Companies use promotional pens all the time to promote new products, events or simply their brand. They can be given to other companies or the public as advertising, or to your own staff. However, if you have never had promotional pens made before it can be a little bit tricky to get the project off the ground. If you are a small company with limited resources it might be difficult to find a printing company who can give you a good enough price. You should try to look at buying these pens as an investment, and remember that you will be doing it regularly for a long time. With this in mind it is a good idea to shop around for providers first.

The first thing you will need to do is decide how much your budget allows for promotional pens. You need to work this down to a price per pen, as this is how you will usually be quoted. If you cannot go above $1 per pen, try to find the best looking pens for this amount. A dollar can buy you fairly decent pens if you look around before deciding. Choose colors according to what goes best with your logo, and make sure that you try out a sample first so that you can see if the pen feels good to write with.

The next thing you need to do is produce a Corel Draw file which has been converted to Curves so that it can be manipulated by the company making your promotional pens. You will probably also need a PDF file for a reference, as well as a JPEG or GIF image of your logo or the design you would like to have printed on your pens. A lot of providers will require this, so if you or anyone at your company do not have the skills to produce this file hire someone to do it for you. Some providers will offer to work with you to design your logo, but they might charge you a lot more than a freelance graphic designer.

Go for quality, rather than quantity when choosing your promotional pens. If you can buy 10,000 really cheap pens or only 1,000 good pens, rather go for the higher quality pens. The reason for this is that people receive pens all the time, and only keep the ones that they like to use. The rest will end up in the kids? pencil bags at school, leant to a co-worker or in the trash. Rather impress a few people than fail to make an impact with thousands.

Distributing your promotional pens is not something you should do yourself. Rather hire a company who specializes in handing out promotional items, or get some kids you know who are looking to make some pocket money. Handing out free samples to the public normally pays around $15-25 per hour, so this should not stretch your marketing budget too far if you are only distributing for a day or two.