Promotions with Panache: Elite Promotions Inc. helps clients reach customers with giveaways

At trade shows and special events, it's not uncommon for potential customers to swarm the booths that offer free giveaways.

When businesses hit on the three Fs - fun, functional and free - there are benefits for the business giving out the items as well as those who receive them, according to Elite Promotions Inc. Vice President Roger Wasson Jr., who noted that economic conditions make promotional items particularly attractive to businesses right now.

"We offer anything with a company logo on it, from shirts and hats to pins, gadgets and gizmos," Wasson said. "You can spend $300 for 1,000 pens with us, and I'm not sure there are many places today you can get advertising for $300."

Elite Promotions Inc., 1419 N. Belcrest Ave., was founded in 1994 by Wasson's father, also named Roger.

The elder Wasson retired in 2004, and daughter Tammy Wilmsmeyer took over as president, with her brother in the vice president's role.

Elite Promotions reached just more than $4 million in sales in 2008, and its goal every year is 10 percent revenue growth.

"We probably won't reach that this year because of the economy," he said.

The company's 12 employees rely on cold calls and word-of-mouth to market their products and services, as well as their own products.

"We also use pens and shirts with our own logo to leave behind when we do sales calls," Wasson said.

Preferred products

Elite Promotions offers its clients more than 300,000 promotional products from around the world, including 60,000 different types of pens. The sales team works from more than 5,000 catalogs, and the top sellers include hats, shirts, mugs, pens and calendars. Once ordered, Springfield-area screen printers and embroiderers usually personalize items locally.

Eco-friendly goods and products made of recycled materials also are gaining popularity. "The woven polypropylene bags that people use at the grocery store are huge, along with products made of corn plastic, like pens and mugs," Wasson said.

And as people try to move away from using plastic water bottles, aluminum and metal bottles also are gaining favor as giveaways.

"We just did an order for 10,000 at $3 per piece," Wasson said, though he declined to say which client placed the order.

Technological items, such as USB drives, also are making the giveaway rounds.

"Most companies opt for 1-gigabyte USB drives," Wasson said. "They will use them for conferences and conventions where they can put 40 or 50 different seminar presentations on one USB. They run around $8 or $9 per piece, but it's something people can use and keeps a brand top-of-mind."

Creating business buzz

Companies use imprinted merchandise and promotional product advertising for reasons that include name recognition, creating buzz at trade shows and other events, generating goodwill, attracting new customers and boosting general interest in a product or service.

The strategy worked for Tracker Marine, which recently ordered 11,000 reusable aluminum water bottles from Elite Promotions for the launch of the 2010 Toyota Tundra. "We co-branded the bottles with Toyota and filled the back of trucks with them at 11 different Bass Pro Shops," said Amy McDonald, publicity and special event manager at Tracker Marine.

"People who came by got a free bottle. It was a great promotion," McDonald added.

The Incentive Performance Center, a New York-based not-for-profit that studies incentives and promotional activities, found in a 2006 study that custom promotional products could be used as a standalone advertising medium, second only to television advertising in terms of information value.

Research also showed that imprinted merchandise was a very effective supplementary advertising device that reinforces positive brand image, alongside television and print media.

"We've been doing business with Roger at Elite Promotions for several years, and the reason we keep coming back is their excellent customer service," said Kim Pridgen, marketing communications manager at Paul Mueller Co., which manufactures stainless steel tanks and processing systems.

Pridgen has ordered stainless steel tumblers etched with the Paul Mueller logo, in addition to stainless steel clocks from Elite.

"We use these as a sales tool, take them to trade shows, and some of the items are available for employee purchase," Pridgen said. "Roger always helps me find things that I just normally don't have time to look up. I call and tell him I need a pen that looks like stainless steel, and he finds the options."

Always seeking new revenue streams, Elite Promotions is focused on developing relationships with its existing customers to achieve growth.

"If we already work with a marketing department of a hospital, we will try to get with the human resources department," Wasson said. "We want to bring more value to the clients we already have."