Branded promotional materials can help your business stand out. They are a physical and memorable piece of marketing which you can give away to clients or prospective contacts in combination with a business card. But how much information should you put on promotional materials? And how are they best used?

If you don’t see a return on investment, you are just wasting time and capital. Promotional marketing is a really valuable part of your advertising campaign, so plan carefully to get the most benefit from it.

Include the right information

Should you try and fit all your information into a tiny space, or should you go for something minimal? It can be difficult to work out what to include on promotional materials, especially when space is as limited as it is on branded pens. You’ll have a lot to say, and a lot of information you can give.

If you try and include too much information, it’s likely to go unnoticed, or worse, be impossible to decipher. The more text you want to fit on to the barrel of your pen, the smaller everything will need to be. You’ll be heavily compromising on clarity in order to include things which won’t necessarily be useful. Save this for brochures and your websites, or even sales calls. Information like your job role, your phone number, and your address can be saved for business cards.

All you need to put on you branded pens is your company’s logo, and your web address. If whoever is holding the pen is interested in finding out more about you, they can head over to your website and find out exactly which services you offer. A phone number is less useful because the purpose of your company won’t necessarily be clear from your logo alone, and people are unlikely to phone up on the off chance you do what they think you do.

How many pens should I buy?

Because branded pens are such a reasonably priced marketing method, it might be tempting to buy thousands in bulk. If you’re only a small business though, you might find that you’d giving them to all your friends and family for every birthday and Christmas for the rest of their days. The number of pens you’ll need depends on how and when you’ll be distributing them.

If you have a stall set up at a trade show, your marketing materials are likely to disappear in minutes, especially pens and bottle openers. At banks, pens near desks will also vanish rapidly. If you’re giving pens out by hand to customers as they visit you, you won’t need many at all.

While a higher quantity of pens will fall into a cheaper price bracket, if you aren’t going to use them then you’re spending more than you need when the money could be being used elsewhere. There is also the possibility that you’ll undergo a rebrand before you use them all, at which point they will become entirely redundant.

Which type of pen should I pick?

There are cheap promotional pens and there are executive versions. For your most valued clients metal cased branded pens make excellent gifts, while the lower cost plastic versions should be used for a mass market and to build general brand awareness.

There are so many variables with promotional marketing that it’s impossible to give a clear set of rules for every business. If you’re not quite sure which would be the best pens for your particular company, feel free to contact us for more guidance.