Corporate gifts printed with your logo offer your business or organisation many benefits.  Who doesn’t like a freebie? I know I do, especially when I get a package and don’t know what’s inside. It creates a sense of excitement in me. When executed cleverly, corporate gifting is not just a matter of throwing a gift at a client or employee. It represents your relationship with your clients and employees. Corporate gifts and promotional products printed with your logo can build and maintain business relations, make the recipients feel appreciated by your business, encourage clients to become loyal clients and provide incentive to employees to perform better. Highly successful businesses are acutely aware of this and this is one of the reasons why they are so successful. When choosing a corporate gift for your clients and employees, make an effort to choose imprinted promotional products which suit their tastes, interests and loyalty level. For example, your top performing employees deserve better promotional merchandise compared to the rest. Or you might have a group of clients who love golf so golf related promotional merchandise would be appropriate. Not sure what corporate gift or print would be suitable? Simply call 1300 760 887 (9am to 5pm AEST) and speak to one of our promotional corporate gifts consultants for suggestions.

It’s been a year of uncertainty with regards to the Australian economy but one thing’s for sure, we avoided the recession and we’re heading into a brighter New Year. As reported in the Australian on 25th November 2009, Australia has ”recently entered a new upswing” and ” it is reasonable to assume that we will see this growth extended for a few more years yet”. So what does this mean for your promotions, promotional marketing and advertising right here and now? Well, don’t just sit there and be merry that Santa has come early. It’s the perfect time to swing into action for the New Year and increase your promotions to stamp out your competition. Use promotional merchandise, corporate gifts and  promotional advertising to get noticed and capitalise on the upswing in the economy to put your business at the forefront of your competition. PromosXchange has thousands of promotional products and merchandise to suit every promotional advertising budget and objective.  Browse through our large range of promotional products online on www.promosxchange.com.au or if you need advise on the right promotional merchandise or corporate gifts for your next event, please call us on 1300 760 887 to speak to one of our promotional consultants.

If Rihanna’s umbrella song is anything to go by, umbrellas are definitely the in thing to have (still can’t believe they made a whole song about umbrellas!). Advertising using promotional umbrellas is a practical and great way to promote your organisation. Other than in Rihanna’s hot umbrellas video, umbrellas can be seen at all different types of outdoor functions where large numbers of people come together such as sporting events, the races and festivals.

Umbrellas are a great way to show you care and protect your customers and employees, and the imprint area on umbrellas allows you to notably display your company logo. Moreover, an umbrella is one of the most useful promotional products that will be used over and over again so you’ll be sure to get the maximum exposure for your brand name. Some companies actually re-sell their promotional products including promotional umbrellas. These companies benefit from the profits and free advertising of their brand name.

At Promosxchange, we offer a variety of promotional umbrellas to suit your needs.  There are different types of umbrellas such as Folding Umbrellas which are perfect for storing away in concealed places, Long Handle Umbrellas and Golf Umbrellas which are bigger than the conventional umbrella. At Promosxchange, we offer screen printing and digital transfer of your logo on umbrellas.  

Speak to our promotional products consultants at our Melbourne head office to find out how you can effectively market your corporate logo on promotional umbrellas.

The promotional products industry is a thriving industry with sales in its billions of dollars each year. So who are the top buyers in the industry? Well, obviously the top buyers are the ones who are cleverly utilising their bigger budgets as they know the value of promotional products in their marketing mix. According to the Promotion Magazine (March/April 2009 edition), the sectors below with examples of the top buyers in each sector make up the top 50 Australian advertisers:

1. The Pharmaceutical Industry - eg. Procter & Gamble,   Unilever,  Johnson & Johnson

2. The Finance Industry - eg. ANZ, Suncorp, NAB

3. The Alcohol & Gaming Industry - eg. Fosters Group

4. The Media Industry - eg. Fairfax Media, News Corporation 

5. Motor Industry - eg. Toyota, Mitsubishi, Mazda

6. Retail Industry - eg. Myer, David Jones 

7. Telecommunications Industry - eg. Telstra, Singtel Group/Optus, Vodafone

8. Food Industry - eg. Wesfarmers, Masterfoods, Kelloggs

9. Travel & Leisure Industry - eg. Qantas, Harvey Holdings, Village Time Warner Group

No matter which industry you’re in, PromosXchange has a large range of branded promotional merchandise to add value to your brand. In addition to the promotional products, promotional corporate gifts and promotional clothing viewable on PromosXchange.com.au, there are thousands of other printed promotional items available from our promotional items manufacturers’ factories across Australia which are not shown on PromosXchange.com.au.

PromosXchange delivers Australia wide, catering for promotional products Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. We constantly update our website with new promotional marketing ideas and promotional items so keep checking back with PromosXchange.com.au Whether you’re looking for promotional pens, imprinted bags, printed mugs, promotional clothing such as t shirt printing and embroidered polos or promotional corporate gifts, PromosXchange Australia offers a fantastic range of high quality, most popular promotional products and promotional merchandise from renowned manufacturers. PromosXchange uses the best imprinting techniques to brand all promotional products and promotional merchandise with your logo through embroidery, screen printing, pad printing, engraving, digital transfer and dye sublimation.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for on PromosXchange.com.au, contact one of our promotional products Melbourne head office promotional consultants. If you’re looking for a specifical promotional item that you would like sourced, please give us a call and one of our promotional consultants will discuss your promotional item requirements with you. From design through  to production and on time delivery, PromosXchange will take the best care of your brand. Just let us know the objective of your promotional corporate gifts or promotional clothing, your target market and we’ll source the best promotional item we can find to suit your promotional marketing budget and promotional campaign objectives.

When deciding on printing of your logo/artwork on promotional products, it’s best to know the basic differences between spot colour print vs full colour print.

Spot colour printing is a process where each colour is printed in its own single color ink. If there is just one color to be printed, there will be a single run. If there are two colors, there will be two runs, and so on. By using a single ink for each colour, it is possible to achieve good matching to both existing printing and future print runs and to colours from the Pantone spot colour swatches. For example, if you must match a colour in your corporate logo, spot colours should be used. Because of its good colour matching ability, spot colour printing also produces prints with extreme clarity and crispness. Since spot colour printing uses single inks, this method is typically cheaper and used for jobs which require no full color logos/artwork, such as for one colour printing on t shirts and mugs. However, it becomes rather expensive for more than 3 color prints on promotional products. With spot printing, you also have a smaller colour range to choose from.

4 color printing, also known as full colour printing or process printing, involves the use of four colour inks: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Keyline (Black). When these four colours are mixed, you can get a wide variety of colours for printing of your full colour logo on promotional products. Full colour printing is usually more expensive than spot printing as it requires four different colours to be printed. Unlike, spot printing, it’s harder to match the colours in full colour printing so full colour process printing will not be as clear and crisp looking as spot colour printing.

Whether you decide to use single print colours with spot printing or full colour printing will depend on what you see as most important ie. colour matching of your logo, cost or achieving full colour print.

Transfer pad printing, commonly known as pad printing is a popular printing method for products of odd shapes, and sizes as they can be printed on without any sacrifice to detail. This method of printing is used for smaller sized promotional products such as promotional pens, mugs, stress items etc. Artwork required for quality printing are either vector EPS or Adobe Illustrator AI files and to size of the print area. Text must be converted to outlines. Images need to be at least 300dpi and either embedded or supplied as separate files. If all this sounds like a lot of technical jargon, don’t worry. PromosXchange provides free text artwork and free artwork enhancement for printing onto promotional products if you do not have your file in the correct format for quality print. This saves you $60 - $100 of what you’ll be charged from most other promotional products companies. The print area for pad printing is not large as it’s limited by plate, pad and efficiency of the machine and the size of the item being pad printed. So refrain from writing a thesis by using long lines of text and complex logos. Keep your artwork for pad printing simple. What works best is a very simple logo and short text. Anything else is an overkill.

I’ve got to say, I am a great supporter of Obama. Not because he’s now President of the United States but because he and his marketing campaign people had the sense to know the value of promotional products. His campaign’s investment into promotional products was a factor in getting him out there and into the President’s spot so obviously they know the power of promotional products. According to opensecret.org, Barack Obama spent double the amount of money on promotional items like promotional badges, promotional t shirts and promotional signs than John Mc Cain who shamefully did badly with the votes. Who can forget the promotional t shirts with Obama’s face worn by Hollywood celebrities like Oprah? So there you go, if party candidates and the President of the United States can’t do without promotional items, I don’t think you can afford not to afford promotional products for your marketing campaigns. Hmm…I might run for Mayor of Melbourne myself using all our promotional gear:))

So you’ve chosen the promotional products you need. What next? Well, you’ve got to have quality artwork for quality print. The preferred format in the promotional industry for all graphics files for print on promotional products are either vector EPS or Adobe Illustrator AI files. Text must be converted to outlines. Placed images need to be either embedded or supplied as separate files. Sounds like too much technical jargon to you? Well, it most likely is if you’re not a graphic designer. If your artwork is not supplied in the correct format, most promotional companies charge you anywhere between $60 to $100 to reillustrate your artwork and make it ready for print on promotional products. However, PromosXchange gives you FREE Artwork Enhancement meaning you don’t have to pay to reillustrate your artwork for print on promotional products. Even if you don’t have artwork but require text only for print on promotional products, PromosXchange will do it for free.

Just the other day, a promotional consultant got a call from a customer who wanted to order promotional products for a trade show event in a hurry. As usual, the promotional consultant went through the list of questions we normally ask customers to meet their needs. However, the consultant didn’t get much from their conversation. In summary, the questions and answers went something like this:

Consultant: What’s your budget? Customer: Don’t know.

Consultant: Your target audience? Customer: Don’t know.

Consultant: What would you like printed on the products?

Customer: Don’t know. Consultant: Objective? Don’t know.

Customer: Just need the cheapest promotional products you have in 3 days.

Now when a conversation with a customer goes something like that, it doesn’t make things any easier and it doesn’t give the information that’s important in getting the right product at the right cost to you at the right time. If you want a promotional products company to meet your needs, you need to let them know what you need. So here is a quick must know list before approaching a promotional products company.

1. Know Your Promotional Objectives

Unless you’re in a habit of throwing money into the air, you must know your promotional objectives. Why are you going to spend dollars on promotional products? Is your objective to thank your loyal customers, reward new customers, improve customer relationships, promote goodwill for the company to position it in a better light, to attract attendees for a company event, community recognition, to launch a new product, to publicise a new initiative, to motivate staff, to reward staff performance? You need to know what you want to achieve with your promotional campaign.

2. Know Your Target Audience

Before you go to a promotional products company, make sure you know: Who are your target audience? What do they want? Are they your top 20% loyal corporate customers who deserve premium corporate gifts? Or will they be prospects who opt in for your E mail campaign?

3. Know Your Budget

Many customers say they don’t have a budget but when the prices are placed in front of them, they suddenly realise they need a budget. Be sure to set a realistic budget and don’t just go for the cheapest product. Find a product with the best value for money within your budget that suits your target audience. Letting your promotional consultant know your budget also saves time which would otherwise be wasted on recommending you products which don’t fit into your budget.

4. Know To Choose Promotional Products which Fit The Picture

The promotional products and printed message chosen for your promotional campaign should fit into your objectives, target audience and budget. If you’re not clear about which products would fit the picture, seek the advise of your promotional consultant who should be able to give you a few ideas based on your information. Remember, promotional consultants are not there to draw up your whole marketing plan so be sure to give them the information they need to help you unless you’re willing to pay extra for them to do your marketing job for you.

5. Know To Plan Ahead

For best results, plan at least 3 months ahead for your promotional campaign. Don’t get caught up in a last minute mad rush to buy your promotional products. This might cause a lot of stress, added costs and you might overlook certain important things in the purchasing process such as looking through the artwork carefully before approving it for print. Many marketers are also pressured to change things last minute by other decision makers in the company which results in more delays. If you’re handling the marketing side of things in your company make sure you firmly push for a realistic timeline for your promotional campaign to avoid such situations.

6. Know To Measure Your Results

Many people overlook this stage of the promotional campaign. However, if you don’t measure your success, you won’t know how well or how badly you’ve done and you won’t know where to improve in future. Track the performance of your promotional products campaign not only at the end of the campaign but as it progresses so changes can be made if required. You might measure your promotional campaign by asking people how they heard about your company, perhaps even print a unique phone number or url address on the item to know that the lead was generated from that promotional product.

In summary, knowing your objectives, target audience, budget, choosing appropriate promotional products, planning ahead and measuring your promotional results will ensure a successful promotional campaign for you.

Do you have an event coming up in just a few days but you haven’t prepared the promotional side of things for it? Or are you handling the marketing in your company but the decision makers keep changing their minds so you’re left to last minute promotional sourcing? Well, you don’t have to panic. When you need promotional products fast, go to PromosXchange, Australia’s most reliable promotional Company. PromosXchange has a great range of promotional products solutions for your next event which will make your promotional campaign a success. PromosXchange can get your promotional products shipped to you from within 24 - 72 hours. Now that’s what’s called an Express service. Whether you’re looking for low cost promotional giveaways or premium corporate gifts fast for your tradeshows and company events, PromosXchange can help you with the Express Promotional Products range. With PromosXchange lowest prices, quality products and prompt follow-ups guaranteed, you can only gain when dealing with PromosXchange.