Get the Most From Promotional Items at Conferences by Georgia Brown
Conferences are typically packed with business people competing in a vigorous manner to gain new customers and contacts and trying to work out what their competitors latest products and offers are. If your luck is in, and you have got your stand placed in a highly visible place, then attracting visitors to your stand is not too difficult. However, if for whatever reason you have found yourself at the back of the hall you are going to have to be a little more inventive on how to get a greater number of people to your stand. Whatever the circumstances are, you are guaranteed one thing, the competition in this day and age is stronger than ever and every exhibitor will be trying to come up with ways to outwit each other and get those vital visitors to their stand.
When selecting which custom printed promotional products to use during the conference or exhibition keep one thing at the top of your mind ‘bait’. The items you display work best if they are colorful, so that people who pass by your booth will be attracted to your items. Choosing items that are designed with your company color scheme is a great idea–distributing promotional items that use company colors will help reinforce your business identity, in turn helping to make your company more memorable.
Another equally important point is that the items you choose should fit your company’s image, and be related in some way to the products or services you offer. A business or organisation relating to the environment would be best advised for example to giveaway products which have been recycled or our green in colour.
If your plan is to hand out standard promotional gifts for example, keyrings, mugs or pens, it is key to go for more eye catching colours or designs. They’re such commonly-used promotional items that you risk losing the impact of your own booth in the face of enormous amounts of competition from every other booth that gives them away.
One product which has always done well during a confere is the simple carrier bag. You could get a large number of these printed with your logo and details, for arelatively low cost and hand these out to everyone that passes your stand. This is an excellent way of distributing items that people will appreciate–most people will end up with a large amount of promotional material by the end of a trade show, but they may not have enough bag space to conveniently carry everything. You don’t need to go overboard on the quality of these bags, keep the cost down and go for a traditional plastic bag and this will easily serve its purpose. Emblazoned with your branding and carried throughout the day your brand is going to receive hightened attention and thus awareness of your products and services.
Conferences are such competitive arenas, so if you are going to use promotional gifts another good angle is to offer some gift items as prizes. It could be that you decide that every fiftieth person to visit your stand during the day wins a spot prize, a great way to create a little extra buzz. Giving additional items such as these and including a random element in the distribution can be an ideal method of generating extra interest in your trade show booth.
About the Author
Georgia Brown is the marketing manager for Clickpromogifts one of the UK’s leading suppliers of business gifts and custom printed promotional items.
Tim Somers
Bizarre Promotions, Inc.
