subject: How Promotional Pens Can Serve As Inexpensive Advertising [print this page] For most types of business, advertising is the mainstay means of producing awareness about their products and services among people who might otherwise not hear about them, and it can take a wide variety of forms. In addition to well-placed billboards, or advertising spots in newspapers or radio stations, promotional pens can serve as a particularly cost-effective means of spreading brand awareness.
Using pens as a means of advertising is extremely simple. There are companies that will print and colour pen bodies to whatever specifications are needed, and can fill orders ranging from just a handful of pens to thousands. Of course, it's also possible to purchase large quantities of pens with blank bodies, which might be a cheaper option if a company has the tools and equipment to print their logo on the pen themselves. Pens ordered in bulk are extremely inexpensive, and can be had for as little as a few pence a piece.
One of the biggest advantages of using promotional pens is permanence. When a company purchases an advertising spot through traditional mediums, what's actually happening is the ad space is merely being rented for a set amount of time. Billboards get changed out every few months, and radio advertising requires the target audience to just happen to be listening to that station at that moment to be effective.
If company representatives give away pens that bear their company's phone number or logo, those pens tend to stick around offices, or households for more extended periods of time. The number of people that might use them, and stand to have the company's name stick in their head is potentially higher, and that fact alone can more than make up for the extremely low cost of producing pens with promotional materials on them.
When it comes to the distribution of marketing pens, companies have a lot of options. They're small and light enough to be mailed along with sales catalogues, or other packages. They can also be handed out in bulk to nearby point-of-sale retail outlets, who can then be instructed to offer them for free to customers.
Of course, it could be argued that other forms of business promotion offer a more immediate effect. Advertising using office supplies offers no way to target who sees the company's information, and is really a scatter-shot method of promoting awareness. Media allows advertisers to target their material to specific qualities that they recognise in the audiences of particular television channels, or radio stations. In this way, they're much more likely to provoke a response. This is doubly true since the target audience is typically paying full attention to a television program when the commercials start playing. Pens, on the other hand, are merely a tool, and usually only garner attention from people as the means to an end.
For almost any marketing effort, it's important to match the intended goal of the campaign with the chosen medium, and assess how likely it is that the company that is being advertised is going to get a positive response that can justify the expense of distributing the materials. Considering the low cost of acquiring large numbers of pens, and the ease with which they can be passed out to the public, using them as a means of marketing is a fairly risk-free venture.
