How to Determine Your Budget For Promotional Products

Promotional products are an extremely important aspect of most successful marketing campaigns. These useful and powerful marketing items help to reinforce your message in a tangible way that connects your business with people. These powerful promos can bring the main point of your marketing message to life and continue to do so for much longer than a billboard, radio ad, television commercial, or newspaper ad. While all mediums of advertising and marketing can be important parts of the puzzle for a successful campaign, this article will address how to best determine your budget, specifically, for promotional products. Often, budgets are created with an arbitrary number chosen by a higher executive who has no working knowledge of the event or campaign. However, to arrive at a realistic budget that will actually accomplish your goal, you must put in a little research and planning time.

5 Steps to Determine Your Promotional Products Budget

Step 1 - Plan Ahead - Your event date is directly related to the cost of your items. Longer production times allow you to source the best possible prices. Plan early enough and you can even order promotional products that are produced overseas. Make sure you go through a reputable and domestic promotional products distributor for overseas production, otherwise, this can be a risky proposition. Late planning or late ordering of your promos can result in rush fees and/or expedited shipping charges that increase your costs.

Step 2 - Estimate the Number of People - Whether you will be giving out promotional items to everyone in attendance, giving to only select guests, or selling items, you must estimate the number of attendees expected. If this is an annual event, you can use numbers from past events and adjust them based on the projected growth. Once you derive your number, multiply that by 10%.

Step 3 - Know Your Demographics - What type of people will be attending? Is it a sporting event, concert, or comic book convention? Depending on the crowd, your choices of promotional products will be different. Based on the demographics, you can check for promos that best fit the crowd and get an idea of the cost per piece, based on the quantity needed from Step 2.

Step 4- Research Product Ideas - Do a little searching for the products your want BEFORE determining your budget. It's easy to say you want to give away power banks and you have a budget of $4 each; however, with a little bit of research, you'll find that it is simply not possible to acquire quality items at that price point. It's important to understand the costs of your ideas in order to create a realistic budget.

Step 5 - Define Your Goal - Is your job to reach as many people as possible with your giveaways or is the main objective to leave a useful giveaway with recipients who showed interest in your company? Are these gifts with purchases? Are the items being sold as a fundraiser? All of these various goals will influence how many items you need as well as the level of quality you need. It should go without saying that the more premium items require a higher budget per piece. With just a little planning before setting your budget, you can create a realistic budget and save yourself a lot of time from having to re-plan due to improper budgeting.