THE ROI OF PROMOTIONAL PRODUCTS VS. OTHER MEDIA

Resource Center » The ROI of Promotional Products Compared to Television, Radio, and Newspapers

The ROI of various promotional products compared to other marketing tactics.

Return on investment (ROI) is a way to measure the effectiveness of advertising. It's an analysis of the profits compared to the cost of a financial investment. Learning about the ROI of different forms of advertising can help businesses to make good choices when deciding where to use their marketing funds. Advertising can be expensive, and there's nothing worse than spending a lot of money on a campaign that doesn't bring in any new business.

Promotional products offer a better ROI than almost any other type of marketing out there, including television ads. One way to calculate ROI is through the cost-per-impression, or the average amount of money that is spent for a campaign compared to the number of times someone sees the advertisement. For example, the average cost-per-impression for a promotional baseball cap is only 0.002 cents. That's one-fifth of a cent for each impression! The figure is about the same for personalized calendars, logo bags, and three-dollar custom pens. Shirts have an average cost per impression of 0.005, or half a cent.

Television ads often have a much higher cost-per-impression. Prime time TV spots, for example, are 0.019 cents per impression. That's more than nine times the cost of using high quality promotional pens. Cable TV ads average at about 0.007 cents per impression, which is still a significant increase over promotional products, although television advertising will generally cost more overall. Another drawback of using TV ads is that they usually require a significantly larger minimum investment to get started than promotional products do, and that's bad news for a new business or a business that doesn't have a huge marketing budget.

Media advertising like newspaper ads, magazine ads, and radio spots are also much more expensive than promotional items. A half-page black-and-white ad in a newspaper costs about 0.019 cents per impression, and ads in national magazines are an average of 0.033 cents per impression. The cost of a spot radio ad is 0.005 cents.

Promotional products work well because the same people see them repeatedly and new people are always coming into contact with the products. Repeated impressions are an important part of creating brand recognition, and it's less likely that people are going to see a print media advertisement multiple times. A recent study showed that 84 percent of people remembered the names of advertisers who had given them promotional items.

Promotional products can potentially save money and increase traffic because they're relatively inexpensive and they have been proven to bring in customers and increase profits. This combination creates a high ROI. Research has also shown that many people have more positive views of companies after they send them promotional products. The majority of people, 62 percent on average, also report that they have done business with someone after receiving a promotional item from them.

The statistics used in this article were published in “Advertising Specialties Impressions Study: A Cost Analysis of Promotional Products Versus Other Advertising Media,” which was released at the ASI Power Summit on November 10, 2008.

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