1 Step Year Long Promotion

You might have guessed by looking at the title and graphic of this article that I’m going to be talking about calendars and wall planners as promotional tools. I bet you are saying why bother, everyone has computers and smartphones theses days and use those to keep track of things. Yet most of us still have some sort of paper planner or calendar on a wall or a fridge and use it to mark off school activities or other events.  It’s used year-round  in one way or another and you should be using it as another tool in your marketing arsenal.

Now I’m not going to cover a lot of the basics of what calendars should do as I’ve covered here in the article 365 days of advertising . I’ve also covered the types of calendars and wall planners in the article Calendars and Wall planner formats . Jump and have a look at those to get the basics if you have never thought about calendars before or need a refresher as I’ll be building on those for this article.
Following on from the answer of the intro paragraph, the reason why you would use calendars and wall planners is that it’s marketing material that people hold on to for a year. This is why you see them used by so many professionals that only see their customers on an infrequent basis. Professions as wide ranging as Insurance companies to auto repairs use them because they want their customers to keep their brand in mind, even if it’s just in the background. This is a very powerful form of unintrusive customer retention, which I talk about in more detail here . This is what you need to keep those customers coming back to you and not the first person they find doing a net search.

Having sold you on the idea of printing a calendar or wall planner to promote your business, the next is question is what type should you be looking at doing? Well here’s a few simple things to consider at the very start:

• What type of person are you targeting in your promotion?
• Are you looking for new customers or to retain existing ones?
• How do you expect it to be used by people?
• How many people do you want it to go out to?
• Do I need to courier or mail it to your recipients?
• Should it be personalised to each person receiving?
• Will you be including business related information such as special events or promotions?

Answering those questions will help you pick the right solution for the job. If you are planning a mass marketing item, especially if you want to delivered as part of the weekly advertiser deliveries, then a single sheet A5 or DL flyer fridge calendar or a folded wall planner is going to be far more cost effective than delivering ones that have multiple pages. If you want to include relevant event or marketing information then you have to look at doing the larger sized wall planners or multi page calendars units that have the space to fit more details. Looking for personalized designs, then one way is to have just the cover of a calendar with the personal information and leaving the internal parts more generic. If you are targeting businesses then a desk calendar or wall planner is more useful, while for homes bright picture rich multi page or fridge magnet calendars have the draw.

Another thing to ponder is breaking outside the standard formats, something that Copy Express specialises in. We have done all manner of interesting designs for customers, from 12 month colouring in callenders to a rotating trifold calendar that is supplied folded so you can send mail it out with a single kiwi stamp and not even having to worry about the envelope as the delivery address is printed as part of the design. Or have folded single sheet pocket calendar that’s small enough to fit into a credit card slot of a wallet or purse and still has your business card details on both sides when folded up. These are just a few ideas to make your material more practical and cost effective for that one step year long promotion.
We will wrap this up for now, but if we have whetted your appetite enough for these cool marketing tools then contact us at Copy Express today and we can help you turn them into something to grab people’s eyeballs and keep your businesses name in the back of their minds for a whole year.