Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Promotional Items - Your Best Marketing Partner

By Alexander Calvin

You can indulge in a promotional marketing endeavor for a wide variety of reasons...introducing new products, offering new services, thanking your customers for their support, and even to the extent of motivating your own employees for their dedication. You can even use promotional items to reinforce a direct mailer campaign, building customer loyalty, enhancing brand awareness at a tradeshow, etc. Tradeshows and seminars are the best locations for distributing promotional items as a tool for highlighting your company amidst the wide range of competitors. Audiences at a tradeshow are always fascinated by free gifts, and a well planned and well designed promotional item can well serve your purpose.

Once you've decided to purchase corporate gifts, the next step is deciding what type to choose. Many factors may be considered including your industry, your location, your clientele, or your marketing purpose. The most important determinant should be usability. Usable items will get used. Period. If it has no usable function, it will likely be tossed aside and your marketing dollars will be wasted.

You may want to think about distributing promotional pens, likely the most widely used promotional item today. They come in a variety of styles and materials, some with flashlights, some with other catchy features. Just make sure you buy the best pens that your budget will allow. You don't want to be remembered as the company that suppied the cheap pens that ran out of ink after a week.

If you are planning to make your promotional marketing endeavor more innovative, you may consider delivering promotional mouse mats. Not as common as promotional pens, mouse mats too can serve as an excellent tool for brand awareness. In fact, promotional mouse mats have a number of advantages over pens. First, mouse mats are bigger enough to display your marketing message in a much more visible way than a pen. Secondly, mouse mats are more target oriented than pens. You can distribute promotional pens to everyone but not mouse mats. Your customers will even prefer to have a mouse mat to promotional pens, which they already have in plenty.

Whichever promotional gift you choose do distribute, make sure it is pertinent and appropriate for the clients you are giving it to. Not everyone can use a mouse mat, so be aware of that, unless virtually all of your audience operates computers. The whole concept of giving promotional merchandise is to say thank you to your customers. If you give them something that is useless, your money will have been wasted. - 16651

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