Promotional products: products you can choose to give away as a creative advertising statement to enhance your company’s brand image, your event, fundraiser or trade show. These items have been proven to work effectively in creating recognition of your brand, recall of your brand and the awareness of your products and services, to name a few.
Now, once you have strategically chosen which products in which you decide to pass out, the next step is to choose an imprint for your item. You do not want to overcrowd your product with information, rather, you want to selectively choose which information you would like to highlight. Think about your marketing campaign. What information do you want to put out there that would most benefit your campaign? For example, think about how you want your customers to contact you. Do you want them to come into your place of business? If so, add your company’s address. If you want them to call you, your phone number should be printed on the product, and so on.
A quick note: you also have to think that one of the purposes of promotional items is that recipients are more apt to keep the item, rather than throw it away. If the product is not designed properly, you will lower your chances that recipients will actually keep the product and in that case, you will have wasted your marketing dollars. So, you also have to know to always think of how to make the product look appealing to your target audience.
Next, you have to think about what you have to work with. Every promotional item is different and each has it’s own “imprintable” area. The imprint area is the area in which can be imprinted with your logo, information or marketing message. Therefore, there are certain size requirements your logo must follow. For example, a pen has an imprintable area of 2″W x 5/8″, which is a smaller imprint area than a coffee mug that has an imprint area of 2.5″W x 1.75″H.
Let’s take a look at the pen to the right. If you placed your company name, logo, website, phone number and a call to action, the pen looks overcrowded and the text is too small to read. In some to most cases, the ink used to imprint on the pen will end up blurring the text.
In this instance, it would would be best to only use minimal information, especially for a pen. Take a look at the picture below with only the company name, website and phone number:
For the coffee mug, the imprint area allows for a bigger image. Some mugs allow for printing on both sides. A bigger product allows for a larger imprint area. So, you have more options when deciding which information to place on the mug. Once again, try to avoid overcrowding the product with lots of information. Just because there is a larger imprintable area, does not mean that you can stuff more information onto the product.
If you think it would benefit your campaign to add more information, such as your company name, telephone number, website and marketing message, you do not want to use one side of the mug like image pictured to the right.
In the mug pictured on the right the text ends up being too small and the mug looks stuffed with information.
To make the product look better and more appealing to your audience, take the opportunity to imprint on both sides and split up the information on the mug. In the image to the left, we chose to place our logo on one side and our marketing message with our website on the other. Do you see the difference between the mug with the imprint on one side and the mug with a two sided imprint?
In this picture, the information is spread out more and looks more clean and more sharp. If you had to choose which mug to keep in your kitchen, which would you choose?
Not only do you need to know how big of an imprint area you are allowed on a product, you also need to consider which information is best for your campaign.
Do you want to increase your website traffic? Generate more Facebook and Twitter followers? Increase phone calls to your company? Or do you want your customers to visit your place of business? Think of these questions as you decide which information is most pertinent to your campaign.
All of these factors: the product you choose, the product’s imprint area and your company’s campaign purpose, together, should help you decide how to choose an imprint for your promotional products. Remember, designing your promotional products boils down to keeping it simple and not overcrowding the product with information.
Creating Memorable Impressions For Your Brand 