It takes a village…

Get by with a little help from your friends and offset your planner cost to meet your client’s budget. This is great for schools, hotels, colleges, and any company with a local focus. Consider using vendor participation to boost the value and practicality of your book. By selling calendar ads for things like nearby restaurants and shopping, you'll increase the utility of your item and cut down on its cost. See below for examples of how companies have worked out useful promotions with help from a number of outside vendors. This could be you.

One savvy company created a sales playbook for their reps to carry out on the field, complete with custom filler modeled after the work forms they needed customers to fill out on the job and instructional inserts for their reps to reference. To offset the cost of custom printing, the company sold ads to relevant businesses for products that might interest their clients.

Another tech company customized an event planner for their annual conference. Instead of printing pamphlets with all conference information, they chose to incorporate all printed info into the journal as custom inserts that turned the notebook into a valuable reference tool. By selling ads to local businesses near the conference location, they were able to cover the custom insert costs and the bulk of the book costs, making their promotion nearly free while providing useful information about where to eat, shop, and sight-see in town.

Written by Elise Anderson