Printing & Design Blog

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Calendars

It’s not too late.  You still have time to promote your Sonoma County business with a calendar.

This is a time of year that we are always a little more aware of calendars, usually we are receiving calendars from various sources, our vendors, friends and family. Some of these calendars can have images from around the county with pictures of the Llano de Santa Rosa near Sebastopol or other cities from Windsor to Rohnert Park.

We usually receive these with smiles and put them up on our walls or desks.  As I look around in the office I am working in right now there are two calendars on the wall and one small calendar on a desk.

Often that is as far as we go with calendars.  While we use calendars and appreciate them as gifts, we don’t really consider them as part of our own marketing effort promoting our Sonoma business.  Yet if you consider the fact that one of the goals you have in any marketing message that you send out is that the prospect would keep and remember the piece, you can see the value of a calendar.

What do people do with calendars?  They keep them and refer to them regularly.

When you are thinking about calendars you want to focus on beautiful, unique, and useful.  People are likely to keep and use a calendar if it appeals to them, will make their surroundings more attractive and helps them in their day. What a great opportunity to include one of your favorites photographs from around Santa Rosa.

Your customers will keep a calendar that they like, even if they don’t like you.  Can’t say that about many other marketing pieces.

So calendars are a good way to keep a constant presence before your customer.  In today’s throw away, electronic world an appealing calendar with eye catching pictures is still considered a great give away to customers.  And with digital printing it is easy to create custom calendars in short runs to make calendar giving affordable.

Size doesn’t matter.

Calendars can be big or small.  Starting out with calendars can be very easy with business card size calendars that people can carry in their wallets and purses.  We have customers ask us if we are going to be giving away those small calendars about this time each year. People look forward to using these calendars on a routine basis.

Postcard size calendars can work also.  They can be for the entire year or only have a few months, giving you the opportunity to send out postcards regularly to your clients, keeping in touch with them.

There are a large number of choices with wall calendars.  A calendar can be a single, beautiful picture of some wine country scene, for example,  that would be appealing, with the pages for individual months, that can be easily taken off, attached below.

We are all familiar with the more traditional calendar that has a picture for each month and the pages flip out of the way.  These calendars are a bit more expensive to produce but offer the possibility of a wider variety of images that can make the prospect of hanging the calendar more likely.

Large poster size calendars, often call planning calendars, are also popular and functional.  Many businesses use these calendars in scheduling days off and vacations and they are referred to frequently.  Wouldn’t it be nice if your company logo and contact information were always there reminding them of your services?

And don’t forget that on any calendar you can have reasons for your customers to return to you each month.  You can create a calendar that offers a tear-away coupon or deal that they can use each month.  This can acquaint them with your local Sonoma County services that they may not know you offer or provide you with a chance to promote a new or highly profitable niche in your business.

It’s still not too late to think of calendars even for this year.  Consider the rewards to your business if your clients were given the opportunity to have your company name and contact information available to them because you had given them something they liked and wanted to have around.