Promotional Products Articles & Promotional Newsletters Educational

Promotional items are a proven, effective way to market your company. They offer a wide range of benefits, such as name recognition and brand building and customer and employee appreciation. However, to get maximum results from your promotional products, you must use them correctly. This means choosing items that fit your company image and your customer base or audience.

Thematic consistency is important is establishing and maintaining your company image. This concept extends to promotional items. If you're going for a hip, youthful image, then giving away leather portfolios or desk lamps to your customers could do you more harm than good. Conversely, if you're image is one of solemn strength or professionalism, you shouldn't hand out bottle-opener key chains or beer cozies. Your promotional merchandise should reinforce an existing image, and that image should be consistent with the rest of your marketing scheme.

Knowing your customer base and handing out promotional items suitable to it is equally important. Consider the age of your clients or customers, their economic status and their lifestyles. For upscale or older clients, a bikini calendar is hardly appropriate (unless your clients are exclusively male, perhaps). Golf tees don't make much sense if you're marketing to the working class. Teenagers won't appreciate briefcases or letter openers. A young mother doesn't want a box cutter or a set of darts.

Similarly, promotional gifts you intend to hand out on the street should be much different from the gifts you give away as prizes in contests or drawings. These gifts should be different, in price and quality as well as in theme, from the ones you give to your employees to show them your appreciation for a job well done, and these should be different from the gifts you present to the president of an overseas company with whom you are hoping to negotiate a business deal.

Promotional items are invaluable marketing tools, but only if they're used correctly. To keep these tools working hardest for you, always select them with an eye to company image and to the intended recipient.