Advertising business gifts can be a significant expense for your company. Like most advertising, it can be difficult to determine a bottom line return on your investment. With advertising business gifts, it can be especially difficult to measure their true worth to your company, since a great deal of the value comes from intangibles like increased customer loyalty and heightened brand awareness. Here are some considerations and figures that may help you determine the relative cost-per-value ratio of your marketing campaign using advertising business gifts.

When you purchase advertising in a magazine, online or on the television, one of the determinants of pricing is how many times your advertisement will be viewed and by how many people. You pay far less per column inch in a low circulation newspaper than in the Daily News with a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. When determining the relative value of advertising business gifts, you can use the same logic. Simply estimate how many times your logo or message will be seen and by how many people, and then divide it into the cost of the item. For instance:

Custom-Printed Promotional T-shirts

Promotional t-shirts are one of those advertising business gifts that offer high visibility. Assume that a promotional t-shirt costs you ?3.49 and lasts about 18 months. During that time, the shirt is worn 3 times per month, and seen by an average of 50 people each time it is worn. That's 150 impressions per month for your message, or about 2,700 impressions over the life of the t-shirt. The cost per impression is about .0013p, and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is 1.2p. Of course, that doesn't take into account the value of endorsement ? every time one of your customers wears their t-shirt, they are endorsing your product as well as publicizing it.

Promotional Car Stickers

Car stickers are a popular, low cost way to advertise your business, and make great advertising business gifts for businesses like pubs, clubs and spas. Suppose you spend ?0.29 per car sticker and the life of the sticker is about one year. During that year, the sticker is seen every time the car is driven on the highways and streets. Assume an average of 30 people per day view the sticker. That works out to about 900 impressions per month, or over 10,000 vies per year. The estimated CPM of your bumper sticker is ?0.02. In other words, it cost you tuppence to put your name in front of 1,000 people.

You can work out the mathematics on other advertising business gifts yourself. Of course, you'll also need to take into account such things as targeted market ? a coffee mug that is used in an office where most people will need to buy your product at some point gives you a more targeted market than a car sticker that is seen by hundreds of people who will never have a use for your product. Once you start working out the numbers, though, you'll find that using advertising business gifts as part of a marketing campaign is cost effective and just plain effective.