There are hundreds of different promotional items for you to choose from, making it difficult to decide which one to go for to promote / advertise your brand. So how do you choose which one to go for?

The wrong choice of product can either be a waste of money or worse still, can give the wrong impression. Here are a few guidelines which you should follow when choosing promotional items:

1. Make sure your promotional item is tailored to your target market
2. Choose a promotional item which will be used by your target market i.e. they won’t throw it away
3. Make sure your promotional item is convenient i.e. it is small and/or can be carried easily

Spend a little time thinking about the above 3 points when choosing your promotional items and you should, hopefully, come up with the perfect product for your promotional giveaway campaign. Here’s a few more specific pointers though:

If your promotional giveaway is being hosted at a sporting event, why not give away something like promotional drink bottles, promotional caps or promotional polo shirts? These types of products can be branded with your company logo and the logo of the sporting event or teams. Done properly, these types of promotional items can be very effective.

Is your target market children? Why not try giving away novelty pens such as glitter pens or different coloured pens?

Maybe you are hosting an event – You could try something like promotional lanyards?

Promotional golf day? Why not give away promotional golf umbrellas?

Trade shows? Try something like promotional USB drives, promotional pens, keyrings and stress balls. These are small and easy to carry.

Using promotional items is a great way to promote your brand and can be highly effective if you take the time to think about what might be the best promotional item for your target market.

Green issues have become a seriously hot topic in recent years and it is becoming ever important for businesses to adopt greener processes, not just to do their part in looking after the environment, but because potential clients will take into account how environmentally friendly a company is before deciding on whether to employ their services.

It may even become the deciding factor when weighing up which company to use. In very competitive industries such as printing or promotional products, it may be hard to differentiate between two companies based on price, customer service or delivery, so the decision of what company to use could come down to something like their environmentally friendly printing policies.

The printing industry ranks highly amongst the top energy consuming industries in the world, due to high demand on electricity and fossil fuels. Printing companies need to consider ways to cut down on consumption of natural resources and need to adopt more energy efficient, environmentally friendly printing processes. Environmentally friendly printing is getting more and more important in the printing industry.

Here are a few ways in which companies can adopt more environmentally friendly printing strategies:

1. Understand your environmental impact
Printing companies should implement environmental policies which help management and staff understand the impact of their printing services on the environment. Once the policy has been implemented, companies can provide training, set targets, and create more environmentally friendly printing strategies through the use of products with lower emissions and environmentally friendly printing technologies which use fewer chemicals.

2. Use soft proofing
Achieving more effective, environmentally friendly printing ultimately comes down to printing less! It may seem obvious, but this is often overlooked. This can be done through strategies such as ’soft proofing’. Pre-press proofs do not always need to be printed out onto a physical substrate such as paper. For simple jobs, PDF proofs are often sufficient. This has many benefits in addition to reduced printing, such as reduced paper use and reduced environmental impact of sending documents via ground or air mail. It also enables a faster turnaround of jobs.

3. Reduce energy use through investment
Investing in newer, more environmentally friendly printing equipment can have a number of benefits. Not only are you investing in more up-to-date printing equipment which is faster and prints at a much higher quality, newer equipment tends to be more environmentally friendly. Investment in environmentally friendly printing equipment often results in less demand on energy, less waste in terms of printing materials such as ink, and a greater level of reliability (there are less breakdowns with newer equipment).

4. Reduce, reuse and recycle
The three R’s are know well know throughout all industries and are the cornerstone for implementing good waste prevention and management practices within a company. Reduce the use of hazardous waste, reuse things such as ink drums and recycle inks and solvents where possible for more environmentally friendly printing.

In summary, printing companies should not overlook environmentally friendly printing as an essential part of their business. Not only are you doing your bit for the environment and saving money in the process, your environmentally friendly printing policies could be the deciding factor in winning that all important printing contract.

The cost of printers on the market today has reduced, and it is now possible to get a perfectly good printer for any home or small office at a relatively low cost. But once you have bought the printer from a specific brand, generally speaking you are tied into using their ink/toner cartridges which in many cases can be very expensive. In some cases, the ink cartridges can be almost as much as the printer itself!

So how do you save money? Well, there are a few simple changes you can make to help save a significant amount on the cost of your printer ink and toner cartridges:

1. Don’t print everything!
Before pressing print, ask yourself, “do I need to print everything”? You may be printing out some information from a web page, however the web page may have a number of images, made up from a large number of colours, which is going to have a significant effect on the amount of ink used. To get round this, try copying text to word and printing this out. Alternatively, try printing in greyscale.

2. Reduce the size of what you print
The standard text size in Word is 12pt. When printed onto paper, in my opinion, this looks very large (and also quite ugly). Depending on the size of the document, you could save yourself a significant amount of ink by reducing the text size, not to mention the amount of paper you could save. What about other software? With Adobe Acrobat, you can specify how many pages you print onto each peice of paper. If I am printing something out, purely for information purposes, I will print 2 or even 4 pages onto once side of A4 paper.

3. Reduce the quality of what you print
How about quality? Well, unless you are printing your company brochures (which is highly unlikely on a standard office printer) you do not need your printer set on high quality. Even standard quality is often overkill for standard home or office printing. Change you printer setting to low quality and save on your ink/toner cartridges.

4. Deals and returns
Many ink shops will do deals on returned ink/toner cartridges. Depending on how often you do this, the money you could save could impact significantly on the cost of new ink/toner cartridges.

5. Refills
Refills are even better than deals and returns. You don’t pay anything for the ink/toner cartridge, only the ink.

6. Use all of the ink!
The people who make printers can be sneaky. These days printers will tell you when your ink is low and that you should replace you ink/toner cartridge. Don’t be fooled! Ink/toner cartridges will usually last a lot longer than the printer is telling you and there are ways to make them last even longer. Use up all of the ink in the cartridge and then take it out and give it a small shake. Ink often gets clogged in cartridges, so giving it a small shake will break up any clogs and the ink/toner cartridge is likely to last much longer.

Here’s something a bit different for a Friday morning -  edge printing, also known as fore-edge printing. Edge printing consists of paintings or images applied to the edge of a book or brochure (see image).

Edge printing was widely used in the 18th century and from my sources, the process

“finds its origins in gilding, a process that applied gold or silver to the pages of a book to protect them“.

The process of edge printing however is rarely used today. I do ask though, why not? There are a number of interesting things you can do with print and fore-edge printing is one of them.

With edge printing, you can apply different images to the page edges, and these can either be shown permanently or are only shown when you fan the book in a certain way.

Surely there are uses for this in marketing your brand? Anyone who prints books (or brochures which are thick enough) should consider edge printing to give your publication that extra ‘wow’ factor, and not to mention to possibly increase the value of the book?

There are some amazing effects you can apply to your publications with fore-edge printing, so before you sign off the design of your book or brochure, get involved with edge printing and see how far you can take it!

The are a few different printing processes used in commercial printing today. It is helpful to have a basic understanding of printing processes if you are looking to place a lot of print work with a printing company, so here’s a basic introduction to two commonly used printing process, the offset printing process and the digital printing process.

Offset Printing Process

In the offset printing process, the ink is not pressed directly onto the paper. Instead it is distributed from a metal plate to a rubber mat where it is then set onto paper. Offset printing is the process of indirectly transferring ink to paper through the use of a metal or paper plate. This printing process uses CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yello and Black – aka Process or Full Colour) and Pantone spot colours (PMS). This printing process is widely used for the production of magazines, brochures, flyers etc. Generally speaking, the longer the print run, the lower the cost per 1000. This is because the majority of the cost of the printing process is tied up in the setup, rather than the actual production. The offset printing process produces high quality cost effective results for long print runs. Most print runs need to be at least 1000 to justify the cost of the setup. Usually, a colour proof is generated prior to the printing process commences, however colour matching is often still made ‘on press’ as the job is run.

Advantages Of Offset Printing

• The offset printing process provides consistent quality and produces sharp and clean images and type.
• The offset printing process conforms to many different textures thanks to the printing surface used
• Production of offset printing plates is fast and easy
• The printing plates used in the offset printing process have a longer printing life than direct litho presses.
• If you are printing high volumes of materials you will save even more money. With offset printing the more your print the more you save.

Digital Printing Process

With the digital printing process, both CMYK and RGB can be used, although colour shifts may occur with RGB content. The digital printing process is good for short runs of any quantity less than 1000 copies. The digital printing process also requires no printing plates so there is less time and expense involved in setting up a file to print. This means that the digital printing process can be turned around in a very short period of time, from approval of artwork, to a proof be produced, through to the final quantity being run. Unlike the offset printing process, with digital printing, proofs can be printed on the final stock choice for accurate colour checking. The digital printing process is done using a computer. The basic technology has made many things possible that would not have been otherwise. By utilizing the latest innovations in technology digital printing can help your business save time and money.

Advantages Of Digital Printing

• Digital printing gives you more options of substrates such as fabric, exceptionally thin paper and even ceramics
• The digital printing process is fast and economical and has a great turn around time
• Digital printing is cheap

Which printing process?

Ultimately in boils down to the time you have to complate the job, and the run quantity. The offset printing process tends to be better for larger runs however this printing process takes longer, whereas the digital printing process is good for short runs and takes relatively little time to complete. So price based on quantity required and available time are obviously key considerations, but the offset printing process offers the ability to specify PMS colour, so this may actually be the better choice to achieve higher quality results. The final printed effect of solid areas of colour can also be an issue to consider, as the digital printing process can appear less impressive than offset, especially within certain colour ranges.