A Promotional Items Checklist

So you've been assigned to choose promotional items for your company or organisations next marketing campaign and you don't know where to start. Browsing for promotional items online is more confusing than helpful. Even consulting with the professional assistants offered by some leading online promotional gift suppliers doesn't really help. Before you start shopping for specific promotional items, spend some time planning and you'll find that the whole process is much easier than you thought. Start with our checklists to help define your thinking.

What Are Your Key Objectives?
Every promotional campaign should start with an objective. Here's a checklist of some of the most popular promotional objectives to help you clarify your objectives.

Sales Objectives
Sales objectives are among the most popular reasons for using promotional items and promotional products. Those objectives are perhaps the most varied of any other grouping. Your intent may be to increase sales or recognition of a specific product, to entice existing customers to spend more, to increase overall sales or to increase brand recognition and awareness. Your market may be the general public, web site visitors, trade show traffic or your existing customer base, to name just a few. Each of those objectives will help shape the promotional items that you choose and the method you'll use to deliver them in the most effective and strategic way.

__ Increase sales of a specific product
__ Increase overall sales
__ Lead generation
__ Promote new product lines
__ Build brand recognition
__ Increase trade show traffic
__ Increase name recognition
__ Increase web site traffic


Promotional Objectives
While the overall objective for most marketing and promotional campaigns is to increase business on the bottom line, there are more subtle ways to do that than a typical sales promotion. Many promotional items are chosen as a means to cement relationships with customers and introduce yourself to potentially new customers. Some of those objectives include:

__ Thank good customers
__ Event and/or party gifts
__ New account gifts
__ improve customer relationships
__ Promote goodwill for company
__ Celebrate a company milestone eg anniversary
__ Community recognition / service event
__ Publicize objective/initiative


Employee / Staff Motivation
Promotional items and gifts are often used internally, either to motivate employees or to recognize their contributions to the company or organisation. In addition, there are ways to use promotional items to foster a company identity and team ethos among your employees. Some of the ways that promotional items can be used with staff and employees include favourites such as:

__ Recognize and reward service to the company
__ Motivate salespeople
__ Foster team spirit
__ Performance incentives
__ Increase staff productivity


Once you've defined your objectives, you'll find that it's easier to choose promotional items and products that fit those objectives. Your next step will be to define who you want to reach with your promotion. The next article in this series will discuss defining your influence groups.

For further information on promotional items, promotional products and business gifts check out the leading online suppliers today!

Gareth Parkin is the co-founder of Ideasbynet, the UK's leading online promotional items and promotional products company based in the north of England. Established in 2001, he has taken the UK gift market by storm by the application of modern business thinking and the latest search engine marketing techniques. For more details visit www.ideasbynet.com