Getting Noticed

Getting your products out to your public and getting them noticed requires a few clever ideas. But it all depends on who your audience is.

If you are after the public, rather than businesses, then you have an excellent opportunity coming up! Shortly the Christmas season arrives and with it Christmas Fairs, Christmas Parades and the likes.

So here's what you do. Get a load of cheap products ready made. The Promotional Bug from 17p each or Promotional Fridge Magnets from only 26p each are a couple of good ideas. Then go to the fairs or mingle in the crowds at the parades or Christmas Light switch on and just distribute your gifts to the children.

They'll take your products home with them and their parents are sure to see whatever they were given.

A sure fire way of distributing your promotional gifts - and making the kids happy!

Promotional Cameras

Another popular item for this time of year are the Promotional Cameras. If you are organising a Christmas party or other event, then sort out a batch of cameras and leave them on the tables for your guests to use.

If you are getting married, have at least enough cameras for one camera per table and ask your guests to take photos throughout the reception. Gather up the cameras at the end and then you have a memento of what the day was like from your guests' point of view. Not being official photos, these can be a lot more relaxed and playful!

A good choice of camera is the 35mm Promotional Camera. All the features of a basic camera, including lens cover, from only £2.55 per unit. An order of 100 would only be around £275.

Promotional Ice Scrapers

Promotional pens and diaries seem to be the thing of the moment, but whereas both are useful promotional tools, don't forget that there is also a huge range of other gifts to suit all price ranges.

Very seasonal at the moment - or at least will be by the time orders are through in a few weeks, are Promotional Ice Scrapers.

Cheapest for small quantities is the Billboard Ice Scrapper, with it's huge printing area and around £150 for 250 units. A massive area for printing allows for any logo or picture you want to be added to the unit, along with phone numbers etc. Just look at the sample on the page.

The basic Ice Scrapper also features a rubber squeegee - ideal for the perfectionist. It's flat and can be printed both sides - a massive area for your messages! We also have the Elite Ice Scrapper - your traditionally shaped ice scrapper for those cold winter mornings!

Designing To Suit Your Promotional Materials

Your promotional message or logo might not be the first thing on your mind when you are deciding what products to use. You might already have decided that just putting your logo onto the items with a quick line or two is enough. But stop right there.

Consider the printable shape of the item. What's going to work best on it? Is it square, rectangular or circular?


A promotional golf ball, for example, is best printed with a circular pattern. It could be printed with a square print, but the proportions would be wrong.

Take care when planning your promotional ideas and make sure that you get the best results every time.

Using Your Items

What's the best way to use your investment of promotional gifts?

No matter what you buy to give away, you must first think about what sort of people are likely to be receiving the items and how you are distribution them.

A friend is buying a load of pens to send out with quotations. A little bit of a gimmick, but they won't add anything to the cost of the postage and are quite cheap to buy anyway.

Consider what happens when a quote is sent out. It probably ends up in a pile of other quotes ready to be compared. At the last minute, the potential customer realises they still haven't looked through the quotes and decides quickly on one of them. Maybe not looking at the best service or best cost, maybe more just a random gut feeling on the service provider.

Now if she is the one that provided the pen that the potential customer has carried about and used, that pen has made the name become more familiar. That could be what caused the gut instinct.

Give a little extra - you might be surprised at the results!

Promoting For Bridal Suppliers

If you work serving in a distinct market, such as bridal supplies, then it’s likely that there are a group of local retailers that could work together to promote each other.

One idea that I've knocked about with, but not yet put into action, is to get 9 or 12 bridal suppliers together for 1 promotional item. These would all be offering different services, e.g. Wedding Dresses, Ladies' Wear, Gents' Wear, cake suppliers, photographers, wedding cars, florist, beauty, reception venue, stationary etc.

Find a group of 12 different suppliers, including yourself, get a logo and contact details off each of them and put together a promotional item. For example, a Promotional Mouse Mat, or a Promotional Puzzle Tray, or a Promotional Pen And Paper Set.

Have 100 of these printed for each of you in the group – with each on having all of the logos on it. If there are 12 of you working together, (that's only about £55 - £88 each for the range listed above), yet your items along with your contact details will be distributed to 1200 potential customers.

If all of you are passing the items to every potential new customer that visits your shop of you meet at bridal fairs, then you are going to get a very good coverage in the local area. And with these sorts of items people aren't going to continue to take them once they already have one, so you can be fairly certain that your name will be spread far and wide, for under £90!

More Ideas For Distributing Promotional Items

Another time a lot of people will gather is for races – both running and bike races. A lot of races like to provide souvenirs, but it's usually down to sponsors to provide these items to protect the cost of the entry fees.

A popular item with running is always the Promotional Cotton T-Shirt. From £1.20 each, these can easily be distributed to all finishers, with marshals and helpers being given the surplus.

Put the name of the race, the date and your logo onto the t-shirt and pass to the organisers to distribute at the finish. Being a runner, I can recommend SMALL logos rather than the typical huge logo on a t-shirt. These are more likely to be kept and worn. Coloured t-shirts go down even better.

One local race likes to give the children in their race Promotional Badges instead of t-shirts. I know my daughter has kept her collection of these, so they can be kept for ages.

Another local race gives out Promotional Mugs and these are really popular with the runners. They usually get a mention on the forums after the race as they are so much more popular then t-shirts. But for a small race (under 500) they can be a lot more expensive than t-shirts.

Using Your Promotional Items

So you want to encourage more customers your way, you've decided to run a campaign of promotional items, but what are you going to do to get them noticed?

There are many ideas and ways to distribute your gifts to people and make sure that they are noticed. It all comes down to 1 basic question – “Where are my target audience today?”

If there is a trade show coming up then the answer is simply at least a month before the trade show, get a load of gifts printed up and pass them out there. But what if this is not the case or you want more exposure?

Consider when and where your customers are likely to meet up. For example, are your customers likely to play golf? There’s lot of different demographic groups that meet up on the golf course – young professionals out to do business to early retired gentlemen. From youths hitting their first few balls to the not so early retired in their golf buggies, if you get my meaning!!!

A little research and you can easily find out which sort of people are playing at local clubs. Find one that has plenty of players in your target audience and then find out when the club next has a match on. Offer to provide some gifts for the match, say provide a few dozen Promotional Golf Balls to the players, or try a couple of thousand Promotional Golf Tees and arrange for all players in the competition to receive some when they pick up their score-card. 2,500 tees would only cost around £125 – and that would last quite a few matches!

If you are feeling more adventurous, for a cost of around £150 you could offer to provide a gift of 50 Promotional Golf Sets. These could be used as prizes over several competitions and in this way hopefully the clubs would leave the items on display before the matches started.

Promotional Post-It Note Paper

Promotional Post-It Note Paper seems a very popular item - there are always a lot of searches for this kind of item.

There's a good range to choose from, starting with the Basic Promotional Post-It Note Paper, which starts at only 57p per pad of 50 sheets. These have plenty of space for a logo or message, and customers will always keep them somewhere handy to use.

If you prefer something more eye catching, then look at the range of shaped promotional post-it notes from only 72p for a block of 50 sheets. There's a choice of shapes and colours for your logo to be printed onto.

Or if you want to look really fancy, go for the top of the range Promotional Post-It Note Organiser. 75 post-it markers and 25 post-it notes in a card cover. Follow the link for more details, but this fantastic item starts at only 83p each.

There's also a good range of other post-it note products available. From design your own shape to interlocking pades.

Promotional Stopwatches

Here's an interesting item that we've had some interest in overnight, a Promotional Stopwatch.

A nifty little gift, from only £4.60 each, with clock and alarm in built and neck strap.

Slightly cheaper is the Promotional Stopwatch and Step Counter, which (as it says on the 'tin'), also counts steps and has a lap timer, from only £3.45.

Either of these gadgets would be great if you are promoting to or within sports clubs. Give them to swimming coaches, running coaches, football coaches, school sports teacher etc and your logo is always around their neck.

If you are a fitness club trying to encourage your members to walk more, then just he basic Promotional Pedometer from £1.59 each would provide an incentive to get out and walk, whilst reminding them of you!

Promotional Pen Torches

Another sign that the nights are drawing in as people as searching for Promotional Pen Torches! There's a few great little tools on offer if you are in that situation.

First, there's the Pen Torch. From only 99p each, and still only £1.10 if you only want the minimum order, an excellent little tool.

This one is popular in Pharmaceutical industries, but we've also seen enquiries for youth clubs.

The Roll Top Promotional Torch is cheaper still, from only 89p each. It has a good rectangular printing area and with a keyring attachment makes it excellent for many uses.

Promotional Printed Diaries

We're obviously fast approaching the end of the year as people are searching for Promotional Diaries.

A standard little promotional tool, which if you get in quickly before other people have handed out diaries can be quite useful. Your recipients will soon add their list of contacts and future appointments to the diary and then it's carried around all year, along with your message.

There is quite a range in prices on Printed Diaries. The Strata Week To View Diary costs from £1.15 each for orders of 250 and even if you only want 50 they are £2.09 each.

At the other end of the range is the really impressive Sorento Quarto Desk Diary. This excellent desk diary, with cream pages world maps and a ribbon marker, starts out at £5.82 per unit, but is a really impressive gift that your recipients will want to leave on show all year.

Promotional Lanyards

With the winter fast approaching the skiing season is about to start and customers have started to look for Promotional Skiing Lanyards. If you are going to a trade exhibition where your customers could be passing you by without looking, these can be a great giveaway at this time of year to make them stop and pick up a gift.

Even if they walk straight away from you they will have your name and logo around their neck for their annual skiing holiday. And broken bones aside what better time to be associated with someone - on an annual holiday!

The ski pass holders start from only 44p per unit and even if you only need 500, they are still only 59p each.

Order yours now - Ski Pass Lanyard have a standard 3 week lead time, so don't leave it to late!

Encouraging Customers To Look At Your Gift Items

What else can be done to ensure that potential customers pick up & take home you promotional items? You want them to - that's why you have had them printed. It's no good spending hundreds of pounds on promotional material if the target audience aren't interested in the items.

With the Printed Mouse Mats what I suggested to the customer is that he passed me pictures of several of his main speakers along with their signatures and we'd have a grid of speakers printed.

This would be an excellent souvenir of the night out and I can easily imagine plenty of people picking them up and taking them home. It's not hard to imagine several of them taking the mouse mats into work the next day to use there - to show off about the speakers they saw the night before.

In this case there's a good chance that work colleagues will also see the promotional goods - and there's a chance that at some point in the future one of them would want to arrange a night and remember the mouse mat.

That's the way these goods can work. Sounds a bit if and maybe, but when you are talking about thousands of mouse mats being sent out, there's a good chance of many things happening.

Selecting Your Printing

You've got a few ideas about what sort of promotional gifts you are going to use, but what are you going to print on them?

Your logo is the obvious answer, or a corporate message. But is that best?

It depends how you are distributing the gift items and what message you want to get across.

One customer of mine wants to buy 1000 promotional items that he will leave on tables at dinners he arranges using sporting celebrity speakers. He knows that a pen with his logo on is not an encouragement enough for the attendees to pick up his gift - most would be ignored.

Instead, I've suggested that he buys Promotional Mouse Mats or Promotional Puzzle Trays. Neither is that expensive - from 54p each for the Puzzle Trays. And what I've suggested he does is to print onto whichever he chooses to use a picture of the speaker and a signature and just leave a small space for his logo / website address.

This means that the puzzle becomes a souvenir of the evening, instead of a promotional piece, and it has far more value to the people attending. Even if it's only to take home for the kids when he's feeling guilty about going home worse for drink!

Promotional Keyrings

I like to base these entries on what people are currently searching for on our site. It ensures that the posts are current - and helps me to quickly find relevant items!!! Yes, I'm very lazy.

Most recently (6 minutes ago) was metal bottle opener promotional keyrings. An interesting little search!

No doubt they will have found items such as the Keyring Bottle Opener. From £2.10 for 500, not the cheapest. But for £230 for 100, a good gift.

Of course, the important thing is getting the audience right. Give them to a bunch of people who will find them useful and they might well just carry them with them all of the time, spreading the word of your business. Give them to people who never have cause to open a bottle, and they will be finding themselves heading towards the bin.

Targeting is important - but so is the graphic. In a day or two I'll talk about that.

Promotional Games

If you are looking for something different, take a look at the range of Promotional Games on offer.

Some of these are very cheap - under 50p per unit, even on small orders. For example there's the Glossy Yo Yo at 49p each for orders of 500, reducing to 43p each as order sizes increase.

Remember the old number squares puzzles where you move the numbers 1 to 8 around a grid to get them back in order? Well now you can have your logo printed onto one of those toys and customers can concentrate on your logo as they rearrange the pieces. What a great way of getting people studying your logo!

Or how about a frisbee, whistle or rattle? Again, these toys are all very cheap and suitable for mass distribution.

For even more toy ideas, see our Printed Toys page.

Promotional Mugs

Promotional Mugs are a great way to get a message across. It doesn't even need to be your corporate logo.

If you are introducing a company saying, ethos or way of thinking and want to remind your staff of this on a regular basis, get it printed onto some Cambridge Promotional Mugs. These start off from only £1.41 each (when ordering 504) and you can then fill your canteen with them.

Every cup of coffee your staff drink reminds them of your corporate way of thinking!

Promotional Umbrellas

Unfortunately, with a summer like the one that's just been, Promotional Umbrellas have probably been well in use and possibly wearing out!

If you want your Umbrellas Printed with your company logo, message or id, then take a look at the vast range available. From massive golf umbrellas to tiny fold away telescopic umbrellas that fit in a bag.

And how to use them? Well, if you have a sales force on the road then provide them each with a brolly to keep them dry between car and customer.

If your customers are visiting you and there is an outdoor area, have a stock of umbrellas positioned so that they can find them.

If you are arranging a day at the races or a Christmas event, then your staff would appreciate brollies if the day is wet.

Let your imagination fly!

Flamenco Promotional Pens

Buying a printed pen is always a good start for a promotional idea, but which one should you choose?

Well the Flamenco Ball Pen is always a popular choice, with a lot of people searching for it. From only 11p each for 5000+ units, it really is suitable for mass distribution (and even 1000+ units cost only 14p each). With these prices you really can have a load printed and distribute them freely to your target audience.

They are a simple traditional shaped ball pen and can be left where your potential audience may pick them up. Or if you are running a mass mailing, these could be just what you need to insert into the envelope to ensure the recipient opens it and reads what is inside.

Give us a call or visit our website and we'll see what we can do for you.

Promotional Printed Mousemats

A Promotional Mousemat is an excellent tool with many marketing uses. The Brite Mat is cheap and excellent for use with an optical mouse.

From only 88p per unit, when ordering 500 or more, it's well worth looking at what else you can use it for.

The most obvious use would be just to get a batch printed and hand them out to customers. But here's a lot better way to use some Printed Mousemats.

Simply get together with a few similar businesses - but not any that compete with you. Say 8 or 10, including yourself, but from 4 will easily do. Then design a mousemat that includes all of your logos and get 100 printed each.

Now, every time that you or one of the other businesses hands out a mat, it becomes a potential advert for all of you.