The use of promotional gifts has been proven time and time again. Nobody can dispute that giving away items such as pens, key rings, calendars and similar gifts is a proven method of building and promoting a business. With the myriad of choices you have when selecting promotional gifts, it's often difficult to find what you really need, and what you know will work. The best general rule to choosing promotional gifts is to let the utility of the item be your guide.

Why utility? Simply this: items that are useful get used. It sounds too simple to be meaningful, but in fact it is this principle that makes the most inexpensive promotional gifts a goldmine of virtually free advertising and publicity.

Promotional gifts with an obvious use that people frequently have need of are the best choice, every time. Regardless of how much you want to spend per item, from a twenty pence promotional pen to an executive pen set worth more than twenty pounds, those items are successful precisely because they are useful. Giving a client or employee a wildly expensive gift is very often pointless if the gift has no practical use. Even though items such as pens are very cheap, they are also very effective.

With this simple principle in mind, it's easy to see why promotional gifts such as pens, calendars, coffee mugs and mouse mats are so popular. All of these items are used often, usually every day, or even several times a day. Even the least expensive item can be valuable in terms of the publicity it generates when the recipient of the item sees your promotional message multiple times in a single day.

Many marketing and advertising studies and statistics have shown that the more times a person sees a company brand or slogan, the more likely they are to associate that company with the product or service they offer. That, in turn, means they are more likely to purchase from that company when they need the service or product it provides. It doesn't matter where they see the advertising message?the important point is that they see it. Because of this simple fact, choosing practical promotional items that are likely to be used often is always the best choice.

There are some other important concepts to consider, of course?utility is not the only factor that counts when choosing promotional items. However, choosing a functional item should be your first step, and any other decisions should be secondary considerations.

Note that it's important to choose promotional gifts that your specific recipients will find useful. This means that if, for example, your promotional gifts are targeted to a particular group of people, you must know what types of gifts they are likely to find useful. If you're targeting your promotion to young mothers, for example, you'll be choosing gifts that are very different from those you would select if you were targeting teenagers or children. As with any promotion or advertising campaign, knowing your target audience is important, as this allows you to choose promotional items that are useful to them.