One of our most popular series of articles here at Two Kids and a Coupon has been our various articles on how to save when marketing your small business. In addition to publishing this blog, I work full time as a marketing consultant and I help small business owners around the world grow their businesses by advertising on very meager budgets. We’ve received some great feedback on some of the tips we’ve shared in the past and one of the recent questions we’ve had in our inbox is on how to save when ordering trophies and promotional items. Here’s a few tips!
Shop Around
Did you know that you can use your saving shopping skills for work too? I regularly shop around for the best deal on promotional items and awards, and often price match vendors and negotiate deals to get the best offer. Be sure to get written estimates from vendors so that you use that quote and ask another vendor to meet or beat the price and when ordering online be sure to look for online discount codes and to shop through cash back sites like Ebates too!
Volume Discounts
Are you going to be needing additional awards or promo items for an upcoming event? When you produce custom awards or imprint promotional materials with your logo, most of the cost is in the set up cost. To produce additional items at the same time is usually just a small additional cost. My employer presents 5 crystal awards every year, however instead of paying production costs to reorder only trophies every year, we order a large amount of them in advance every few years. For example, this year I ordered the awards for 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. While we obviously won’t need a few of the trophies for a few years, the costs per trophy are so significantly lower it pays us to order them all in advance and keep them in storage until we need them.
Removable Pieces
If you’re ordering award plaques, have you considered putting the personalized information on a separate piece? When my company orders sales awards plaques for the salesman, they are made from wood and 90% of the plaque is the same with the company logo and the year. We then add a small plate that is different to each plaque with the salesman’s name and award. This allows us to save on production costs by keeping most of the awards identical, and still give all of our top achievers a nice recognition piece they deserve.
The tips you have shared are really helpful. I usually get tired of finding and choosing a company resulting to hiring second rate companies that are usually more expensive. This year, its gonna be different. I have your tips to guide me. Thanks a lot!