Marketing Goals

An effective marketing campaign is crucial to the success of your business. Promotional products make it simple to promote your business efficiently and effectively. Learn basic marketing tips on selecting promotional products that fit your business goals, imprint ideas, and how to use promotional products to drive sales and maximize brand recognition. National Pen has gained a respectful reputation in aiding businesses large and small from every industry in creating a successful corporate marketing campaign. Review our promotional marketing tips to take full advantage of the marketing opportunities available through personalized promotional products.

Identify Your Promotional Marketing Goals

In order for any marketing program to be successful, it must have goals to measure against. Create obtainable goals within your business and have a way to track your successes. Whether you want to increase sales, create brand recognition, or drive leads, creating goals will help identify the best way to use promotional products for your marketing campaign.

Budget, Schedule, and Plan Your Marketing Strategy

Identify key marketing opportunities throughout the year in which you can use promotional products to drive sales, generate new leads, or create brand awareness. For each of these events, identify who your target audience is and what type of budget you would need to obtain your marketing goals. Visit our marketing tips for ideas on how to easily and effectively promote your business with promotional products.

Choosing Promotional Products that Fit Your Business

Thousands of promotional products exist, from the commonly known pens, mugs, calendars, t-shirts, and key chains, to ones you might not have even thought of, such as candy wrappers, tools, coasters, or sports equipment. Along with each selection of promotional products also exists choice of colors or design at various quantities and pricing. Using your marketing plan, you should be able to easily choose products that will fit your identified marketing opportunities whether it is a tradeshow or a special occasion as well as how many products you need and how much you can afford to spend per item. Choose products that are appropriate for your industry as well as something your audience would enjoy. Meld your selected promotional product with your imprinted message/logo and a powerful marketing tool will be in your hands.

Imprinting Your Promotional Message and Logo

The most important items to convey in your promotional message are who you are, best way to contact you, and a call-to-action. When a promotional product is received by your customers or prospects, you want your name to stand out right away so they remember who you are. Add your logo and/or company name to create brand awareness. Always include a means of contact either with an address, phone number, email address, or website. Lastly, create a tagline or special offer to remind customers of what services your company provides. Incorporate all of these items to create a strong promotional product for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

Artwork Glossary

Industry Terms

Ad Copy:
Lettering imprinted on any item. Usually an advertiser's name, sales message, trademark or slogan.

Artwork:
Any non-typeset drawing, photo, illustration or lettering in an ad.

Bleed:
When an illustration runs all the way to the edges of the page or sheet after it's trimmed.

Boldface:
A heavy typeface used for titles or emphasis.

Camera-ready Art:
Any drawing, photo, illustration or lettering suitable for photographic reproduction.

Color Separations:
The separation of multi-colored original art by camera or laser-scan techniques to produce individual separated colors. There are four common separations: yellow, magenta, cyan and black.

Continuous Tone Art:
Photograph, painting or other piece of art in which black & white tones gradually merge into one another.

Crop:
To eliminate a portion of a picture, illustration or photograph that contains unnecessary material or to highlight a certain area of the image.

DPI:
Dots per inch. Sometimes expressed as pixels per inch. For bitmap images, the number of individual elements of color information per inch.

EPS File:
EPS stands for "Encapsulated Postscript", which is a sophisticated file format for capturing precise image and text information. Because of the mathematical basis for building the format, EPS files are the most reliable method for communicating artwork.

Font:
Used to describe a complete typeset from a particular typeface. Examples include Helvetica, Times New Roman, Arial, etc.

Four-color Process:
A printing process that creates color productions by overprinting screens that individually prints reds, yellows, blues and black. All colors can be represented as a combination of these four.

GIF File:
A type of bitmap image file that Branders.com supports for artwork upload. Files of this type have a .gif suffix.

Halftone:
An image produced by breaking the subject into small dots of varying intensities of gray ranging from white to black.

Illustrator by Adobe:
Adobe?Illustrator?is industry standard illustration software that creates graphically rich artwork for print or the Web. It provides powerful and flexible tools for PostScript?

Italic:
In type, letter forms that slope to the right.

Kern:
To add or delete space between pairs of adjacent characters. Also known as letterspacing.

Line Art:
Black and white illustration of reproduction quality.

Overrun:
The number of products in excess of the number originally ordered.

Pantone Matching System (PMS):
A color scale used to precisely match colors for printing. Each color has a coded number indicating instructions for mixing inks to achieve it.

Sans-serif Type:
A type style without cross strokes at the end of the main strokes.

Serif Type:
Any typeface with letters having a cross stroke at the end of the main stroke.

Spot Color:
A single consistent color used throughout an area.

Supplier:
A company that offers for sale, usually through distributors, Promotional Products it manufacturers or imprints according to buyer specifications. Also known as a manufacturer. (Note: In Canada, a supplier of Promotional Products is known as a distributor).

TIFF File:
Stands for Tagged Image File Format. This is another bitmap file format that is supported for Artwork Upload.

Typeface:
A general term used to describe the styles of lettering available in typesetting. See also FONTS.

Under Run:
The number of products less than what was originally ordered.

Decorating Terms

Branding:
A hot die imprint usually burned into leather or wood.

Deboss:
Machine presses a die into the surface of the material, resulting in a depressed imprint.

Deboss with Colorfill:
Combination of the Deboss and color, deboss then filled.

Decal:
Artwork is produced on a transparent decal, then applied to product.

Die Struck:
A reverse die is made of the imprint, then machine struck onto the metal surface. Die struck pieces are predominantly metal (lapel pins, etc.) and may be color filled.

Emboss:
Machine presses a die into the surface of the material, resulting in a depressed area around the imprint desired. Imprint appears to be raised.

Embroidery:
Logo is digitized into a "tape". Machine reads tape to stitch logo onto surface of product. Usually includes up to 5 colors of threads in one logo. Pricing is based on stitch count. Embroidery cannot be PMS Matched.

Etch and Engraving:
Methods for transferring a design to hard, smooth material such as glass.

Foil Stamp:
(see Hotstamp)

Four Color Process:
Photo-quality full color image is created by laying 4 colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) on top of each other.

Hotstamp with Foil:
Heat is used to leave a foil imprint of the design on the surface. Available in a variety of colors but can only be implemented in a single color for the entire design.

Laser Engraving:
Logo is digitized then lasered into hard surfaces such as wood, metal or glass.

Offset Printing:
Is a process of transferring ink from a metal printing plate to a rubber-covered cylinder. Used on more complex artwork and for higher quantity runs.

Pad Print:
Used on oddly shaped products and surfaces. Only one color can be imprinted.

Silkscreen:
Ink is pressed thru a fine screen leaving a flat, painted imprint on the surface of the material.

Sublimation:
Is a heat transfer method of imprint using heat-activated dyes that "sublimate" into the fabric; becoming part of the fabric, not an imprint sitting on top of the fabric.

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