Simple, Effective Advertising Strategy: Use Promotional Products

You are working alone on this one, flipping through magazines or stock photo books to jump-start your thinking. Stock photo books give you something visual to think against. Magazines, too, are filled with inspirational editorial design. You went to a newsstand and picked some foreign publications. You are thinking of ways to help you get outside the walls of your own head, and give you a starting point that’s more interesting than a blank screen.

This is one of the scenarios many entrepreneurs go through when they sit down to think of ways to promote their small business. But it happens that on some leaner days ‘how-to-promote-my-business’ ideas are elusive. Somehow, an ad copy in a local newspaper or a quick text posting in business portals online is commonly ignored.  Ah, advertising, like literature and cinema, operates on a mere handful of story lines, retold in hundreds of new ways.  Which one will you use? 

Spend a day observing.  The idea is around you.  It’s near you.  This idea may turn out to be better than you think. Here lies your opportunity barometer that’s may be out of whack.          

What is written on your pen? How about promotional products? Yes, those caps and calendars, pins and paper weights, mugs and mouse pads, sticky notes and note pads, bags and briefcases and vacuum flask.

Promotional products are physical rendering of what are considered to be pretty, useful things.  Think of what people are using, or enjoy using – on a daily, more common basis.  This is where promotional products can help.  They’re a tangible reminder that your product exist.  They’re fun to look at and use, and those charming little things, are relatively inexpensive, too.

Also known as promotional gifts, tailored items, advertising products, events souvenir, corporate gifts or corporate giveaways, promotional products are given free as gift – now that’s a clever way of telling them about your business.  As you must, place the brand, your company, your logo, contact telephone number, website address and a neat slogan prominently in the promotional item, beautifully embossed, if you may insist.   

Promotional products can give you a jump start.  A simple key chain can uncover your brand.  In fact, they reveal a great deal about your product or service. The brand will now exist in the minds and hearts of your market, your potential customers.  They will come to know your brand that, maybe, they’ve just overlooked before. 

With more and more businesses realizing the marketing value and advertising effectiveness of promotional products, the demand for items like customized pens and personalized key chains are ever on the rise.    

Think of promotional product appropriate for your type of product: USB drives, FM Radios, MP3 players, alarm clocks and calendar combo, trinkets and blings, too.

But don’t fix on those blings, yet.  You may want to get a second opinion.  Everybody wants to have his or her idea validated by someone else.  But be careful about wagging it all round your circle in search of approval.  Pick a couple of people whose opinions you trust and show it to them.  They’ll give you a look on it, and may have comments to make it better.

Have we got it simple for you?