Promotional gifts are gifts used by organisations to help boost their brand awareness. Typical gifts include mugs, mouse mats, umbrellas, caps, pens, bags, lanyards and notepads.
Most promotional gifts simply include the name of the brand, perhaps a website address and nothing much else. Whilst this can help maintain brand awareness, it is essentially an un-trackable activity: you don’t have much idea how effective your gifts are from a marketing perspective. Perhaps they all get thrown away.
A solution to this problem is to place QR Codes on your promotional gifts but for this to work you must also give people a reason to scan them. You may get the odd person just scanning your QR Code for fun but to generate traffic and hence engagement you need to motivate scanners.
Example promotional drinking flask
Of course you also need to track scans of the QR Codes you place on your promotional gifts too and that process is covered in detail in The Definitive Guide To QR Code Marketing.