Over the past few years, it has become increasingly essential for businesses to rethink their traditional sales and marketing methods and redefine them in line with the current market – taking the modern buyer’s behavior into account. This includes looking into what attracts, motivates, and triggers their actions, and finally, working on effective methods (conventional and unconventional – such as using gifts for marketing) to mitigate loss and stand out in the currently highly saturated market.
Big data, social media, and purpose-driven branding are moving the field of marketing forward, resulting in a shift in how businesses communicate their offers and how potential buyers consume such communication. Since the 1900s, when the term ‘marketing’ made its rounds as a descriptive of the activities, actions, and results in the then much more traditional buying and selling markets, and later refined by Philip Kotler, the father of modern marketing, we’ve experienced a total evolution of the notions and accompanying practices.
Traditional marketing was often seller-centered and predominantly concerned with internal objectives instead of external expectations. But access to information, the increase in the emergence of alternative industries, and the increase in the number of more niche and smaller vendors resulted in a shift of authority. Suppliers/suppliers can no longer rely on internal agendas to design marketing strategies. Instead, the buyer’s power means that they choose who to patronize, how much value their relationship with said provider holds, how often they’ll patronize, and whether or not to remain loyal to said vendor.
Corporate gifting continues to gain prominence as a preferred marketing, sales and retention tool across the globe – to such an extent that an entire industry focussing solely on corporate gifting has emerged. Having turned in about $242 billion in 2021, the corporate gifting industry is expected to grow at an accelerated 8.1% CAGR through 2024.
In this blog, we identify a few issues marketers deal with when opting for marketing tactics, highlight a few aspects where corporate gifting can be utilized as a catalyst, and highlight Giftsenda solutions that are perfect for marketers. Shall we?!
5 Common Marketing Challenges
Finding the right tools: Marketing tools are constantly evolving, and so are buyer expectations. As cross-vertical markets continue to expand, marketers often find it difficult to vet and select marketing tools and tactics to keep them ahead of the competition, retain the brand/product top of buyers’ minds, and ultimately, convert leads into actual patrons. Instead of sticking to their traditional marketing methods, marketers ought to conduct research on successful competitors’ approaches, well-critiqued marketing enablement software, and platforms, and collect customer-focused data that highlight preferred communication tactics. Corporate gifting platforms provide marketers with a toolset to add a new level of personalization to their campaigns, resulting in increased conversion rates and higher clients retention rates. As with any platform, there are various options and aspects to consider when deciding which one is best for your business. If you need help deciding which platform is best for your business – this blog might help!
Generating leads: With the inability to find the most cost-effective and result-brewing marketing tools often comes the inability to effectively communicate a brand’s offers. In this situation, eligible leads aren’t correctly identified nor effectively led down the sales funnel, resulting in an inactive sales funnel, and poor ROI. To mitigate such occurrences, marketers should make sure they have the tools to accurately do research to understand what messaging resonates with modern buyers, what tactics they’re most accepting of, and what motivates action.
Budget constraints: This plays an enormous role in a marketing team’s inability to fully explore their chosen marketing avenues. This shortage in funds often stems from little to no returns on previous marketing campaigns, internal financial shuffles, problems with the sales approach, or leadership changes, to mention a few. To overcome such issues, marketers need to establish their value by adopting ‘proven to be effective’ marketing strategies. Tracking and reporting on their performance using the following indicators might help to determine these:
- Customer acquisition costs: This metric communicates how much it costs to acquire new patrons. With this information readily available, marketers can motivate their budget requirements.
- Customer lifetime value: This metric highlights the average income a customer will inject into a business during the lifespan of their relationship with them.
- Conversion rates: These metrics tell the business how effective its marketing tactics are, and how many buy-ins it acquired.
- The return on investment: This metric communicates how much revenue a company will receive for every dollar spent on marketing. Good news is that if you use a corporate gifting platform such as Giftsenda, all your gift activities are tracked to enable you to determine the ROI of your campaigns.
Retaining customers: Customer retention is an essential goal for marketing teams, and this is because it’s more cost-effective than acquiring new customers. Low customer retention rates can increase a company’s advertising costs by a large margin.
Businesses should invest in effective retention strategies to guarantee sustainable profit margins. Making small investments can help your customers feel valued and may increase your average customer lifetime. These can include: adopting regular communication efforts via your preferred comms channels, running brand awareness and retargeting ads, corporate gifting campaigns, and implementing bundle deals and loyalty discounts.
In today’s digital-first world, enhancing your marketing messages for clarity, engagement, and accessibility is crucial. Leveraging advanced tools like AI-generated videos can transform text-based marketing communications into dynamic videos, making them more engaging and memorable. Furthermore, by adding subtitles to your videos, you ensure that your message is accessible to a broader audience, including non-native speakers and the hearing impaired. Additionally, using an automatic subtitle generator can save time and effort, enabling you to focus on crafting the perfect message for your marketing gifts and campaigns.
Moving into new markets: This is probably the most notable challenge marketers deal with because expansion often requires reworked strategies, a focus on product education (in cases where the market is unaware of the solution), refined patron personas, and an increase in budget. When moving into new markets and exploring wider audience pools, it’s important to understand cultural nuances, make sense of preferences, and marketing messaging consumption. This way, necessary adjustments can be made in order to help personalize offers. If you are considering adding gifting to your international marketing strategy, you need to make sure that the gifts are locally sourced and culturally appropriate – so that you can make the right impression on your recipients. Giftsenda can help you do this with ease, by allowing recipients to choose their own gifts from locally sourced gift collections.
Using Corporate Gifting As A Marketing Tactic
In a recent survey, 46% of ABM professionals stated that personalization at scale toward target accounts is a big challenge. By using a gift-first approach to personalize your marketing efforts at strategic points of the funnel, you can improve your ROI and lead conversion rates. What’s more, personalized account-based gifting campaigns can help develop and maintain comprehensive account profiles and target personas, in addition to improving the quality of those leads. Our corporate gifting platform enables marketing professionals to customize gifts and messages to provide them with the best results – internationally.
Free Choice Gift Links
Get more webinars and event attendants, find more marketing-qualified leads, and create customer retention campaigns by using our Free Choice Gift Links. Send gift invites that allow your recipients to choose their own gifts from a selection of gifts based on your budget. You can also create specific gift collections from which your recipients can choose their gifts in the required locations, internationally. These can be sent via email or shareable gift links, and without the need for actual home addresses. This way, a sense of formality is preserved, and recipients can decide where these are to be delivered.
One-Time Gifting Projects
Do you need help creating a corporate gift campaign for a one-time project? Take the manual work out of gifting and utilize our gifting platform to save time and money while sending gifts across the world. Whether you are creating a client onboarding campaign to celebrate new business relationships or just need help with gifts for your webinar, the Giftsenda platform has all the tools you need to launch effective international corporate gifting campaigns.
Lead Nurturing for Account-Based Marketing
Use gifts as door openers and break through the noise. Make a lasting impression on potential new clients or hot leads by inviting them to a meeting or online event with a gift. Giving first shows you value their time and take your relationship seriously, making it more likely for them to invest the time into listening to your sales pitch.
Up-Sell & Retain Clients
Make sure your clients know you value their business. Plan campaigns to introduce new products to existing clients or check in with them to keep them interested. Once-off buyers don’t always equate to returning buyers, so make sure to always work toward winning them over!
Using Giftsenda To Launch Corporate Gift Campaigns
Our gifting platform provides ultimate access to a wide variety of specially curated gifts in more than 200 countries, coupled with intuitive automation tools and CRM integrations. No matter how entry-level or executive your marketing campaigns are, you no longer need to spend hours on end looking for the perfect corporate gift items, sourcing addresses for delivery purposes, and managing the delivery processes. The Giftsenda platform takes the admin out of launching well-curated gifting campaigns and allows you to spend time on what matters, your ROI-raising and retention strategies.
Ready to get started with corporate gifting on a global scale? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how our gifting platform works , or contact us for more information.
