The Value of Promotional Products

When working on your marketing plan, do you consider just the cost of your program or do you also consider the value of it. For instance, you sell a product or service. How do you get that out to market? Through trade shows? TV or print advertising? Networking? Promotional Products? What's the value of each of these? What is your return on investment for each of these? TV and print advertising lasts as long as the commercial airs or until your throw away the newspaper or magazine. Networking? How long does someone really keep your business card, or even if they keep it, how often do they look at it? Here's the value of promotional products. Choosing the right product for your audience can have lasting value for weeks, months and years. They can be used in conjunction with events where you market your services. Next time you go out in public, look at how many people are wearing a tee shirt advertising something, how many men are wearing a golf shirt with a corporate logo on it? How many backpacks or computer cases are branded? They are everywhere! If you're considering a promotional product to give to clients, rather than just give someone a pen (and the right pen is a good gift!) consider these things. Giving something that is useful will typically give you continued face time with the recipient and something they will appreciate. Give something they will remember. If you're giving chocolate, give them the best piece of chococlate they have ever had. Make your marketing dollars an investment, not an expense.

USB Drive Standards and Quality

In the promotional products industry, there are about 3-4,000 suppliers who can logo anything from a pen to a refrigerator and just about anything in between. So I was recently doing research for a client for some usb drives. Because they wanted a small number, I contacted 3 different suppliers who each had a 5 star rating (the highest) and the prices were just about the same. In the distant past I had shied away from selling them because I wasn't educated enough with the quality or guarantee or pretty much anything else about them except that I knew you could store data and transfer data using them. Here's what I've discovered over the past year or two. USB drive technology is a commodity and prices are usually set every week by the factories that make them for that week. And as I read in a recent article, you get what you pay for. There are no standards to supervise the quality. Manufacturer ID is very important when buying them as it's just about the only identifying quality standard. USB drives usually have a failure rate between 2-10% on a straight duplication of information. USB drives purchased from a top tier supplier have a failure rate of .1%. Big difference! In the article, the writer stated he was duplicating drives for a top end car manufacturer and discovered a 30% failure rate. He went back and reran the 70% that had passed on the first run and came up with another 30% failure rate - in the end, most of them were bad. So, if you're in the market for usb drives, it's important to know the brand and that it's from a top tier manufacturer. Be sure that the company you purchase from is going to guarantee the product. Sometimes the quality of the logo product you give to a client or prospect can reflect on the quality of your company.

A New Leaf

I've not written as frequently as promised or as frequently as I would like because I get writers block sometimes. Really, how interesting is it for you to read about promotional products all the time? Right. So, my goal is to write more frequently and I will write about promotional products but also about life and the joy of it - and whatever else strikes my fancy. Hope you will continue to tune in.