We all love to snag a little free swag or a freebie from a business that we frequent. And those little extras like personalized notepads emblazoned with the company brand can be a versatile addition to your marketing plan. It’s easy to design and print personalized notepads to give out or include with company materials. By following a few basic tips, you can create beautiful and functional personalized notepads to use to promote your business in multiple ways.
Personalized Notepads Can Be Good for Your Business
Marketing a business can take many different forms, but one common way to keep the company name in front of the community for an extended period of time is to provide a useful branded product. Giving out a gift like a branded personalized notepad does more than just provide potential customers with something they can use.
Small gifts can engage customers with the well-known psychological effect called the law of reciprocity, leading to a potential increase in sales and goodwill toward the company. Many businesses use items like personalized notepads to encourage sales and increase engagement with potential customers.
Creating Your Personalized Notepads
The first step in creating custom personalized notepads is to consider their purpose and how they are going to be used. If they will be part of a new customer packet, then the overall size of the notepad will be a consideration. Personalized notepads that will be mailed out to the community should not be too bulky with a large number of pages. Knowing how your notepads will be used makes it easier to design the perfect notepad for your business.
Size
Personalized notepads can be made in just about any size. Knowing how your notepad will be used can help you to determine the perfect size for your business. Larger sizes can incorporate more intricate or detailed graphic elements, while smaller notepads will look best with more simple designs. Some common notepad sizes are:
- 4 x 6 inches
- 5 ½ x 8 ½ inches
- 6 x 9 inches
- 8 ½ x 11 inches
Branding
The next step in the personalized notepad printing process includes utilizing the company logo and any tag lines. A notepad is a useful item that provides an excellent platform to increase name recognition so your business’s logo and brand colors should be the focus of the product.
Notepads that have evergreen content will look great all year round, but you might consider adding a seasonal change to your branding. If your notepads are going to be gifted along with a holiday or other noteworthy time of year, consider tweaking the logo or color scheme as a nod to the well-known event or time.
- In conjunction with October’s Breast Cancer Awareness campaign, consider swapping a brand color for a shade of pink.
- Add a fun harvest or spooky element for notepads to be gifted in the fall.
- Create a notepad with small tweaks to the logo using seasonal icons or colors.
Company Details
Be sure to include a way to contact your business right on personalized notepads. If your company is location-based, a physical address or list of the locations is a smart addition. For businesses that are primarily online or that want to encourage their online presence, including your website address is a good way to drive customers to your site.
Printing the business phone number on the custom notepad is another good option as well. The most important aspect of including the company’s details, however, is to not crowd the graphic elements on the notepad. Simple, clean designs will stand out, and they will also leave plenty of room on the notepad itself so it will be useful for its practical purpose.
Business Tie-Ins
Consider an element to your notepad that increases its usefulness. Checklists are a fun way to tie in your business’s focus to the notepad while also providing a useful task list that will help out potential and current customers. Companies that provide services or products for parents might include a kid-centered checklist to help busy parents or a financial business could include a budget checklist.
A reminder phrase could be used to direct attention to a service or product so consumers will remember the right time to contact the business. For example, a house cleaning company might place a reminder about when to schedule your next service or an HVAC company could suggest the best time to schedule a system check.
Appeal
While printing in black and white might save some upfront costs, color printing will look better and can show off your brand the best. Your logo should look recognizable on all marketing materials, so if you have never promoted your brand in black and white, shifting to a new look on a personalized notepad is not a good idea.
And a boring or basic notepad may not be used as often or worse, could end up forgotten and waste your marketing efforts. Do make sure that your notepad printing project is memorable with bright, crisp colors that show off your business and brand and engage your customer’s attention.
Finalizing the Personalized Notepad Printing Process
Once your graphic elements are finalized, it’s time to consider how your notepad will be constructed, including the way it is held together, the type and weight of the paper to be used as well as any extra additions to your notepad.
- Binding: Most notepads are constructed with a glue binding that adheres the ends of the pages together, leaving the body of the notepad papers stacked securely. Some notepads are also constructed with a sticky top, similar to the way Post-it notes are made to adhere to a new surface once they are removed from the notepad.
Other options include the elegant Perfect Bound notepad that looks and feels like a traditional book, Plastic Coil bound notepads as well as the cost-effective Saddle Stitch binding option that uses staples to secure a blank book that doubles as a notepad - Paper Type: The weight of the paper can influence the overall look of the notepad too. Thinner, uncoated papers are ideal for personalized notepads, because notes typically won’t be kept for long periods of time, or the notepad will be used as scratch paper.
Weightier paper is also an option for companies that want to produce a more substantial notepad that might need to be sturdier or when mailing weight is not an issue. Personalized notepads constructed with gloss or matte finish papers look chic with their unexpected finish on this traditionally informal product. - Number of Pages: For notepads that will be included in a mailed envelope, a small 25-page notepad is a perfect size. But notepads can be made with larger increments like 50, 75, or even 100 pages.
- Special Features: When designing your notepad for its preferred use, you may decide to include a hard backing, typically made of cardboard that is adhered or stapled to the notepad. Another way to make the notepad look great is to round the corners. This eye-catching style elevates your brand in the eyes of your clients or customers.
Personalized Notepad Printing On Demand
With on-demand printing, your business can design and print small quantities of personalized notepads. This will allow you to not only print what you need, when you need it, but also allows your business to adjust or change the product design between printings to maximize how you implement the use of the notepads.
Working with a trusted printing company like Dazzle Printing that utilizes on-demand printing can save your business time and money by allowing you to order the number of personalized notepads you need right now. Dazzle Printing has been helping customers with their printing needs for decades and their expertise in printing notepads and other marketing tools will help you grow your business exactly when and how you want with their on-demand printing services.
