As markets continue to become more and more competitive, it is important for businesses to think outside the box when it comes to marketing. This brings us to the custom lanyard, which is possibly one of the most underrated yet amazingly effective promotional tools available. If applied properly, custom lanyards serve as effective and versatile tools for organizations seeking to increase brand visibility.
What are Custom Lanyards?
A lanyard is a string, rope or a strap worn round the neck or round the shoulder or round the wrist, holding small articles such as a badge, keys or an identity card. Exhibits include the name, logo, slogan, or any other branding image unique to an organization in custom lanyards. It is common to see buttons on the lapel at conferences and parties, student and employee IDs in schools and offices, backstage passes during concerts, and others.
Cost Effective Marketing
The advantage of custom lanyards is that as a promotional tool, it is relatively cheap and places your brand in the face of your audience. In terms of economies of scale, depending on the quantities ordered, a company can get them for as cheap as $1 each. Thus, when compared to other types of promotional apparels such as t-shirts, bags, and hats, one realizes that lanyards offer a better value for money. With little effort, your logo and message can reach out to a huge population with your ad!
Versatile Use Cases
Lanyards can be customized to some extent and can be given at different places and events to increase the awareness of the buyers. Examples of the ideal settings that are usually considered include conferences, trade shows, concerts, intern events, orientation days, corporate offices, schools and the like. Wherever your target audience is, if they can wear your branded lanyard, there will be an opportunity to gain more impressions.
Can Your brand really walk around Town?
Perhaps the most striking advantage of having bespoke lanyards is that it turns people into human billboards. Wherever your target market goes with the lanyards – be it a conference, a concert or schools, or whichever – your brand goes with them. This is an organic visibility and impression frequency difficult to replicate outside of this medium.
The first thing that people are likely to notice is the first thing that they will tell others about you.
Brand lanyard in professional contexts such as conferences provide exhibitors and speakers an opportunity to create an initial positive impression. Whenever attendees, prospects and key players in a particular market see a custom lanyard, they recognize your brand on the spot. This top of mind presence creates a good platform for building the perceptions customers have about your company.
A Conversation Starter
As with any form of company branding or personalization of accessories, custom lanyards tend to attract attention and prompt people who come across them to ask questions. The lanyard design, the message that is printed on the lanyard, the color and the company logo makes people curious to know what your company does as well as what is the use of the lanyard. This also proves very useful to your sales and marketing teams as it provides them with the perfect conversation opener to talk about your products, services, and offerings.
A Memorizable Brand Imprint
Perhaps the most significant strength one can attribute to custom lanyards is that they can morph into a memorable brand prompt. Whenever people are constantly exposed and handling an object that has the logo and message, then brand recall and memory encoding is achieved unconsciously. This makes it easier to recall and identify specific name-brands at a later stage in the chain of purchasing.
Extended Exposure Lifespan
Many custom lanyards can be significantly reusable, and much more than other novelty products that are typically given out. As opposed to a poorly produced Sanford product that may reach its end after one presentation, the lanyards are worn and seen continuously for months or years. Such visibility means that your branding remains persistent across different points of interaction.
Marketing with Lanyards: Ideas on How to Make the Most of Your Lanyard Marketing Strategy
Having discussed the paramount advantages of custom lanyards, it’s high time we revealed some major tactics to make sure that your custom lanyards will be as effective in terms of visibility as possible.
Selecting the Right Type of Event or Location
It is important to ensure that lanyards are only distributed in the venues and events that are often frequented by the target buyers and key opinion leaders. Presenting them where your target audience will not be found reduces projection frequency. Co-ordinate the outreach campaigns and distribution of lanyards especially to ensure that the identified target group gets the best exposure possible.
Design an Eye-Catching Lanyard
The design of your lanyard has to be prominent in a manner to create an appeal in midst of a large number of attendees. Employ vibrant colors, short, memorable, unique, and catchy images and slogans like logos, mottos, or benefits statements. Do not use small characters, intricate designs, or long words that compromise the clarity of the text. To sum it up, it is essential to keep it simple and make it bold.
Use High Quality Materials
Do not use substandard building materials that are likely to be easily broken or give a poor and unpolished look. Choose a high-quality material for lanyards that can sustain stress from daily use, abrasion, and exposure to chemicals and UV light. .. and ensure that they are tightly fastened to the rigid structure. Cheap lanyards tend to be of low quality, which is not good for your business.
Hand Them Out Yourself
With regard to booth staffing, passing lanyards directly to people as opposed to simply displaying will help guarantee interaction. Personal distribution means the possibility of branding discussions take place and actual usage is higher compared to conference bags.
Offer Incentives For Wearing
Repeat the following type of suggestion: Reward people for wearing lanyards. Give out tickets for a free raffle if someone can wear it from morning till evening or give away free snacks, drinks, etc. to people who were seen wearing the customized lanyard. While incentives will ensure that people appear frequently and actively on the platform as compared to little activity, it is more preferable having regular activity than sporadic.
Use Creativity in Determination of Distribution Channels
Lobbies, check-in counters, waiting areas, charging points or other crowded areas then help you place these lanyards in a more optimal manner. It also needs to consider what lies outside of merely manning a booth at an event. The more distribution channels the more potential impressions which means that if the company increases its distribution channels it increases its potential impressions.
Measure Performance and Impact
Some metrics to monitor include how many are distributed over time, how often they are worn on average per day, how many inquiries were catalyzed, lanyard scans/taps, social shares, etc. Through feedback and data, you can evaluate the visibility ROI and enhance future promotion.
In this case, it is possible to state that custom lanyards present numerous visibility business possibilities.
The reason for purchasing custom lanyards is the ability to promote a business’s branding, visibility and conversion options. Thus, they are flexible promotional tools that provide a great opportunity to reach out and engage highly diverse audiences in different professional contexts and scenarios. It just requires a bit more of thinking about how you want your lanyards to look like, where you want these buyers or influencers to have access to them, and how you can encourage people to use them constantly.
When properly executed and properly distributed, custom lanyards make people carry around your advertisement in a cost effective way and in the long run, it leads to a higher brand recall.
