Whether you’re trying to open your own business, get more people to visit your blog, or find more clients to hire you, creating and promoting your own personal brand is integral to success. Regardless of what sort of brand you’re trying to promote, there are a number of sure-fire ways to get out there and help grow your brand. One of those methods is one you may not have originally thought of: t-shirts. Creating a custom t-shirt with your logo or other information about your brand can be an excellent way to promote your brand far and wide. But how exactly can a t-shirt help your brand? And what should you keep in mind when creating t-shirts to promote your brand?
Versatile Logos
If you haven’t already gone about the process of creating your brand, that’s the first step. While the actual process of creating your brand is somewhat involved, Marketing Donut provides a succinct list of steps you should follow. Such actions as defining and clarifying your brand and what you want out of it, keeping in mind what is driving your business, focusing on building long-term business-client relationships, and other important steps.
Why is Marketing Important?
If you’ve never dealt with business or creating a personal brand before, you may be wondering why marketing is so important. Well, in many ways marketing is the lifeblood of a business. Sure, customers are technically the actual lifeblood, but you can’t get any customers if no one knows about your business and brand. Marketing is getting the word out about your business and brand. According to the Houston Chronicle, marketing is important for a number of reasons including increasing sales, fostering an environment of healthy competition, and improving your business’ and brand’s reputation.
Reaching Out
So once you actually have your brand created, you need to get going on that marketing. Market your brand like your life depends on it, especially since your success professionally does depend on it in many ways. This is where getting your hands on branded t-shirts is very important. T-shirts are an excellent method to reach out to new potential customers and clients for multiple reasons. The Idea Boutique emphasizes on the fact that t-shirts are affordable apparel that can be considered a collectible by many people. But the important part of the shirt that pertains to your marketing efforts is the fact that they are blank slates that can have any type of message, logo, design, or branding you can think of. T-shirts allow the wearer to make a statement (if they wish) about what they believe in, where they’ve been, or what they like.
Creating t-shirts with your personal branding on them, be it design, logo, or whatever, is an excellent way to basically get free marketing in (minus the cost of creation and distribution). Whenever someone wears your shirt, they are marketing for you and your brand.
Drawing Interest
A t-shirt with a logo may not be a very active form of marketing on its own, but that’s all right. Just remember that whenever someone wears the shirt out in public, hundreds, if not thousands of people will see your logo and branding. While the majority of those people are likely to just ignore what they saw, plenty of others will have their curiosity piqued because of one reason or another. Again, not everyone who developed an interest in your brand will follow up the same; some might ask the wearer of the shirt about it, while others will just go online and see what they find. But the fact of the matter is, that shirt introduced new people to your brand. As American Express states, a branded t-shirt is an excellent conversation starter along with it turning the wearer into a walking advertisement.
Creating Your T-shirts
While you may have already worked on creating a logo or other design for your personal brand, you may need to rethink how it works when looking to get it printed on a t-shirt. You may not entirely realize it, but not all designs that look good on a computer screen or on paper will necessarily look good on a T-shirt. So whether you’re looking for a graphic designer to rework an existing design or you’re looking for someone to create a brand new one, you’ll need to make sure they are aware of your need to fit the design on a t-shirt. Using a design company like Designhill that specializes in t-shirt designs can be a good idea as well. When looking at t-shirt designs by Designhill or other companies, you can also decide on picking a prebuilt template you may want to modify, or you can work on creating an original.
Regardless of how you go about creating your t-shirts, you need to keep in mind the fact that you are using them as a marketing tool for your business and brand. So keep the design unique and memorable.