How to Use Advertising Specialties to Build Your Business

By J.D. Solomon

My wife and I recently celebrated our wedding anniversary at a wonderful restaurant where the dinner was delicious, the service impeccable and the price tag appropriately high. At the end of the meal, the credit card slip came back tucked inside a handsome leather-bound folder that was subtly embossed with the restaurant’s name. Inside the folder was a high-quality heavy-gauge pen—imprinted with the name of a popular arthritis medication.

The owner and his staff had obviously worked quite hard to create a memorable dining experience for me that night, but at the end of the evening here’s the message they left me with: “We’re so cheap we’re having you sign the bill with a pen we stole from a doctor’s office.”

This story illustrates the first tenet of marketing: It’s all about branding. The difference between leaders and laggards in business is that leaders understand the value of their brand. They work constantly to build and reinforce their brand’s image and distinctiveness in the minds of consumers. Laggards adopt a take-it-or-leave-it approach to brand management, and they eventually find that most people choose the latter when it comes to their brand.

Advertising specialties are a critical component of any company’s marketing program because they help cement brand awareness and identity. What are advertising specialties? Any item of perceived value that conveys a message about your company. Here are 10 ways that advertising specialties can be used to convey the message that your company is a leader:

Use No. 1 — Building your brand. To do this, you must always look for opportunities to promote your brand. Few opportunities are too small to ignore. Consider my  restaurant experience. The average restaurant owner gives patrons a generic pen to sign their checks. Smart owners give patrons a pen imprinted with their establishment’s name. (Really smart restaurateurs suggest their patrons take those imprinted pens home.)

Use No. 2 — Thanking people for their business. Everyone likes to be thanked for their business. Thanking a customer or client is a sign that you value the fact that they chose you to provide the product or service they needed. The value or nature of the product or service should dictate what you use to express your thanks. But whatever you use, don’t miss the opportunity to promote your brand. Back to my restaurant story. I’d just spent over $150 on a dinner for two. It was a great dining experience and I thought I’d received good value for my money. Now, what if that handsome pen in the credit card folder had been subtly imprinted with the restaurant’s name and had come with a card that said, “Thank you for dining with us. As a token of our appreciation for your business, we would like you to have this pen as a gift.” I would have felt great about being thanked in that way, and probably would have told three or four friends about the experience. (By the way, thank-you gifts don’t have to be as expensive as a fine pen. They can be low-cost promotional items with high perceived value. They can even be as simple as a hand-written thank-you note—but just be sure to use cards tastefully customized to promote your brand.)

Use No. 3 — Meeting expectations. Here’s another personal story. On a recent trip to my bank’s drive-up window, my son was tremendously disappointed when the teller neglected to include a lollypop with the deposit receipt. “This bank is cheap,” he announced. “We should use another one.” The story illustrates another important use of advertising specialties. Sometimes you need to give them away simply to meet the expectations of your customers and clients. For instance, I expect to get a pocket calendar from my accountant every year, and when I go to a trade show I expect to leave with a trinket or two. If I don’t get them I’m disappointed and, like my son with the bank, inclined to look elsewhere for my business.

Use No. 4 — Turning people into walking billboards. So many of us go to the mall, the ballpark or the soccer field as a living advertisement for our favorite apparel company. Unless you’re Tiger Woods and you’re getting paid to wear that Nike cap, why not be a walking billboard for your own company? Get some sweaters, jackets, shirts and caps with your firm’s logo on them and wear them when you’re out and about. Give some to your employees, and good customers too, and turn them into walking billboards also. One day someone may ask about the hat and the next day turn into a customer.

Use No. 5 — Building employee morale. It’s no secret that happy employees are productive employees. And since gifts make everyone happy, why not make your employees happy with gifts of branded wearables? In addition to turning them into those walking billboards, it will foster loyalty, workplace pride and team spirit that, in turn, will give morale and productivity a boost.

Use No. 6 — Stimulating repeat sales and referrals. Why do you think contractors give out refrigerator magnets? Because they know the next time you need their service, or the next time a neighbor calls for a referral, you’ll never be able to find their business card in your utility drawer. It’s the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” principle of business. If you don’t keep your brand and contact information in front of your customers, their repeat business and referrals will go to your competitors who do. That means you need to give out useful items that will remain visible over time, ranging from basics like pens and memo pads to higher-value items such as mugs and desktop accessories.

Use No. 7 — Converting generic deliverables into statements about your business. Every day, your firm sends out information—memos, press releases, instruction manuals, product specifications, order sheets, catalogs, quotations, brochures, reports. How you package that information sends a distinct message about your company. Store-bought folder: cheap and generic. Store-bought folder with an imprinted sticker: a company with aspirations but no money. Custom-printed folder: an established firm that’s a leader in its field. So what statement are you making about your company?

Use No. 8 — Wooing prospects. I used to work for a company that sold high-priced educational technology programs to schools. Whenever the sales representatives delivered a proposal to a customer, they inserted it into a lovely leather-bound portfolio embossed with the company name. The prospects got to keep the portfolios, regardless of whether they ultimately accepted the proposals. Were we attempting to “buy” the prospect’s acceptance of our $25,000 proposal with a $25 gift? Of course not. But what we were doing was fostering an obligation on the part of the prospect to take our proposal, and our company, seriously. Customers who received our proposal in a portfolio were far more likely to share it with fellow decision-makers and return our follow-up calls than customers who got a proposal in a simple folder. If you’re in a business where it takes time, attention and repeated contact to close a sale, you too should woo your prospects with branded specialties.

Use No. 9 — Showing off your creativity. If you’re in a creative business—consulting, design, art, architecture, photography and the like—or if you just want to set yourself apart from the crowd, you can use smartly designed advertising specialties to make people stop and say “Wow!”. The trick here is to use your creativity (the very skill you’re trying to sell) to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Even if it’s just a pen, a mug or a folder, cutting-edge design can turn the mundane into the “must-have.” And that will keep you and your key message (“We’re creative!”) in front of your prospects and customers.

Use No. 10 — Surpassing expectations. Everyone likes surprises, and the best way to surprise a customer is to surpass his or her expectations. I recently ordered a box of imported tea from an online tea merchant. When the shipment arrived, there were two “extras” inside the package. One was a refrigerator magnet. The other was a small tin of mints, with the company’s logo imprinted on it. By including that little surprise, the merchant surpassed my expectations and ensured that when I run out of tea I’ll re-order from them.

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