Using Pens As a Promotional Strategy

Cost-effective advertising and promotion can be a tough balancing act; after all, in today's age where you get what you pay for, settling for cheap promotional material means getting at most mediocre results. But what the advertiser or marketer wants and needs is a promotional solution that is both effective, and not too costly. What the marketer needs are solutions such as cheap pens.

At first the idea of using pens in a marketing campaign may seem absurd, but then again Einstein himself said that "If at first an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it." Besides, promotional pens have long been classic advertising paraphernalia. Perhaps what makes it a concept that at first would seem to be ineffective is that nowadays a marketing repertoire is mostly comprised of Internet ads, animated banners, and other online advertising stunts suited for the current Web trend, whatever the rend may be. Indeed, how would cheap pens hold water compared to such technologically advanced marketing means? Well, pens aren't reliant on trends for one. And of course, pens are always handy.

Internet trends come and go faster than the seasons change. One marketing tactic that works for the current trend might need massive recalibration and tweaking to accommodate the next one. Pens are exempt from this reliance in trends and fads that are at best only passing. Besides, though more and more people usually use blogs and not journals to "write" on, pens will never go out of style. They will always be needed to jot down a note or a quick reminder to self.

This permanence and usefulness and the fact that they're affordable makes cheap pens great marketing paraphernalia. Though of course you don't just go out and buy pens and then give them away. Usually pens are bought in bulk and then printed on or adorned with whatever marketing motif or theme or slogan your campaign has. Used the right way, promotional pens can be a very efficient tool in bolstering your campaign regardless if its purpose is for advertising, an advocacy, an election candidate, or whatever.

Of course, most of the time cheap pens are employed into a campaign arsenal as a secondary or accessory effort, supporting a larger, more central endeavor. But on its own, mixed in with guaranteed marketing tactics like niche and target marketing, advertising through pens can yield positive results that can parallel the results of other major campaign efforts.

This would entail a bit of knowledge and know how on the use of marketing tactics of course. Take target marketing for instance. Used in a pen drive, you'd distribute the promotional pens in question to a specific consumer pool categorized by demographic. The best way to illustrate this would be to tag along a major campaign effort like a fundraiser in a community where you're sure a lot of potential consumers reside. So if your target consumer pool are teenage girls, then giving away your cheap pens with promotional print on them at a fundraiser at an all girls campus should do the trick.