Print Blog: communicate, motivate, educate, enhance, celebrate, animate, and promote with print and promotional products

The Internet has changed marketing forever and created entirely new marketing channels, without the Internet there'd be no such thing as email marketing, SEO, or Inbound Marketing. But that doesn't mean traditional marketing is dead, in fact in some areas, such as promotional merchandise and even printing, the rise of the Internet has made old school marketing even more valuable.

When you allocate a part of your business's valuable marketing budget to promotional products you want to spend wisely, choosing promotional merchandise that will deliver the greatest possible return and provide your company with maximum exposure.

You’ve probably been advised to choose your words carefully when approaching certain people about sensitive subjects – or when crafting a marketing message to convincingly sell your products or services.

If you want to launch a successful marketing campaign or come up with a successful package for your product, start with color. Extensive marketing research has shown that of the senses, vision plays the greatest role in influencing purchasing decisions. For instance, a study by the secretariat of the Seoul International Color Expo 2004 found that 92.6 percent of respondents cited vision as the greatest influencer, compared to 5.6 percent for touch; and 0.9 percent each for hearing and smell.

One of the most effective forms of advertising is promotional product advertising. On average, you visit your refrigerator more than ten times daily. For this reason, a refrigerator magnet is a great advertising tool. Imagine having your marketing message receive that much exposure for such a minimal cost. In fact, the numbers show that a family of four may be exposed to your marketing message and logo in excess of 14,000 times each year. Refrigerator magnets are cost effective and produce results.

Custom branded USB Drives are a neat promo item that have quickly become a promotional item favorite.  Why? They are useful, a great way to share information, very functional and highly transportable.  In fact, sending large files such as pictures or documents may not be easy due to email limitations, but these larger files can be shared on a USB drive. 

Not long ago we published an article about "Marketing With Trash Bags" that discussed how Home Depot is able to get free advertising on every street in town by printing their bright orange logo on yard waste bags that line the street every day in the fall.

Marketing on shopping bags is practiced by almost every retail store in the world. It's just another way they can keep their brand in front of as many people as possible the problem is it's short lived. Those shopping bags make great walking billboards as you walk through the mall but once you get home the shopping bag, and thus the billboard promoting the store brand ends up in the trash.

The Home Depot is a very well known brand, one reason for that is they never miss an opportunity to put their name and logo in front of as many people as possible, they even use trash bags as a marketing vehicle.

I recently attended HUG 2010 a users group conference put on by inbound marketing company Hubspot. Hubspot provides software to help small and  medium size companies get found on the Internet. They are all about marketing they live and breath it,  their CEO just published a book "Marketing Lessons From the Grateful Dead"