Before starting a promotional product advertising campaign, you will need to consider several points. What are your goals with this campaign? Do you want to simply gain brand awareness, drum up business leads, or promote word of mouth advertising? Are you looking to impress potential clients or earn the loyalty of current ones? Do you have a system in place to track the effectiveness of your promotional gifts?

You can't just jump into the promo gifts pool – things need to be thought out carefully or it will take far too long to see a return on your investment. The last thing you want to be doing is wasting your time, so make sure that you sit down with your advertising team and go over every last detail. You will also need to come up with a plan on distributing your promotional gifts – while you can just throw them out of a speeding car, why not plan ahead and get the most focused marketing you can buy.

While there are plenty of tried and true promotional gifts, if you want to make a lasting first impression, you might want to try to stand out from the crowd. This could take some time and research by first finding out what your competitors are doing. Then you have a few choices – you can either do it better than them, or you can throw a curve ball and do something completely outside the box. Either way, just make sure that your business sticks out more in your customer's mind than your competition's business.

You don't want to fall into the trap of going too over the top, however. That could give the impression that you either don't take things seriously, or you are too extravagant for most people to deal with. Unless you are in a business that thrives on those two aspects, it wouldn't be a good idea to give off that impression.

A few promotional gifts that are very flexible in customization include: promotional key rings, promotional shirts and other apparel, promotional usb drives, promotional gift baskets, promotional pens, promotional mouse pads, promotional flash lights, promotional umbrellas, promotional cameras, promotional mugs, and so on. If you really want to make something special, you could also think up an entirely original promotional product and get it made. That is probably not something your competition would do, nor would they expect it. Could you imagine the first impression that a unique promo item would make? Now that's thinking out of the box.

Promotional gifts can bring you unprecedented business. On the whole, they are more effective than 90% of other advertising efforts, so if you can work some sort of promotional items into your game plan, you should really make the effort to do so. Just ensure that your marketing dept. has a good tracking system in place, or else you are going to be reaching into the darkness to figure out exactly what gifts have produced what results. That's the last thing you want to happen.