Beyond just helping people keep their schedules in check, custom promotional calendars are tailored to your brand and offer a unique way to advertise your company throughout the year. These printed calendars tell stories, celebrate seasonal company events, promote monthly deals, and, most importantly, make your brand unforgettable.

Why It’s Important to Promote Your Business with Custom Calendars

Custom promotional calendars serve as more than just date reminders or planners. They are powerful branding and advertising tools. By creating a calendar personalized to your business and its offerings, you can consistently place your brand in front of customers and prospects daily, building loyalty, awareness, and recognition. Additionally, calendars provide you with opportunities for monthly promotions, enabling you to highlight new deals or share valuable insights about your company, helpful tips, and information relevant to your industry.

Essentially, a custom calendar is a strategic blend of marketing, utility, and brand storytelling, making it an indispensable tool for your business to engage with its audience, build strong brand awareness, and increase sales.

The Benefits of Promotional Calendars

Increased Brand Exposure

Custom company calendars offer incredible brand exposure because they are used for an entire year rather than just for a single campaign or event. They allow you to put your brand in front of your audience all year long. This increases brand recall and awareness, making it far more likely that your calendar recipients will choose your brand over your competitors when making a purchasing decision.

Better Customer Engagement

"Let me check my calendar" is used every day worldwide. Many people rely on their calendars to keep their schedules on track and remember important dates and holidays. While also effective marketing tools, unlike greeting cards, chocolates, and other merchandise, calendars are used daily for an entire year, making them the perfect promotional gift for your customers and prospects. In addition to your brand's message being viewed daily and building strong recognition, you also give your audience a useful and thoughtful gift.

Provides Year Long Advertising Opportunities

Once hung or placed on a desk, your calendar stays put for twelve months, meaning your audience will see it every time they walk past it, jot down an upcoming event, or check the date. Because of this, you can advertise within your calendar on every page and guarantee it will be seen. For example, when someone checks when their holiday gathering with the family is, when their next conference is, or when that next appointment they scheduled is, you have the opportunity to share information about your company, a seasonal sale, or an intriguing statistic that will make them want to call your company to get a quote for your services.

Calendars are Cost-Effective

Marketing campaigns you run year-round, such as online display ads, are expensive and can cost thousands of dollars per month. They are also scrolled over or ignored by many. Conversely, calendars are interacted with each month and provide you with a tangible touchpoint for engaging your audience with what you offer for a fraction of the cost of other advertising efforts. You can include several different ads for each month. You also have complete control over who receives your calendar, allowing you to know who is using it. Because of this, you can tailor your design to reflect your target audience's interests and needs and thus maximize your ROI.

Your Audience Enjoys Them

For many people, a calendar is a daily tool. For others, it's an occasional tool used to remember birthdays and other events. Regardless, everyone uses a calendar. While mobile calendars send reminders without needing to check the calendar, many people still prefer a physical calendar. In fact, a study showed that 78% of people still use printed calendars at home or work. And 62% of people own a promotional calendar. These findings prove that your audience finds calendars practical and enjoyable, making them the perfect promotional gift. You gain twelve months of advertising opportunities and brand exposure at a low cost, and your audience gains a helpful and thoughtful gift.

Tips to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Promotional Calendar

Keep Your Audience in Mind When Designing Your Calendar

Your audience may receive several calendars from other companies as well as yours. While they may keep one at home and one in their office, depending on how many they receive, they'll only use the ones they prefer. This doesn't mean the company they like the most; it means the design. Because of this, you want to keep your target audience in mind as you gather content and put your calendar design together.

For example, for an audience of CEOs for corporate businesses, they won't want to hang a calendar in their office with neon colors and playful design elements. Instead, a sleek, professional design will catch their interest. If your veterinarian clinic is looking to send out a calendar, start the design process earlier and ask your clients to send photos of their pets to be featured. Who wouldn't hang up and use a calendar that includes a picture of their pet?

Timing is Everything

Make sure to send or hand out your calendars early so your recipients have them on hand and can write down personal dates before receiving a calendar from other companies. A reasonable time frame to plan for your audience to have your physical calendar is around November to December. In addition, designing and ordering your calendars early ensures that your calendars don't arrive after the year has already started, which could make your calendar obsolete.

Include Your Logo on Every Month

While promotional calendars offer excellent brand exposure, your calendar recipients must be exposed to your brand each month. Having your logo and company name on just the cover of your calendar is not enough. Place your branded elements on every spread or page to ensure your audience is exposed to your brand every month and every day they check their calendar.

Include a Call to Action on Every Month

Give your audience something to respond to each month. For example, a retail store could feature winter must-haves with a coupon code for 15% off during December. A lawn care company could share a snippet during a typically dry month with a call to action telling their audience to give them a call so they take care of their lawn, or a private practice could include a reminder for flu vaccinations with a link to their scheduling portal to make an appointment.

Use QR Codes

There are many benefits to QR codes in print, including the ability to track responses, offering an interactive way for your audience to engage with your brand, and they are an instant bridge to digital channels. Because of this, include a QR code for every month to engage and interact with your audience. Some examples of what you could have include facts about how a specific service you offer can benefit your calendar recipient with a QR code that leads to your service page for them to request a quote. In addition, retail stores can feature seasonal products with QR codes linking to their product pages. Nonprofit organizations can include QR codes to sign up for seasonal charity events or QR codes that direct to a donation page.

Take Advantage of a Calendar Design Template

Creating a table that includes the days for each month in order and national and religious holidays is a lot of work. So, to make the process easier, you can take advantage of a calendar design template that includes the proper printing design requirements and the months, dates, and holidays.

Feel free to take advantage of our free calendar templates, which include a PDF that you can place into your design software with the proper months, dates, and holidays, our customizable InDesign file, or our calendar online design tool, where you can upload your artwork.

Choose The Right Printer

Once you have your calendar design prepared, full of marketing touchpoints, and your logo, you're ready to get them printed. When looking for a printer, look for one that offers fast speeds so you can get your calendars in your audience's hands quickly, high-quality materials so your calendar lasts all year and represents your company professionally, and affordable prices so you can stay within budget while generating an amazing ROI.

In addition, if you're planning to mail your calendars to your audience rather than as handouts, look for a printer offering direct mail services. By doing so, they'll be able to mail your calendars directly to your audience's mailboxes as soon as they are printed.

If you're ready to get your custom calendars printed, head to our calendar product page for an instant quote today!