Promotional Products Marketing Statistics from PPAI Expo 2014

We took the pulse of the distributor audience at the PPAI Expo this year and we’ve compiled some very interesting promotional products marketing statistics. At OutboundEngine, we do the email marketing and social media work for thousands of distributors. We were curious to learn about what other distributors find challenging about promoting their businesses, so we asked people who stopped at our booth to take a quick survey.

What we set out to learn is what the biggest pain points are among distributors when it comes to email marketing and social media. We also wanted to learn just how many distributors were in fact using email, social, or both. Below, you can check out the entire survey results but here are some of the most interesting things we learned from distributors this year at the PPAI Expo 2014:

• 99% of attendees are currently doing some form of marketing for their business, with 66% of them spending up to 4 hours/week on it.

• An overwhelming 91% of distributors do some form of email marketing, citing that finding the time to do it (35%) was their biggest challenge.

• Of the attendees surveyed, 71% of distributors currently use social media as a way to market their business.

• By far, Facebook (36%) was the most used social network, followed closely by Twitter and LinkedIn, both tied at 20%.

• When asked about challenges distributors face with using social for their business, 41% said time to do it was at the top of their list, followed by figuring out what to post to their followers (29%).

• By far the most compelling takeaway we learned this year is that 96% of distributors would rather have someone else do their email and social media marketing for them.

To summarize, distributors are using email marketing heavily as tool to help marketing their business. Not too far behind email, they’re also using social media as well. And with both of these channels being used for marketing, the #1 challenge cited for both was the lack of time to do it. Lastly, it’s important to note that the majority of distributors would rather not have to hassle with marketing and would like it if someone else did it for them.

[wpx_bannerize random=”1″ numbers=”1″ category=”promo_bottom_ads”]