Are you thinking about buying some promotional items to market your business but just don't know really how to go about it? Have no fear. This article is going to describe all of the ins and outs of buying promotional pens and for the sake of clarity, let's use promotional pens as the point of reference.



There are 5 steps to buying quality promotional pens: 1) setting your goal(s), 2) identify and stratify who you want to give the pens to ? target market, 3) determining whether your budget is large enough for your market stratification, 4) selecting the promotional pens, and 5) ensuring quality. Each of these seem pretty simply and they are but, you can read a little more about each one in the next few paragraphs.

Step 1 ? setting your goal(s). It seems that many businesses go into buying promotional items with little thought or planning. This is fine, if you have an unlimited budget for marketing and you do not have to show that your marketing was effective. Most businesses do not have unlimited budgets and the money spent on marketing and promotion, needs to do SOMETHING.

The SOMETHING is the goal you set for your marketing. Maybe your financial status indicates you are behind in sales from the same time the previous year so, you set a marketing goal to increase sales to last years? level. A goal can also be to increase revenues from the previous year or quarter. Your goal can be anything you want. You need one though to tell if your promotional pen giveaway was successful.

Step 2 ? identify and stratify your target market. This is a critical step because 95 year old men are not interested in the same things as 30 year old men. So, it is important that you take your customer files and divide customers into categories. The categories can be whatever you want but, a sample of a category is related to money spent such as: one time purchaser, loyal customer, high dollar spender. You could also set your category related to money spent and age. The categories are limitless.

Step 3 - determine whether your budget is large enough for your market stratification. Now that you have all of your customers divided into categories, you might want to consider selecting a different promotional pen for each category. The high dollar spenders are not going to be excited about a $3 pen while the one time purchaser might be really OK with it. To decide how to distribute your budget, put a dollar figure with each level in your category until they total your budget. Give the highest group the most money and then work down through the other levels.

Step 4 ? selecting the promotional pens. Given the figures you have estimated for each level of customer, look for promotional pens within that budget range. If you find you can not give high enough quality to pens to the highest group, with the money you budgeted that category, then think about either going through and lowering the other categories. Another option is to decide to only target one or two of the levels at this time and pick up the other level when the marketing budget has been replenished.

Step 5 - ensuring quality. The promotional pens you giveaway will be a reflection of your business integrity so - you want to buy the highest quality pen your budget will allow. Giving away fewer pens is better than giving away more and looking like quality is not important to you.