What is a "Corporate Gifting Plan?"
We all know what a gift is, so a "corporate gift" is given by a business to another party. Usually, they’re given to customers and employees as a way of showing appreciation for them. So a "corporate gifting strategy" is simply a plan in which a business will give gifts strategically to help grow their business.
This can be to celebrate business miles stones, or to commemorate an occasion, or just to say thank you to employees and customers.
Why are Corporate Gifts a good Marketing Strategy?
Everyone loves receiving presents. People like to feel appreciated, and a gift is the perfect way of showing someone you know that you’ve thought about them.
If you give corporate gifts to mark your company milestones, e.g. a year in business or a grand opening; you are inviting your customers to celebrate with you. This will make them feel included and important to your business and to you. This will aid in increasing public opinion of your business and will help spread the word about your company. The more people who know about your business the better, so free gifts to potential customers can aid in converting them into paying customers.
Corporate gifts also help you form relationships with employees and customers; the better your relationship with them the more loyalty they'll have to your business. The better the relationship you have with your employees will also increase their happiness in their role at the company, and make them feel more appreciated; which in turn will increase overall staff retention.
Basically, corporate gifts can lead to business growth.
How to Create an Effective Gifting Strategy
To have an effective gifting strategy, you need to have a plan.
- A gifting budget: decide how much you are willing to spend on corporate gifts and plan around that. You want to be able to spend enough that you see the gifts working; but you don’t want to spend so much that you have too much to give away.
- Branding: Your products should be branded with your information on, otherwise the free water bottle you give away is just be a plain water bottle, it means nothing. Branding will make you stand out.
- Sourcing: Where you source your corporate gifts from is important and will directly affect people's opinions of your business. Consumers place a lot of value on well made, environmentally conscious products. They like locally produced or sourced products too. If your company comes across as one that doesn’t think about air miles, the environment, or the quality of your products, then consumers may think you don’t care about these issues.
- When to gift: What time of year you give out gifts can make a difference too – a lot of companies like to gift with the seasons or during big national celebrations. However, if you’re a smaller business it would be good to celebrate your own milestones with the community too. This can be expensive if you want to gift year-round and you would need to plan this out in your budget.
Put Your Corporate Gifting Plan in to Action
So, whether you give out free pens and tote bags to your customers, or you’d like to offer gift boxes for loyal clients and employees, it's important to have a plan, and equally as important to stick to it.
A well thought out strategy will allow you to keep track of your gifting budget, help you see growth within the business and increase employee and customer retention.
If you are looking for the perfect Corporate gift, we have an entire category dedicated to it, click here to see our corporate gifts category!
