Creating The Perfect Sports Swag for Your Clients’ Next Event

Having a client in the sports industry provides endless opportunities for promotional marketing. Whether it’s a golf event for charity or a club team basketball game, each has its own unique audience.

If your client wants to hand out promotional swag at their next sporting event, it’s essential to understand what that audience wants and needs. Here’s how to market to those desires through on-brand swag that promote your client’s brand and creates a lasting impact.

Choosing The Right Swag

When deciding which type of materials will be best for your client’s sporting event, consider the audience of that event. A men’s basketball event likely has many millennials in the audience whereas a golfing event is more likely to have members of the entire family present, including children and older generations.

That’s why in order to have a powerful impact, branded items need to be carefully targeted to the right audience, Tim Donnelly at Inc. writes. A brand also might benefit from testing out a new promotional product that differs from what they’ve offered in the past. If they typically hand out water bottles, for example, offering a patch or a t-shirt might help attract some attention.

Informz adds that changing promotional materials also helps promote a company’s agility. Being agile helps a company adapt to the changing tastes of its audience, which can improve its overall success rate.

T-Shirts

T-Shirts are a popular form of promotional marketing that sports fans never tire of. When you’re helping a client choose a promotional tee, there are a few important things to keep in mind.

First of all, it’s important to discuss the brand’s desired goals:

• Who is the target audience for the promotion?
• What is the intended impact on the brand?
• How will these goals be measured?

Minuteman Press explains that all of these factors need to be considered before jumping into a design. This helps you present the brand with tangible results later on, further increasing the chances that customers become repeat customers.

On that note, brand promotion should always be the a key goal of a promotional T-shirt design. Talkroute explains how tees are great conversation starters, especially when labeled with a company’s brand name. This prompts people to ask the wearer about the brand, which usually ensures in a brief elevator pitch about your company and what it does. The result? Free peer-to-peer marketing amongst curious, like-minded consumers.

Once you’ve established the goal, it’s important to create a design that’s on-brand. If it doesn’t include a company’s logo, slogan or other brand elements, it won’t serve its purpose as a promotional item.

According to Printsome, it’s important to sit down with a company and discuss their brand and style guidelines. By reviewing fonts, colors and logo specifications, you’ll ensure that the tee effectively communicates the brand’s values. The design should also be scaled to size, so it’ll look balanced when worn on someone’s body. Alex Bigman explains that properly weighted design elements help a T-shirt design become more flattering, which in turn increases the changes it’ll be loved and worn often by the owner.

Size and Style

Sizing is another important consideration, especially when marketing to millennials.

Kristin Sundin Brandt of Sundin Associates explains that promotional shirts need to appeal to both genders. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, offering tees in a women’s fit increases the chances that women will actually wear the shirt (and therefore promote your brand). This ensures that your brand is accurately represented by a broader pool of people, making the promotion more universally appealing.

If your client wants to go above and beyond the average T-shirt, consider hoodies, tank tops and other apparel. Amber Lee at Bleacher Report gives the example of a Dodgers hoodie being a great freebie. Since official sports gear is typically expensive, this giveaway had fans jumping for joy. If your client happens to be the sports team itself, work with the team to create branded items that look and feel like official team uniforms.

Sports Patches

Similar to T-shirts, patches are a powerful way to promote a company or brand.

Advertising patches are becoming more common on major leagues sports jerseys, which boosts their popularity among fans and everyday consumers. Specifically, it’s becoming a popular advertising method for NBA teams. According to Will Jarvis at Ad Age, the NBA has always been ahead of other sports in terms of branding, and its longstanding history and global fame has helped it become a leader in sports branding.

Business Insider sports editor Cork Gaines explains another reason that the patches trend is gaining momentum so fast. Gaines says advertising patches promote actual business partnerships that a team and the business are proud of. Pairing the patch with the team brand on a jersey shows the bond that these two businesses have, mutually benefiting them both. One team, Utah Jazz, uses the advertising space to promote a charity, which helps reflect its values as a team.  

Patches in Action

Sportswriter Jimmy Carlton tells the success of another team, the Milwaukee Bucks, sponsored by Harley-Davidson. The iconic patch is placed opposite the Nike logo on the jersey, effectively becoming part of the uniform itself. Sean Cummings, Harley-Davidson’s senior vice president of global demand, calls the sponsorship a perfect fit, because the brands complement each other and says that “the crossover appeal can grow both fan bases.”

Looking at trends on the major leagues level can help you think about what type of swag might be popular at club, college or charity sporting events. Think about how popular teams wear advertising patches and how they market those through swag.

In addition to wearing patches on jerseys, many sports players and fans wear patches on plain ball caps. Golf Digest’s Ashley Mayo writes about official U.S. Open hats that featured a branded patch decal. Since this is a trend happening at one of the largest professional golfing events, it will probably be relevant at lower levels of the sport, too.

When you give away patches at an event, you can feature a patch on a baseball cap as an example of how it can be worn. This adds a usefulness to what your client is giving away and makes it more appealing. If your client has more than one sporting event, creating a promotional calendar can create excitement and energy around your team’s giveaway. Matt Snyder at CBS Sports explains that many teams get creative with their promotional calendars, which helps them stand out amongst other teams. When your client’s giveaways go beyond the predictable, they will been seen to set the bar and and stand out above the competition.

Images by: Alterio Felines, Pexels

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How to Elevate Your Brand with a Well-Designed Hang Tag

Providing information about a product and the brand that made it, hang tags are an everyday part of shopping. Consumers don’t think too much about what the tag means or how it affects them.

But as brand owners, we know just how much influence a hang tag has. And in truth, the colors, designs and information on a tag provide subtle, yet powerful clues that influence brand relationships, product perceptions and purchasing decisions.

Here’s how to create a powerful and eye-catching hang tag design that drives brand awareness and revenue.

The Role of Hang Tags

Hang tags are an opportunity to reach your target customer, so design them with your buyer persona in mind. Themes, design choices and color palettes should all be centered around your customers’ needs and desires. Hang tags also reflect your brand identity and reinforce your company values.

As shown in a design roundup by graphic artist Yesta Desamba, hang tags can display the same design elements as those found on the inner garment tag, button and outer garment tag. The Rare Collection is an example of a brand that achieves this goal, modifying its colors and sizes for each tag while adhering to the same logo design.

Having a creative hang tag can help you stand out from the competition. Kelly Morr at 99designs writes that packaging design serves the purpose of standing out on the shelf. For apparel brands, whose products are often hanging or folded rather than packaged, hang tags serve as one of the focal points for brand differentiation. This is another reason why it’s so important to display your logo on your hang tag.

And it’s okay to opt for a large logo on your hang tag. You want people to see and remember your brand right away, and a big, bold logo can help accomplish this.

Product Information

Regardless of design and style, a hang tag should always include details about your product. If it’s a piece of clothing, incorporating the item’s size and materials are a good place to start.

Lumi, a packaging design company for online brands, explains how these seemingly ordinary bits of information can be displayed creatively. Tobacco Road Purveyors, for instance, has a space for sizes small-2XL on its label. Once the tag is attached to a garment, the size is circled in a pen by hand. This handcrafted touch makes the tag a bit more personal.

Technology and Hang Tags

A recent trend in apparel tag design is incorporating digital environments into physical tags. According to Apparel Magazine brands may opt to incorporate shopping experiences into their hang tag design by adding a scannable code or picture. These images, when scanned by a smartphone, take a consumer to a branded web page or shopping site that encourages brand interaction. In addition to helping a brand stand out from competitors, this method also helps create a strong brand experience that customers remember.

Hang Tag Design Inspiration

When choosing imagery and design elements for your hang tag, it’s important to opt for something that reinforces your brand.

Graphic designer Cole Baldwin showcases a beer label design that takes traditional hang tag functionality to the next level. This hang tag features multiple pages, which go into detail about the beer’s history and how it was made. The brand’s colors and fonts reflect the bold and experimental nature of the homemade craft beer brand. The tag also displays fun, on-brand taglines, contact information and social media tags.

This approach would work especially well for a local or small-scale brand that has a strong story to share with customers. The design shows that your hang tag doesn’t have to be limited to a single tag. In fact, many brands are experimenting with layered pieces of paper and plastic to create more interactive tags. Graphic designer Callie Teetaert created apparel tags for We Happy Few, who sold locally made clothing. She layered multiple pieces of textured paper, evoking a rustic theme and playing up the brand’s commitment to handcrafted merchandise.

Another way to incorporate different materials into your hang tag is to consider recycled items and unwanted fabrics. Menswear boutique shop McKilroy covers its tags with cheesecloth and textured paper. The cheesecloth covers the logo, adding another layer of texture. It also makes use of a material that isn’t used all that often today — a nod to the hands-on production methods of days gone past.

Hang Tag Style

Brands can also experiment with the size and shape of their hang tags. Neat Designs shows hang tags that are circular, oval-shaped and varying sizes of rectangles. If your brand is more traditional, it makes sense to stick with a classic tag shape that your audience will find familiar. If you’re a more experimental brand and you’re trying to target young people or those who are more creative, there’s more room to play with tag size and shape.

Attaching your tag is another important consideration. What materials will you use? How will the tag connect to the garment? Catalpha explains that hang tags can be attached with anything from swift tack and zip ties to different types of string.

Beyond the Tag

The main purpose of a hang tag is to display information about a company and its product. However, that doesn’t mean the tag can’t serve a greater purpose.

Creative agency HOOK designed a tag for Grady Mac, a denim brand. This design is letterpressed and uses traditional script for a classic vibe that evokes feelings of heritage and history. The tag is versatile, serving as an envelope holding four informational cards about the brand and the product.

Another way to repurpose a hang tag is to make it double as a business card. One side can serve as a regular hang tag, with information about the product and its uses. The other side can include business card and contact information. This creates a more interesting experience when someone’s reading the tag, plus it saves money and paper on printing.

Images by: BRRT, Daiangan, itsbytespixels

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How Great Swag Turns Customers into Loyal Brand Ambassadors

Consumers are bombarded with digital advertisements and online marketing content every time they go online. These tactics have become so common that many people tend to tune them out.

If you want to transform customers into brand ambassadors, swag might be the best option for you. Even in the digital age, promotional products remain a highly effective way to target audiences and establish brand relationships. Here’s how to create memorable, modern swag that earns loyal brand ambassadors.

Consumer Expectations

There’s no debating it: consumers love free stuff. But could it be true that your customers expect you to give them something? As explained by Brains On Fire, they just might. In multiple studies, consumers said that they expected some sort of promotion or freebie in exchange for liking or following a brand. At the same time, few of the CMO’s surveyed said that they thought their customers expected something in exchange for brand engagement.

This shows that there’s still a huge market opportunity for brands to connect to their audiences by meeting their expectations through promotions. It also shows that there might not be many other brands in your industry giving away swag at random, and that there’s an opportunity to surprise customers with swag when they aren’t expecting it.

Aligning Swag with your Brand

From t-shirts to tote bags, branded swag has the ability to forge a lasting and memorable impact in the minds of consumers. But if you don’t choose the right items for your customers, you could be missing out. That’s why it’s important to make sure your swag is well aligned both with your brand and your needs.

Kristie Notto, author and host of the podcast Be Legendary, says that you can choose something that aligns with your brand’s theme. Since she’s promoting a book called Ignite Your Impact, branded lighters would be a great way to reinforce their message. Aside from aligning swag with your brand message, ThriveHive points out that swag should cater to your customers’ behaviors and fit into their lifestyles. Think about it this way: if a piece of swag is irrelevant to someone, why would they even want it? Instead, put yourself in the shoes of your customers and think what they might really want. As Corporate Specialities puts it, swag provides an opportunity to impress your customers and elevate their brand experience to the next level.

Successful Swag

Creating love for a brand can be equated to building a sports team following. Stephanie Wheeler of Boundless explains that the most successful brands build communities around their brand. Regardless of where people come from or what they do in life, they can all unite around their same love for a sports team. Similarly, brands can help cultivate this feeling by helping people unite and come together around a shared item.

So what kind of swag creates a sense of community? As pointed out in Monaica Ledell’s website Truth Hacking, the best swag is memorable, shareable and useful. When your swag achieves all of these elements, it’s much more likely to stand out in consumers’ minds and make an impression.

Memorable

Successful swag evokes emotion in the hearts and minds of consumers. To create this emotional connection, your swag should be customized. The Noise Lab suggests providing a selection of related, yet differentiated items to let customers to choose what they want. This allows you to create a conversation with people, asking them why they chose what they did. Once you open up this door to conversation, you can also ask people to share their swag on social media and spread the word to their friends. This creates a stronger experience with your brand and helps the consumer feel connected to it.

You can also tug at your customers’ heartstrings by personalizing your swag. For example, crowdSPRING suggests creating handwritten notes and messages that help customers feel important. It’s easy to send an email, but email has become such a common way to communicate that it can feel impersonal. Since people rarely take the time to write handwritten letters, doing so shows that your brand truly values that customer.

Shareable

The best swag is that which delivers immediate recognition and shareability. Caroline Ruggerio at Marketo says that wearable swag provides immediate returns because it showcases your brand to other people in the real world. Glasses, hats, socks and shirts are all easy pieces of swag that can feature your logo. Badges and patches are another way to incorporate wearability into your swag while standing out from others.

No matter what you give away, it’s important to think outside the box. How can you really wow your customers and keep them coming back for more? The Brandling says that brands can try appealing to consumers by giving away recycled and reused products rather than new ones. Since today’s consumers are more socially and environmentally conscious, they may not want to take home disposable items they’ll only use once.

For example, fair trade, eco cotton shirts printed with a fun message can be part of the perfect Instagram photo. Or, you can turn to items that promote sustainable behavior, like reusable lunch bags and water bottles. This can help you stand out from your competitors and create a social buzz around your brand, all while reinforcing your values.

Useful

According to Orange Label, “eight in 10 consumers own between one and 10 promotional products, six in 10 keep them for up to two years, and about half (53%) use a promo item at least once a week or more often.” What’s the differentiating factor between swag that’s kept, and that which is discarded? Usefulness. If your swag doesn’t provide benefits for your customer, it isn’t going to last.

Carrie Melissa Jones at Lonely Brand uses the example of Lululemon to show how a win-win strategy works. The activewear brand sends free swag to its brand ambassadors, who then wear these clothes in social media posts. Lululemon also helps these ambassadors promote free events in stores, which entices potential customers and creates strong relationships between ambassadors and the brand.

Swag and Your Bottom Line

It’s clear that swag can make people happy and excited in the short term, but can it have lasting impacts on your bottom line? When done correctly, it absolutely can.

Digital marketing and social media agency Brand & Mortar explains that giving away swag is a method of initiating reciprocity. When a brand gives away something of value to a customer, they subconsciously generate in that customer a desire to give something in return. Even when this doesn’t come in the form of an immediate purchase, people who receive swag are often more likely to follow a brand on social media, sign up for their newsletter or check their website more often. This means they’re more closely engaged with the brand, which now has more opportunities to reach this person in a sales funnel.

You can also use swag to impress new customers and transform them into loyal ambassadors. SessionCam recommends giving away free swag to users during an onboarding process, or right after they’ve made their first purchase. This sets a positive tone and makes people feel good about their decision to buy your product. You can involve your customers in raffles, giveaways and other exciting promotions that show you value their business.  

Jodi Shapiro at the Pardot blog says that swag sends a message of reliability. “You’re building a relationship with your client that goes beyond selling them a product or service they need.” As a result, your buyers will trust you and remain loyal to your brand. Instead of browsing competitors when they’re in need of a product or services, they’ll head straight to the brand they already trust.

Images by: Pexels, StockSnap, Amîlcar Vanden-Bouch

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Look Good, Do Good: Eco-Friendly Materials in Apparel Manufacturing

From guzzling up water to emitting toxic byproducts, new clothing manufacturing certainly takes a toll on the environment. And when working with eco-friendly clients, traditional clothing production methods often don’t align with their sustainability goals and business values.

Fortunately, modern innovations have allowed many apparel companies to breathe new life into materials that were previously often ignored. From plant-based materials like hemp and bamboo to those made from recycled plastic, here’s a roundup of resourceful fabric, textiles and other materials your eco-friendly clients will love.

Plant-Based Materials

Although plant-based materials aren’t recycled from other apparel items, they offer many benefits for the environment and customers’ wallets. Nadine Farag at Man Repeller writes that common plant-based materials include hemp, linen and raffia among others. Hemp, for example, is becoming an increasingly popular material due to its low ecological footprint.

Hemp

As Ministry of Hemp explains, hemp uses 50 percent less water than cotton. Plus, it doesn’t require pesticides to grow strong and ready for harvesting. Cotton, which is traditionally the most common apparel material, is a water intensive crop that also uses 25 percent of the world’s pesticides.

In addition to being better for the environment, hemp also lasts longer and provides better value to customers. Sympatico Clothing says that hemp is a durable material that withstands many washings and never requires dry cleaning. It also gets softer the more it’s worn, making it the perfect material for nearly any article of clothing.

Bamboo

Bamboo is another crop that grows tall and strong without the need for pesticides. Nomads Hemp Wear says that it also requires just a small amount of water to grow, meaning that its conserves much more water than cotton production methods.

Bamboo Fabric Store Australia adds that bamboo also has antimicrobial properties. This natural function means that bamboo clothing is a great choice for those with allergies or skin sensitivities. The added plus is that these antimicrobial properties make bamboo clothing naturally deodorizing.

Lyocell

Lyocell is a fabric that’s often made from eucalyptus trees and involves a closed-loop production process. According to Good on You, this allows the manufacturer to capture and reuse 99 percent of the chemical solution used while creating the process. This prevents it from being released into the environment and protects nearby land and water from being contaminated.

In the world of eco-friendly fabrics, lyocell is definitely a cutting-edge, revolutionary material. Simplifi Fabric says that lyocell is also 100 percent biodegradable, giving it one of the lowest ecological footprints of all fabrics available today.

When searching for lyocell online, it can often be found under the brand name Tencel. Christina Sterbenz at Business Insider explains that Tencel was first created by the Australian textile giant Lenzing. Now, it’s commonly found in athletic wear, bedding, denim and other everyday clothing pieces.

Fruit By-Products

Pinatex is a revolutionary material made entirely from waste products. Senior writer at TreeHugger Katherine Martinko explains that pinatex comes from the leftover dead leaves of pineapple trees. Pinatex isn’t just an alternative to cotton, it’s actually similar to the texture of leather. This makes it a viable cruelty-free alternative to plastic-based vegan leathers – most of which are made from plastic.

Pintex founder Carmen Hijosa says that the core value of the material is that it’s a byproduct of agriculture. “This really means that in order to have Pinatex, a textile, we don’t have to use any land, water, pesticides, fertilizers … we are actually taking a waste material and ‘upscaling’ it, meaning that we’re giving it added value.”

Another company that recycles fruit materials is Orange Fiber. Based in Italty, the company makes high-quality, sustainable fabrics from citrus juice by-products. Orange Fiber focuses on products that would otherwise be thrown away. The material is incredibly soft – perfectly suited for high fashion.

Recycled and Upcycled Materials

Luckily, recent innovations in recycling and upcycling have allowed even the most pollutive materials to be rescued from landfills and given a new life.

Textile Recovery System

Take the Recover Upcycled Textile System, for example. This is more of a system rather than a material, but it relies entirely on recycling old cotton clothing scraps from around the world. The Recover Upcycled Textile System doesn’t use any chemicals or water, but it transforms existing, resource-intensive cotton into long lasting clothing yarn.

Another benefit of this process, according to Dr. Kate Goldsworthy at the University of the Arts London, is that it doesn’t require additional dyes to create vibrant colors. “One of the most exciting innovations is in the way they can mix pantone-accurate colours like mixing paint to create new tones from waste fibres. No additional dye is needed,” she explains. Reducing the need for toxic dyes and their byproducts is yet another feature that makes this process so valuable.

Recycled Yarn and String

Yarn isn’t typically thought of when it comes to recycled apparel, but it’s another way to create sustainable apparel. Recent innovations have pushed traditional string beyond its limits, allowing fresh garments to be created from old materials.

Row and Rue cites one type of string called Bionic Yarn, which is a fabric created from ocean plastics. This yarn includes three layers, which gives it the desired stretch, durability and feel that customers desire.

Another popular eco-friendly string is jute. Offset Warehouse writes that jute relies on natural rainfall and grows without the need for fertilizers or pesticides. Jute also takes just four to six months to grow and reach the age of harvesting. This makes it a much more sustainable crop that yields high turnover.

Similar to bamboo, growing jute absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen at a faster rate than trees – far exceeding what traditional cotton manufacturing is capable of. Trusted Clothes adds that jute has excellent tensile resistance. This means it has a similar stretch to that found in polyester clothing, yet it doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.

Images by: gunter, Bruno Glätsch, Public Domain Pictures

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