Archive for June, 2007

Trade show giveaways, or promotional products, are an excellent tool that can be used to help visitors and attendees remember your company after the trade show is finished. Proper use of promotional giveaways can increase lead generation at the show as well as boost the number of relevant phone calls you receive after the show. Unfortunately, many companies misuse promotional products at trade shows, and these companies end up looking unprofessional. You do not want your company to be remembered as the group who was more focused on their stress ball than on their products and services. In order to have a successful experience at your next trade show, you need to carefully plan to distribute meaningful, memorable trade show giveaways that will increase the return on your investment.

Your giveaway items should not only fit in with your overall trade show marketing scheme, but they should be memorable and well-branded. You need to select trade show giveaways that are unique, useful, and appropriate. Ideally, your company would give away products very similar to the ones that you sell, but for companies who sell more costly items, the giveaway should at least relate to what you sell in some way. For example, if your company sells speaker systems, giving away gift cards that can be used to download music would be both relevant to your product and memorable. Make sure your company name, logo, and contact information are clearly visible on the promotional giveaways you distribute.

You should also establish a way to effectively track the success or failure of your promotional items. Many companies use giveaways to direct clients to a specific e-mail address, so that you can measure the response to your giveaways by the number of e-mails you receive. Have all your e-mails directed to promotions@yourcompany.com, and you will have no trouble assessing the relative success of your trade show giveaways. In addition to tracking e-mails that result from your trade show giveaway, you need to be able to effectively measure how many visitors were attracted to your booth by the lure of your promotions. This can be a tricky procedure, because many of the visitors that are attracted to your promotions are not the type of visitors you are interested in. The person who is attending the trade show merely to collect free promotional giveaways is not the person who is likely to be interested in your products and services.

If your trade show giveaway is really effective, you will notice an increase in foot traffic to your trade show booth. If you plan to give away big screen televisions for free at your next trade show, be prepared to be flooded with visitors. Realistically your gift will not be as attractive as a big screen television, but you can clearly see that better giveaways result in more visitors to your trade show booth. Your trade show giveaways should be attractive enough to lure visitors to your display, but inexpensive enough that you can distribute them at will without fear of bankrupting your company.

After you have decided what type of promotional product you will distribute at your next trade show, you need to devise a plan to attract attention to that product before the show even begins. Sending targeted mailers before the show begins is an effective way to ensure that visitors to the convention are aware of your promotions. If no one knows that you are giving away an interesting promotional item, you may wind up spending a lot of money on giveaways with very little return on your investment.

Trade show giveaways can be an extremely effective way to draw more attention to your trade show booth. Careful planning and decision making can result in a drastic increase in the return on your investment at your next trade show.