Promotional Gifts for Direct Marketing

So you have your minimum order of 500, 1000 or more promotional pens. This is where if you get it wrong it will become an expensive exercise.

Depending on your target market for your business, there are many different ways of finding your public. If you have a shop or restaurant you might like to just simply pass out the pens to existing customers so that they remember you for next time. But this isn’t attracting much new custom.

Standing on the street corner handing out pens might be a useful way for a community website to be announced, but for a business a lot of the printed pens will be being passed to people who just aren’t going to be your future customers.

Look for shared customers

The answer is surprisingly simple – look in your area for another business with a similar customer base and ask them if they would be happy to pass out your pens to their existing customers whilst the customers are visiting the shop. Offer to do the same back or refer customers to them and suddenly you are both sharing a powerful marketing tool.

Obviously, this is not going to work for competing businesses, but a logo designer, website designer, printers, solicitors and accountants might work well together as could a car electricals with a car parts supplier or service station and a hotel could distribute for local tourist attractions.

Get your pens out in bulk

Swapping with other businesses to promote each other, whilst helping each other and making your customers pleased at getting a freebie might be highly targeted, but it could be a little slow. So what do you do if you have a website with general appeal and want to get it known quickly?

How about sponsoring an event, or at least providing prizes? Look for a local race and ask them if they are giving out goodie bags. If so, how many and would they like pens to put in each bag? Or go to a local school, dance school etc and offer them pens to give out as part of their prizes at prize day.

Whatever you do, do it

Whatever your imagination dreams up distribute your pens, just make sure that you do something. There’s no point having 5,000 promotional pens sitting in boxes on your desk. Even if you just go around your existing customer base and give them each a dozen pens and ask them to pass them onto their friends who might be interested in your services, do something to make sure that the pens work for you!

Learn more about junk silver price and why many people got crazy about this stuff lately.

Have you ever considered how to cut down your marketing costs? Have you been thinking about not sending promotional gifts this year? What a mistake that could be!

Most people when looking at promotional gifts think about promotional pens, diaries and the likes. These are fine and easy to distribute, but usually have only enough printing space for your message. With the current financial situation you need to be thinking beyond the obvious. How can you make your promotional gifts work for you, before you send them?

Most promotional items work along the lines of reminding your recipients of you so they are more likely to come back to you next year or more likely to refer you to their contacts. Fine, but how can you put a figure on this return when business everywhere is struggling? If it important to use the expensive promotional Parker Pen to see the success?

Quite simply, get paid to distribute your own promotional products. Not a huge amount, just enough to cover the production and distribution costs. Don’t be greedy and people will be pleased to work with you.

The way to do this is to sell advertising space on your products. So here I’m not talking promotional items with small print areas, I’m talking larger, but still cheap, items with plenty of print space.

Clothing is fine to litter with plenty of other logos if you are giving the items out at an event and calendars can cost that little bit more, so personally mouse mats are my favourite here. It’s amazingly simple to arrange. Across the top of the mousemat put your logo and contact details then split the remainder of the mat into 2. Most of the remaining space is used to display a calendar or photos of your products.

Then the remainder of the space is available for a few adverts or a list of recommended other suppliers. This space is sufficient to hold several logos or a dozen or more website addresses. Depending which you choose, charge a small amount per advert space and fill it up with adverts. The more mats you are producing the better it is for the advertisers – the more your advert is being seen. You can even give them one when they are produced so they feel they have got something for their cash!

But, why would people want to advertise on your mousemats? Well, it works on different levels. First, you know the recipients and they are your customers. Therefore, they will see these adverts not as adverts, but as referrals. Also, because they are your customers, you know something about them. For example, a web designer might know they are sending the mousemats to small businesses. Therefore accountants, printers and the likes might be of interest as well to their customers.

This is the special knowledge that makes this idea work – you know what your average customer is interested in – so think about what other businesses might also want to target your customers. This is a good example, but there are more low cost Internet marketing strategies to implement.

The good old promotional pen can be used as a powerful advertising tool. There are many varieties about and you will see and use them all of the time. From giveaways, to left on shop counters and well positioned in hotel rooms, they are hammering their message down our throats all of the time.

Whilst relatively cheap and easy to source, with just a little imagination soon everyone will know about your business. And that’s just for starters! Here’s our 3 golden rules for promotional pens.

Golden rule 1 – Don’t be put off by cold callers trying to sell you expensive pens!

At first glance promotional pens that are printed with your company logo, name or contact details can seem quite expensive when you are approached by a sales person. If a company offering to supply you with printed promotional pens has already spoken to you, the prices quoted are usually quite high. But remember that they are leaving room to offer you a “discount” and are also probably offering you a high end product, knowing that if you are unsure they can then try to sell you a lower priced alternative. With just a quick bit of shopping around you can produce something that’s much cheaper.

There is a good range of inexpensive options.

Plenty of charities, surveys and the likes are happy to give out free pens whenever they send out their mailings to encourage people to open the envelopes and complete the forms enclosed. These are usually the cheapest pens on the market and could be a good place to start from. Costing just a few pennies each, which includes having your details printed on the pen, with only a little imagination they can be great for getting your details over to the buying public.

Obviously, if you are advertising an expensive end product, then the basic stick ball pen might not be quite the right image for you, but you can quickly find better looking pens, including the familiar promotional Parker Pen, without having to spend a small fortune.

But why use promotional pens?

Giving out business cards and flyers might seem a good idea, but how many just get thrown out with the rubbish straight away or squashed into a pocket? With a pen it is something useful – it’s something that the recipient is more likely to want to keep and then every time they see or use the pen they will be reminded of your business. A marketing tool is only good for as long as it is on the person’s mind – by giving them something they want to keep, it’s on their mind a lot longer.

Now you just have to work out how you are going to distribute the pens!

Learn other low cost Internet marketing strategies that work.