Promotional Kitting Generates Profitable Results
We’ve been talking here recently about kitting and fulfillment. Today, I’d like to focus on promotional kitting. Because promotional kitting combines strategic thinking and creativity to generate profitable results. It’s one of the most effective tools available to move names from your “prospect” list to your “customer” list.
As the name implies, promotional kitting usually involves a specific advertising or marketing campaign. And it requires the assembly of promotional packages that include items of different sizes, made of different materials, usually sourced from a variety of different companies and suppliers.
A kit may include, for example, a sample product from your manufacturing facility, a brochure from a printer, an explanatory CD or DVD from your warehouse, and an interesting promotional item from still another vendor that provides added value or reinforces the theme of your overall promotion.
Two Pillars of Successful Promotional Kitting
Why does promotional kitting work so well? It’s really a function of two important aspects. Without both of them, the promotion itself is likely to underachieve. Let’s look at the two most important ingredients of a promotional kitting effort.
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Impact
This describes what happens on the “other end” when your prospect or customer receives the kit through the mail or another distribution mechanism. Impact comes from the right materials combined in the right way. Choose the items of the “kit” carefully so that they not only grab the prospect’s attention but guide that attention to other relevant materials in the kit and increase interest, answer questions, clearly define benefits and point to a call to action. A strong selling message delivered creatively to ensure it is noticed.
Let’s say you are promoting a new line of guitars to music stores. A package might come labeled “Meet Your New First String.” Inside is a DVD that introduces the new line and its benefits. There’s a small brochure about your company and its history. A personal letter from the local rep suggesting a meeting to demo the guitars. And there’s a small promotional gift—perhaps a USB drive in the shape of a guitar.
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Efficiency
When a kit is designed with the right elements, the work is only half done. To make the promotion successful, it must be executed at the right time, with the right accuracy and at an affordable (and predictable) cost. There are many elements to manage.
- Sourcing components reliably from many places and companies
- Controlling inventory to avoid overstock (wasting space) or out-of-stock (wasting time and negating the advantages of bulk processing)
- Getting the actual assembly done quickly with minimal errors
- Shipping out finished kits in a timely fashion at the lowest possible cost
- Ensuring economies of scale in every part of the operation
Chances are your organization isn’t really geared to take on this disruption, either in space available or workers to divert to accomplish the job. But in this case, you have a great opportunity to turn this from a potential logistical nightmare to a simple and successful promotion.
Seek a Promotional Kitting Partner
Promotional kitting isn’t a DIY project. You need to call in reinforcements and turn it over to people who know what they’re doing. A partnership is the route to both the creativity that generates impact and the efficiency that generates ROI. In our next post, we’ll explain why that is the case, and reveal some secrets to making promotional kitting easy.
But if you’d like to cut to the chase, know that you can contact Superior for all your promotional kitting needs. Think about our nearly 100 years in business. Our ISO certification. And the second consecutive Best of Print and Digital award we recently earned. All very different things, but they send the same message. Might make a pretty good kit, don’t you think?
