3 College Promotional Items to Consider Utilizing

College promotional items can considerably boost your school’s reputation and recognition amongst prospective students. Around three-quarters of promotional product recipients quickly recall who gave them an item—meaning the next time they scrawl with your pen or sip from your mug, your institution will be on their minds.

However, college promotional products aren’t simply handed out during high school visits and university fairs. Interested individuals can browse your collection online, request preferred items, and even purchase others that catch their eye.

If you’re not already leveraging digital solutions to drive enrollment, highlight your promotional products, and increase community engagement, you’re missing out on a massive segment of potential students. Consider the following best promotional items for colleges and how to optimize your online collection for maximum interest and interaction.

Why promotional items matter for colleges

Before a future student even attends classes, there’s a high chance they’ll have already purchased a piece of spirit wear. T-shirts, sweaters, and other apparel emblazoned with university logos constitute a $4.6 billion-a-year industry.

But for many students, enrolling in college is already a costly process, and the added expense of a new shirt from every school they’re considering simply isn’t in the budget.

Handing out spirit wear and similar branded college merchandise can:

• Build a loyal base of prospective students keenly interested in your school
• Offer free street-level advertising for your institution and brand
• Increase enthusiasm and the sense of community on campus when everyone’s wearing your home colors

Post-graduation pride and promotion

Promotional gear doesn’t just engage prospective students but alumni as well. A full 75% of graduates hold pride in attending their alma mater, while an almost equivalent amount would strongly recommend it to future students.

Try reaching out to alumni and encouraging them to relive their glory days with a shirt, cup, or plushie. Proud, engaged alumni are ambassadors for your brand and can help sway future students to choose your school.

However, alumni aren’t in high schools, job fairs, or the other places your recruiters tend to operate. Therefore, reaching them involves building a robust, interactive, and engaging online catalog that highlights the unique excellence of your promotional products.

3 college promotional items you should consider

Alright, you’ve sat through our introductory class on the importance of college promotional items. Now you’re probably wondering: What items deliver the most impact when engaging individuals interested in your institution?

Certain promotional products perform better than others, but remember that presentation—such as with interactive PDFs—matters as much as the item when appealing to your audience.

Pens

While digital writing devices become increasingly popular, 41% of people still write by hand daily, and a further 31% do it several times a week. For students who constantly scrawl notes and complete homework, an extra pen is an essential, invaluable part of their everyday lives.

Pens are also extremely effective as promotional items as:

• They’re supremely cost-effective—producible and distributable en masse
• They’re practical, and your recipients will think of you every time they write
• People tend to carry and keep them for a long while—meaning a single pen can build your brand’s reputation for years to come

Pens are prime candidates for interactive PDFs, as you can easily include a link to request a free one in seconds. Pens are inexpensive and always needed—so they present a huge potential for returns on investment (ROI) whenever you hand one out.

Shirts

As mentioned, university apparel is a huge market, with schools constantly competing for that prime front-of-chest advertising space. Since shirts offer free exposure everywhere the wearer goes, it’s no surprise that they’re the most common promotional item for brands to hand out.

Shirts also meld seamlessly into interactive PDFs, as you can embed videos to highlight their quality, cut, sizing, design, color, and more. Then, your audience can hop directly to the order page with full confidence their shirt will fit perfectly and elevate their style.

Portable chargers

When it comes to universally useful and desired promotional products, no item enjoys more favor among student bodies than portable chargers. Over half of college attendees ranked them among their top two choices for promotional items, and that figure will likely rise as we increase our reliance on technology.

Embed high-quality images of all their colors and features inside an interactive PDF, and allow your audience to quickly flip through different designs to find the one that best suits their tastes.

How digital tools enhance the presentation of college promotional items

Recruiters previously handed prospective students most of their promotional items, hoping they’d remember when completing applications. Nowadays, most advertising happens online, and colleges must adjust to this new promotional paradigm to keep pace.

Luckily, modern digital tools make distributing promotional items and inciting buzz about your school easier than ever. With an interactive PDF-based digital catalog, you can:

• Improve user experiences: Potential students can browse through all the promotional items you offer with a few quick clicks. This saves the uncertainty and awkwardness of making split-second, in-person decisions when a busy recruiter engages multiple students at once.
• Embed images, videos, and links: Not only do images and videos better represent your products, but they’re more engaging and pleasing for your audience. Nearly 90% of consumers want to see more videos from brands. Meet your audience’s demands by shooting high-quality videos and pictures of all your promotional products and linking viewers to pages where they can get their own.
• Facilitate cross-device compatibility: Smartphones, tablets, computers, smart TVs—students browse on more devices than ever. Thankfully, PDFs maintain compatibility with nearly all of them—making an interactive PDF-based site perfect for reaching the broadest possible audience.

An online catalog doesn’t only boost the appeal of your promotional items; it’s an essential component of your school’s digital advertising strategy.

Benefits of a digital promotional strategy

Digital promotion is the here-and-now of college recruiting, and schools must leverage online tools to reach more prospective students. Developing a savvy, informed digital promotion strategy helps your institution:

• Facilitate distribution: Whether you’re sharing breaking campus news through email, social media, or your website or distributing promotional products to your audience, a robust online presence makes it far easier to reach your base and reinforce key aspects of your brand.
• Reduce costs: Bulky, costly printed materials such as newspapers, pamphlets, and brochures likely end up in the trash anyway. Posting information online reduces your reliance on paper mediums—benefiting your bottom line and the environment.
• Steer its operations: Online mediums offer real-time feedback about user engagement and other key metrics of promotional success. This information helps you tweak advertising strategies to increase appeal and resonate more profoundly with your audience. For instance, if your audience overwhelmingly seeks deals and freebies, you can run more custom college giveaways in which users compete to win personalized branded swag.

When it comes to college promotional items, the top way to increase your reach and appeal is to leverage a digital medium such as FLIPpages to build a central catalog that showcases your goods.

Use FLIPpages to present your promotional products to the world

College promotional items keep your school at the forefront of prospective students’ minds, build your reputation, and offer free advertising for years. Leveraging an online medium to present your products in the most appealing, accessible way possible is essential to reaching students in our modern, digital world.

FLIPpages helps you create interactive PDF catalogs that highlight your promotional items in all their glory. With the ability to embed videos, pictures, and links while working from aesthetically pleasing, easy-to-customize templates, FLIPpages is the simple, effective way to capture your audience’s attention and promote your school.

Visit FLIPpages for your 14-day free trial—future students are waiting to find you.