Why Using Promotional Products Is Good for Your Business

Modern businesses can’t survive without advertising. After all, you have to differentiate your business from every competitor out there with savvy marketing. So you always look for new ways to increase brand awareness and attract more sales.

You may have ads on billboards, buses and television, and you may even put them in the newspaper. But do you use promotional products?

These seemingly outdated items still play an important role in the 21st Century. Learn why you should still use promotional items alongside existing marketing efforts to build your business’s image.

Benefits of Using Promotional Items

1. They break the ice.

When you give out promotional products to passers-by or potential customers, they will more likely listen to what you have to say. The act of giving a gift, no matter how small, will also prompt the receiver to reciprocate the gesture. For that reason, over half of people who receive promotional products end up doing business with those companies.

2. They don’t cost much.

Promotional items cost little by design, so you can order hundreds of them and pass them out to scores of people. Use these economical marketing tools to spread your company’s reach far beyond the walls of your office.

3. They give customers something to touch.

No other advertisement medium provides a full sensory experience to consumers. Touch has the amazing ability to help potential customers better connect with a company.

4. They last a long time.

TV commercials only last 30 seconds. Billboard exposure gives you even less time than that. But your potential customers will use a truly worthwhile promotional item like a USB or a T-shirt countless times. This longevity ensures repeated marketing exposure, which is the key to customer conversion.

5. They increase brand awareness.

The beauty of a promotional product is that it often travels with its user. Give a key ring away to someone, and think about all the people who will see your company’s logo in that product’s lifetime. By giving away free materials, you essentially get a free representative of your company for as long as that person carries your product.

Promotional Products to Use (and Where to Use Them)

Name an item, and a company somewhere has probably put their logo on it. But as a small business owner, you don’t want to waste your money on items people will immediately throw away. Use the following promotional items as easy, economical ways to get your name in the open.

  • USBs: Gift branded USB devices to prospective clients in the tech industry.
  • CDs: Order and give away professionally made CDs to promote your band in coffee shops and independent music shops.
  • DVDs: Pass out DVDs of your documentary to gain exposure at fairs or enter film festivals.
  • Button badges: Create button badges to give away at trade shows.
  • Key rings: Market your boutique or other small business with branded key rings.
  • Fridge magnets: Send dental patients home with a fridge magnet to get repeat customers.
  • Guitar picks: Put your personal logo on a guitar pick to promote private music lessons or your wedding musical group.
  • T-shirts: Give away T-shirts to every employee in your company to remind others of your business. Even after an employee quits, he or she may keep the shirt for years to come.
  • Power banks: Inspire your young target audience to retain your services with a power bank to charge phones on the go.

Whatever item you choose to order, team up with a professional promotional product business to ensure you create a gift potential customers will love. As a result, you’ll see

New 4D Printer to resolve all the problems of life

How it goes on April 1– EFI Announces Revolutionary 4D Printing Technology

Tuesday, 01 April 2014
Research staff at digital printing technology firm EFI™ have developed a new technology and framework for 4D printing. EFI’s new 4D VUTEk® printer combines photopolymer additive inkjet printing with a concept-stage EFI Fiery® digital front end (DFE) running PrintFlow® scheduling software to control time coordinates.

While many other technology companies are exploring ways to enter the 3D inkjet printing market, EFI decided to leapfrog the competition and be the first to market with 4D printing technologies, utilizing bi-directional control of time elements in four-dimensional space.

“The new 4D VUTEk printer is a breakthrough product not only for its ability to print high-quality solid objects, but for the innovative workflow we have built around it,” said Guy Gecht, EFI’s CEO. “While we have always offered leading-edge tools to help businesses avoid printing errors, on complex production jobs, mistakes are often unavoidable. The new 4D VUTEk printer is the first product that will actually allow the user to go back before the error is made to re-print a job correctly.”

Developed in a previously undisclosed special lab in the basement of EFI’s new Silicon Valley headquarters, the 4D VUTEk printer allows operators to adjust their chronological position during printing. Backwards movements present the ultimate money-saving feature, as they give users the ability to discard erroneously printed jobs in the space-time continuum and start over as if the incorrect print job never took place.

Users who master the printer’s 4D design and production process can exponentially increase their productivity by loading their final print job design to the 4D VUTEk print engine and then moving ahead chronologically to immediately retrieve their printed products. Once retrieved, the 4D VUTEk automatically takes the user and the printed products back to point of job submission, eliminating all the production time associated with the job.

“This new technology will not only fundamentally change the market for inkjet printing of solid objects, it addresses emerging technical requirements in the digital printing industry,” said EFI Senior Research Scientist Emmitt Brown, leader of the company’s 4D VUTEk printer development team. “The key breakthrough was reaching a point of high-speed processing where a job is processed before it is even submitted.”

The first installation of the 4D VUTEk printer is expected to take place on April 1, 2015 at New Zealand-based Look Forward Printing. “Although I expected a lot from EFI as a company that is dedicated to making printing more competitive and productive, I was very impressed when I saw a demonstration of the new 4D printer,” said Look Forward Printing’s CEO, Thomas Foolery. “My customers are excited about the prospects of timeless print submission in every point of time.”

Prices and general availability of the new EFI 4D VUTEk printer have not been disclosed.

300GB Optical Discs

Sony and Panasonic recently announced an agreement to jointly develop standards for a next-generation optical disc that has the capacity to hold more than 300 gigabytes of data (six times the capacity of current Blu-ray Discs) by the end of 2015. According to the two companies, the 300 GB discs are geared toward the archival storage market. Is this project the next-generation of Blu-ray? Or is it the consumer electronics industry’s answer to being ahead of the 4K curve? See below for an analysis.
In the joint release issued by both companies, each included reference to the other’s cartridge-based storage solutions that are currently in the market (Panasonic’s Data Archiver LB-DM9 series and Sony’s Optical Disc Archive system). These systems employ multiple recordable optical discs encased in a protective cartridge (beyond this similarity, however, the systems and their media are completely different).
As an associate of mine commented: “(These cartridge-based systems) may have a fairly tough time in the enterprise market though, as it seems to be more of a packaging trick than anything really new — proprietary cartridges and the like can be a tough sell.”
The companies make the point pretty clearly that this announcement is about a single disc solution that ups the capacity of recordable optical discs. It will be interesting to see what mix of layers, lasers and the like will be required to make that magic. Since multiple layers at Blu-ray Disc wavelengths are already in current specifications, the implication is that this new format will be a departure from BD as we know it.

CD/DVD Packaging ideas

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Petersen’s no-frills cardboard with sewn-on patches aesthetic is a fresh look for CD packaging (well, it harks back to Independent Projects’ work with Savage Republic, but fresh for hiphop packaging), and the Arabic calligraphy, minarets, and scimitars imagery alludes to fellow cryptic Seattle musicians Secret Chiefs 3