"Promotional items and corporate gifts" give business marketing an edge over other ways using offline resources. However, if you just go ahead without planning on conceptualizing first the idea of the item or gift that you want to represent your company, chances are, you will fail or yield little or no result at all. In order to prevent this from happening to your business, make sure that you at least make a plan first.
A concrete business plan will most likely be your starting point to discuss other issues which must be resolved in order to make a perfect marketing move. For example, if you have a business about baby gifts and your promotional item or corporate gift is pet-themed, then it would sound absurd to go for it while on the other hand, baby gift business will most likely be best to be promoted using promotional items and corporate gifts with the use of baby-themed, marketing item.
If you got my point, there is no reason that you will arrive at a significant result to encourage more customers and clients, In the long run, this will give your business a higher return on investment. If you don't get what you expect, there must be something somewhere that you must have missed. What you can do is to assess and make a conclusion on where your marketing move went wrong. Next time, you can be assured that everything else will go right.