When planning your branded business gifts, you don’t want to leave custom printed calendars out of the list. In an age of smartphones and tablets handling nearly every aspect of our day to day lives, it may seem surprising that appointment books, planners, and wall calendars have not only survived the digital era but are growing in popularity.
Based on various consumer studies on their use, there is no question that custom printed calendars and planners make very effective business gifts. People appreciate them and use every day, so your brand message will be in front of your audience 365 days of the year.
How To Choose The Best Fit For Your Business
As you can imagine, there is a wide variety of styles to choose from, and making the right choice, as with any custom branded item, ensures that your recipient will actually use it.
To help you with this important decision, consider these facts:
Let’s look at some facts and figures
- 70% of households use a wall calendar to keep track of kids activities, family events, and appointments.
- 75% of calendars users keep them in their kitchens
- 90% of people who use branded calendars and planners recall the advertiser and have a favorable impression of them.
What about Millennials?
On a more informal type of research, when asking about calendars and planners preferences of millennials and the workplace, this is what they had to say:
- Reaching and writing on their planner gives them a welcome rest from their digital screens.
- Using a paper planner is faster than having to open another tab or launch another app, and hence keeps them more productive.
- They appreciate quality and good design
- They value portability and flexibility
- They often have a nice pen that they keep with their planners, so consider a gift set that includes both.
Customization Options To Suit Your Brand
- There are plenty of stock designs to fit many themes and industries ready for your logo and contact information to be added. These include inspirational themes, cars, landscapes, among others.
- For the wall calendars, for example, you can customize each of the pages with your own photo or design, which works well when you want to display your line of products or services.
- Some styles allow you to print the recipient’s name on each calendar. I think we can safely say that people will feel very special if they receive a calendar with their name on it.
- Another option, our personal favorite, is to create a completely custom piece. It requires more planning and time but the resulting piece will be truly unique to your brand.
- Traditionally the best time of the year to hand them out is in December or early January, but there are styles that allow you to start in any month.
One Last Word
Custom printed calendars are so well appreciated that when the year is over your clients will be expecting a new one, which only means that it did what it was supposed to: keep you top of mind. So when you consider this, if you are not giving away calendars, your competition might be, and that’s the one they might be looking at every day of the year. (Ouch!)
If you’re considering this marketing tool and would like to discuss your options and project parameters, please feel free to contact us.
We’d love to help!