What to Consider When Working With a Promotional Marketing Expert

Welcome back!

This week’s blog is going to be short and to the point.  Whether you have experience working with a supplier for your promotional marketing needs or someone new breaking into the business there are always important things to consider.

The basic criteria you should look for are:

·      Experience

·      Reputation

Experience

To ensure things are done correctly, you want someone who already has the know-how.  It will save you loads of time and frustration when you are not working with someone who is still green in the industry.  If you’re new to the business, the person you’re working with will be able to teach you a lot about what is necessary to work with a third party.

Reputation

We highly recommend working with someone that you know has done a good job in the past or is able to provide references.  One of our best sources of getting clients here at Bizee Body is through word-of-mouth referrals.  If you don’t have anyone that is referred, then you can always ask for references.  After all, you wouldn’t hire a contractor to build your house without references, would you?

Beyond that, there are the additional considerations that you may not have thought of.  Those are:

·      Logistics

·      Problem Solving Capabilities

·      Product Screening

Logistics

Logistics is by far the most important.  More than just asking what the lead time for a customized product is – how is your supplier handling logistics?  Are you having to check in every week or are they being proactive and handling that for you?  Different companies will handle logistics differently and it is important to know you are both on the same page.

The secondary part of logistics is dealing with a delivery issue.  If there is an issue, how is it handled?  Who is responsible?

Problem solving capabilities

This relates to experience but some are naturally gifted at this.  There are many things that could potentially happen when producing a custom product, so who will fix it?  If, for example, there is a problem with the screen printing or scaling of your product, what are the fastest solutions and what are the options?  Your promotional marketing partner should be able to answer all these questions for you and provide their feedback.  The worst thing would be to have a problem arise and take a wild guess as to the best direction.  There should be no question who takes the lead on trouble shooting issues.

Product Screening

This is a topic that seems so intuitive that it may not come up.  Are all the products that you are ordering checked out?  Are they compliant with all guidelines and were there ever any recalls on the item?  The last thing you want is to find out after you’ve given out a product is that there is a recall on it.  Items do slip through the cracks and it should be your promotional marketing partner’s responsibility to make sure anything you purchase is safe and has been checked out.

Thanks for you reading again.  Please leave any comments or questions below and we’ll get back to you.