Promote Yourself
 By B.J. Addington

Are you using promotional items? Promotional products, also known as ad specialties, are items imprinted with a logo or slogan to be distributed to promote a company, organization, product, service or event.

T-shirts, mugs, pens and key tags are examples. Nearly anything can be imprinted. The Advertising Specialty Institute identifies more than 750,000 promotional products. Advertisers spent $16.9 billion on promotional products in 2004, more than on cable TV advertising or Internet advertising.

Promotional items fall into two categories: those that appear to serve only the person giving them away, and those with obvious value to the recipient.

It’s important to understand the difference and the trade-offs. For the price of one useful item such as a coffee mug bearing your company name, you can probably buy dozens if not hundreds of the self-serving promotional items like envelope stickers for your mailings.

Be mindful, however, that the self-serving, less useful items may not be around very long, which means your message may not have time to be effective. The more costly useful items, like ballpoint pens and T-shirts, can be ever-present reminders of your business when they bear your company name and contact information. They are like having small billboard ads wherever the items end up.

The purely self-serving variety of promotional items are not without value, however. They inexpensively get your name and message before your target market, albeit usually only briefly.

Because they are less costly and you can afford many more of them, you can get many more exposures, which is key when it comes to advertising. In this category are items like embossed seals announcing a company anniversary. Such items can literally cost only pennies each, so you can use them generously in mailings, on marketing collateral and even on product packaging.

An embossed seal bearing the message, “1985 to 2005 Our 20th Year in Business” conveys stability and reliability. Repeated in successive mailings, such a message has a strong subliminal effect. Announcement cards, mailing labels and thank-you cards are other types of these promotional items.

The other promotional category includes items with intrinsic value to the person receiving them. Calendars, ballpoint pens, coffee mugs, specially imprinted Post-it® Notes and other useful items are examples. These items cost more, usually a dollar or more each, and sometimes considerably more. But if they are high quality (pens that don’t run dry immediately and calendars with attractive artwork), the odds are they will hang around longer than the envelope bearing your company embossed seal.

Manufacturers and distributors of ad specialties are as close as the Yellow Pages. Many ad specialties can be ordered directly online. For example Branders.com, www.branders.com, bills itself as, “the world’s largest seller of promotional items,” with a range of products like tote bags, paperweights and travel clocks.

The wide variety makes it difficult to know what item is best to promote your business. But that decision should have more to do with your target market than the promotional item.

When choosing an ad specialty, evaluate your target market. If you sell to people in the car all day, like traveling salesmen, calendars probably are a waste. But if your target works at a desk, staplers and ballpoint pens are useful.

If you don’t have frequent contact with your target market by mail, it’s probably unwise to invest in embossed stickers announcing your 20th anniversary, since you won’t have many exposures before the sticker is outdated. On the other hand, if you have repeated contact by mail, the cumulative effect of seeing that sticker on the outside of your envelope and on the invoice inside reinforces the message of reliability and stability.

As in all marketing, it boils down to matching your efforts with your target market’s behavior and preferences.


(Posted November 2005)

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