you reach out to your customers, you can discuss customization and how they can create custom designs.

PrintXpand’s Product Designer Tool makes it easy for your customers to create custom designs using an extensive library of fonts, images, and other resources. Once the design is ready, customers can place orders directly from the website. This entire process is easy and avoids unnecessary back-and-forth.

Below are some of the significant benefits of PrintXpand’s Product Designer Tool:

• Supports all technology platforms like Magento, Shopify, wooCommerce, Php, OpenCart, API integration
• Feature-rich library with font types, images, clipart, object handling, and more
• Mobile-first approach to creating designs on the go
• Design a wide range of products like mugs, t-shirts, hats, pin buttons, etc.
• Easy integration and configuration on the admin side
• It comes with an AI image feature using which customers can generate images by simply adding a prompt.
• Similarly, customers can also generate custom text using the built-in AI feature!

And a lot more features. Try our tool and see how useful it is for your business and customers. And ways it can add value to your organization.

Digital Marketing

Once your website is launched, the next step is marketing. Marketing is vital to make your business reach more people. There are multiple ways you can market your website and business. Let’s see them in brief:
Digital marketing plays a key role when it comes to getting your website to rank on search engines. There are two main ways to do this: PPC and SEO. If you’re looking for quick results and want to rank your website fast, PPC is your best bet. SEO, on the other hand, takes a bit longer to show results but brings in organic traffic over time. Both are effective in their own way, so it all depends on what you’re looking for.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the best way to reach out to more customers. Today almost every person uses social media, and marketing products on it has become essential for businesses. Create your business’s account on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest to prost about your products, the processes, and all the interesting behind the scenes. Further, using the right tools, you can will be able to understand and know your customers in detail and understand their needs. This data helps you to make your product better and serve your customers better.

Influencer Marketing

Social media has given birth to influencers. It resulted in an entire new vertical known as influencer marketing. You can reach out to social media influencers, explain your services, sign a deal, and market your products. It’s a new way of marketing and has a lot of potential, especially when your target is GenZ and millennials.

Creating a proper marketing strategy and executing it is important. The correct way of marketing will help your business a lot.