Promotional Mugs from EMC

An incredibly successful and popular method of increasing brand awareness is through the use of promotional gifts such as promotional pens, promotional mouse mats or promotional mugs. What the appeal of promotional gifts is, is that, whilst a TV or online ad may be in front of a potential customer for just seconds, with the likes of promotional pens, they may be sat on ones desk, right before their eyes, for weeks if not months. Therefore, your brand is being brought to the attention of the user on a daily basis, as opposed to flashing before their eyes for just seconds on the TV or on a website.

Promotional gifts can be both a fun and effective way of advertising your brand or business which can push the status of your brand in the minds of customers in a more effective way than TV ads and the like can in a shorter period of time. At the end of the day, most people will remember a brand whose name has been sat in front of them for a month on their desk before that which they saw advertised during the adverts of their favourite soap last week.

Promotional gifts offer a cost effective way to promote your brand and EMC are able to supply almost any promotional item at brilliant prices. Please do not hesitate to contact us today for a competitive quote or to find out more about the various promotional gifts which we can supply your business to help build your brand name.

People are mad about football and will appreciate promotional gifts that reflect their passion. The promotional gifts can be generally about football, but they will be appreciated more if they are associated in some way with a particular team or club. This gives a unique opportunity for the provider of promotional gifts to target their local area because, and this might seem obvious, football teams tend to be named after the area they play in, and that is where they get most of their support (unless your team in Manchester United).

If your promotional gifts can somehow reflect your local football team then they will be noticed more and therefore promote you more. The promotional gifts tie-in with your local club might be formal and by agreement with the club and include the club’s name, badge and logo, but it might also be informal and be associated with the club just by reflecting the colours they play in. Colour association is a very strong emotional memory trigger and is often all that is needed to remind someone of their specific passion. In the case of football this is easy because every team in associated with a particular colour or combination of colours.

For your promotional gifts to easily strike a chord with your target audience you could do worse that casually associate it with your local football team.

...but now you're a pencil case.

So, advertising campaigns that focus on all things green, natural and good for the environment are the modus operandi for many companies and there is no reason why you shouldn’t be capitalising on the ‘green’ phenomenon too.

Adverts in the media that utilise a huge amount of natural, green imagery are common place as are ads that espouse the low environmental impact of certain products and services. But rather than following the trend and advertising on TV, radio and in printed media why not invest in some environmental friendly promotional gifts. We’re all well aware of the power of promotional gifts as an advertising tool that can be effectively used to promote your company, so jump on the green band wagon whilst the goings good. How about some branded notepads made from 100% recycled paper? Perhaps some printed t shirts made using organic cotton or recycled materials? Even organic sweets would make excellent promotional gifts.

Not only will these ‘green gifts’ be useful in raising the profile of your business thanks to their excellent promotional power, but they will also help to improve your company’s image, showing that you are aware of environmental issues and are willing to take a stand against climate change. The green way of thinking really is all the rage these days, so why not make the most of it whilst it lasts.

Ofcom blames confectionary adverts for childhood obesity. Others blame the parents...

Cadbury’s one of the UK’s leading manufacturers of confectionary has found a way around these stringent guidelines by placing a greater emphasis on online advertising. The company has created an ‘online activity workshop’ aimed squarely at children that they are using to promote their ‘Buttons’ line of confectionary.  The website is promoted online and on Cadbury’s packets which conveniently allows them to work around the Ofcom legislation that aims to heavily restrict products high in fat and sugar being marketed directly to children.

Naturally these restriction are hardly good for business when you’re in confectionary industry, as let’s face it, children are the main consumers of Cadbury’s products. When one of the principle forms of promotion for this industry is denied then it’s up to companies to find alternate ways to advertise.

Of course the internet is an extremely powerful promotional tool, but there are plenty of other forms of advertising to be used that are also free from restrictions put in place by Ofcom. For example, promotional gifts can be used to raise public awareness of a certain product without fear of reprisal. Cadbury’s could, theoretically supplement their online campaign with a series of free promotional gifts especially for children to bolster their marketing in light of their reduced TV presence.

Promotional Pens

ASA has removed the ad after a number of customer complaints challenging the 20Mbps claim and stated that it could not be sustained, with further customers claiming that a website will be no faster with a 20Mbps connection than it would be with BT’s existing 8Mbps connection speed.

It is often the case that ads can be banned by the ASA for displaying misleading, or false, information and this can be a huge kick in the teeth to companies who have been using the ads to secure further business. What cannot be banned, however, is traditional advertising in the form of promotional gifts such as promotional pens, promotional mugs and promotional mouse mats and whilst TV and online advertising is certainly a very important aspect of a marketing mix, companies must not forget traditional promotional gifts in an attempt to ensure that their brand is the one which sticks in the heads of customers.

He felt so strongly about the Oil spill in the Mexican Gulf that he is using oil washed up on the Gulf beaches and mixing it with ordinary printing ink to print T-shirts that exclaim their support for the clean-up by the people wearing them. The Gulf Oil T-shirts cost $20 with $5 from each sale going to charities involved in the clean-up.

While the amount of oil used for printing the T-shirts is miniscule compared to the size of the oil spill (it will not, for example, use even a small fraction of the amount of oil washed up on the beaches of the Mexican Gulf), it is more of a symbolic use of the oil to make a statement that the wearer is doing something to help clean up the mess and that they feel strongly about the situation.

This just goes to show how effective printed T-shirts can be for advertising and promotion. Someone has reacted to an issue in the news that he or she feels strongly about. They have had an idea and put it into practice to get a message across very quickly, at a low cost and to a large number of people. In the case of the Gulf Oil t-shirts they have also tapped into an issue that is very much to the forefront of the minds of the American people.

Many large corporations, who in the past have only experimented with this type of advertising, have now realised the massive potential of advertising on social networking sites and are spending a great deal of their online marketing budgets on advertising via social media. Of course, it’s alright for huge corporations with millions of pounds at their disposal to invest in large scale social media advertising campaigns, but the vast majority of smaller businesses won’t be able to invest enough cash into this type of advertising to make it worth their while.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the small business owner should abandon internet marketing as a method of promotion altogether, but it’s important to realise that a significant amount of investment is required in order for it to be effective. In the meantime it’s important to focus on advertising on a local scale, particularly for new businesses. Advertising in local media and utilising promotional gifts to raise the profile of your new business venture will soon help you to get noticed as at grassroots level. This will give you plenty of room to further expand in the future when you have a more significant advertising budget at your disposal.

Promotional Gifts

It is hard to imagine that it is only in the past few years that we have seen the emergence of the likes of Facebook and Twitter, two aspects which have dramatically changed the way in which internet marketing must be carried out.

The importance of a strong online presence will become even more vital in the future, as digital developments move forward even further and new boundaries are pushed, and it is necessary for every business to understand this and develop their marketing campaigns accordingly. The internet is a way to very quickly and effectively engage with customers but it can seem a very hard to grasp concept at first, with various methods of online marketing including Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click banner and email ad campaigns and blogging taking time to adopt.

The key, however, is to develop varied marketing campaigns and whilst there is no doubting that internet marketing is absolutely vital, it does not mean that it should replace traditional methods. For small businesses especially, promotional gifts, radio and press are still hugely important and combined with well thought out internet marketing, success is something which is very achievable.

Promotional Gifts

It is clear that there are still technological boundaries yet to be pushed and it is essential that marketing and advertising focuses on the advancements as they are released in order to use these to their advantage. Whilst 3D is fast becoming a standard for television and cinema, what marketers really need to be looking towards at this moment in time is the use of CGI to gain an advantage in the ever competitive global marketplace.

Although 3D has taken the lead in recent years, the use of CGI in advertising offers a brilliant alternative when developing campaigns. The use of CGI can be used as much in the production of adverts, TV and printed promotional gifts as it can for cinema, developing images and replicas of products and humans that are almost indistinguishable from real life. The beauty of CGI is that it is extremely flexible. Once a digital model of a product or character is created, it can be very easily be adapted for a whole host of uses including traditional advertising methods, therefore cutting production costs immensely. It enables a brilliant level of consistency to be held between print, broadcast and online marketing campaigns, and is something which we are likely to see an awful lot of in coming years.

It’s important with any advertising medium, whether it’s TV advertising, business gifts, or as in printed media, that you think carefully about whom you’re targeting and how your advert will come across to people. It’s also very important to think about where you’re advertising too, as misguided placement of ads and promotional material could cause problems. For example, marketing directly to children is a dangerous area, particularly as there has been a great deal of controversy in the press in recent years  about the aggressive nature in which children are targeted by marketers. Similarly, you must also be extremely careful about the way in which you market products intended for consumption by adults, for example cigarettes and alcohol. In the past criticism has been levelled at companies who have used advertising methods for these products that could potentially appeal to teenagers and children.

So, marketing to children should be approached with caution. But there are plenty of other advertising methods that could damage your company’s reputation. For example use of telemarketing techniques and other unsolicited forms of advertising are considered to be a real nuisance by many people, so utilising these methods could have a negative impact on your company image. In short, you need to think carefully about how the advertising methods you utilise could affect public perception of your brand.