Best Practices for Leveraging Brand Rewards in Promotions
While there are a lot of ways to run a promotion, utilizing brand rewards offers an easy, efficient, and flexible option that drives sales and builds your brand while making your customers feel special and appreciated.
Plus, utilizing brand rewards in promotions doesn’t require a discount on your product or service. You’re adding value for the consumer without cheapening your brand. It’s truly a win-win.
Consider the following when choosing a partner for brand rewards.
What are the best criteria for choosing a reward or gift card?
Whether you call it a brand reward, gift card, electronic reward, or corporate gift card, we must consider five critical elements when creating a prize or prize pool: the purpose of the promotion, accessibility, target relevance, brand association, and brand recognition.
Why are you doing a promotion?
While developing a promotion to drive sales and build your brand is the main priority, it’s wise to think about overarching objectives.
Are you introducing something new? A new service? A new product? A new attitude? Whatever the reason, it should be the first thing on your list to figure out before you just go and pick a brand or brand to include. If you’ve been operating in the US but are expanding globally and want to make some noise—what brands would help?
Perhaps you’re changing lanes. Maybe you need to rebuild your reputation. Or you’re proud of who you are and how far you’ve come and want to promote it because you’re awesome. Whatever the goal, you should look at the brands that can help you accomplish it in the mind of your target audience.
Why is target relevance so critical to success?
Brand selection is key because the brands you partner with reflect on your company.
For example, brands like Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo have obvious similarities—but they create an opportunity for a brand like Axe body spray to play a role since it’s relatable to the target. You might even choose to include all of them to maximize the reach of your promotion while making it unique.
You know your audience. With all the data at our fingertips today, you know exactly how to reach them. But, for whatever reason, some companies come up with offers that make no sense and sometimes fly in the face of what they are trying to do.
It’s crucial to think about your target, brand, and goals to ensure the reward pool you offer makes sense in the big picture. This consideration is one of the reasons NeoCurrency’s catalog has thousands of brands to choose from, from the big ones you’d expect to some very targeted ones unique to us.
How important is brand association in a promotion?
Brand association is an essential element in developing a promotion.
If your company is about simplicity, the brands you partner with in your promotion must reflect this. If they don’t, you run the risk of confusing or even alienating your audience. Plus, explaining why you associate with a particular brand can make messaging difficult.
Choosing a brand because it’s cool, popular, or something else doesn’t make sense if it doesn’t match your company’s DNA (unless you are looking to change your DNA or the perception of your brand).
Picking brands that don’t fit may work against you and could have the opposite effect on your goal.
Is it better to partner with well-recognized brands?
Partnering with well-recognized brands can offer some significant benefits, but there can also be some drawbacks.
The more well-known a brand is, the more likely people are to want to get a reward or gift card from it. However, it can be costly to work with. It comes with a long list of mandates that can be challenging to navigate, especially regarding logo usage, creative guidelines, and approval processes.
On the other hand, lesser-known brands typically offer better savings or some other incentive to entice you to partner with them. If no one’s heard of them, their brand may not help drive the sales you’re targeting.
Yet, there may still be benefits. If a brand aims to use your name to its advantage, it’s valuable to consider what you can gain from the negotiation, especially in terms of who covers the costs.
Is accessibility important when choosing a promotional partner?
Accessibility to easily redeem a prize is vital when using brand rewards as a promotional incentive. After all, the biggest reason gift cards and digital rewards work is because they’re so easy to use by the people who receive them.
NeoCurrency’s vast selection of brand rewards is overflowing with companies that are easily accessible online or in-store, making it easier for everyone to redeem their prize rather than let it waste away on a nightstand.
How can NeoCurrency help you drive sales and build your brand?
One of the benefits of working with NeoCurrency to help develop your next promotion is we’ve done a lot of the heavy lifting for you already.
Rewards planning
Many brands don’t get involved with promotions that offer corporate gift cards or virtual rewards simply because it seems difficult. People think it’s expensive, there are too many layers to work through, and so on. It can be all those things, but that’s why we’re here; we simplify the entire reward process. We’ve negotiated everything—even creative challenges.
Prize pools
We have many different ways to run a promotion with brand rewards. You may want to create something strategically focused on one brand. So, you can offer various levels of rewards for that brand. Or, you could create a broader prize pool, which our experts can help you develop based on your goals and objectives, whether it’s a local, regional, or global effort.
Marketing strategy
There are also different ways to motivate customers. You might want to leverage an instant win element to build your promotion. We help with this! Or, maybe you want to keep them engaged for longer by developing a sweepstakes option where they can enter numerous times. We help with this, too!
Fast and simple bulk gift cards
Our wholesale pricing is fixed with no hidden fees. You can manage everything from our reward dashboard, which makes everything straightforward and intuitive, or you can simply integrate it with our single gift card API.
Partner with NeoCurrency on your next promotion.
NeoCurrency’s global catalog of over 2000 brands provides plenty of opportunities for you to run a successful promotion, regardless of your goals. We’ve been doing this for a long time and would love to put our experience to work for you.
Request a demo to get all the details about how we’ll help you develop and execute your next promotion by leveraging an extensive variety of brand rewards.