Using promotional products to establish and spread awareness of your corporate brand is not merely a matter of selecting an item that suits your fancy (or your budget) and slapping your company name and contact info on it. Branding is an art, and in order to maximize your marketing dollar, there are 5 essential qualities that the promotional items you design and distribute should contain.

To be effective, promotional products should be:

1. Clear: There is no room for ambivalence in marketing. People should not have to hunt for your brand identity on your promotional items. However you distinguish yourself from the pack – be it a logo, a slogan, a color-scheme, etc., or any combination thereof – it should be prominent placed right up front where it can’t be missed. In other words, it should be obvious.

2. Simple: Similarly, don’t disguise your brand identity in a confusing and chaotic swarm of colors, shapes, words, images, etc. Pick something simple that people can easily recall, and chances are…they will.

3. Accessible: Esoteric images, words, and concepts only work if your target market is esoteric. For everybody else, you’re going to want the brand image you present on your promo products to be easily understood by your target audience. Just like you don’t want them to have to hunt for your brand, neither do you want them to have to struggle to figure out what the heck it means.

4. Valuable: The promo item itself must provide inherent value to your target audience (for example, you wouldn’t give out jackets to nudists now, would you?). And on a more subtle, subconscious level–each of the branding decisions you make should convey value to your audience as well. Make your promotional product relevant to its intended user and the promotional products themselves will be as much a part of your corporate branding as its design.

5. Verbal: The more of your audience’s sense you engage, the likelier it will be that they’ll remember you and, ultimately, be drawn to do business with you. That’s why the visual and tactile elements of a promo item aren’t quite enough to get the job done. You also want to choose carefully the words you imprint on the object as well. Choose something catchy, that people will enjoy getting stuck in their heads.