A great marketing strategy is to distribute free promotional t-shirts to your customers and partners, as well as through any networking events or trade shows that your company may attend. The recipients feel like they are getting a free gift and you are effectively hiring a number of walking billboards.

That sounds like the ideal situation, but there is one major hurdle that you must first overcome. Convincing people to take a free shirt is not the problem; it’s convincing them to wear that shirt on a regular basis. After all, that shirt isn’t doing much advertising if it spends its lifetime in the back of a closet or in the bottom of a drawer.

In this way, it pays to spend some time with a creative team to decide on the t-shirt’s design. A shirt that has nothing but the company logo emblazoned across the chest will likely not be worn by too many people. The shirt from MarketLeverage, for example, has “I’m blogging this” written on it. That’s unique. In like manner, a shirt from OCZ Technology says that “SSD killed the HDD star” with some great graphics to boot.

It’s important to keep branding in mind, but too much branding can turn someone off from wearing your shirt in the first place. You want your company name or logo on there somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be the primary focus of the shirt.