When choosing promotional products to display at your trade show booth, think in terms of bait. Attracting people to your stand is the key thing, so always select giveaways which are bright and colourful so as to draw the attention of the passing visitors. To make your company more memorable, pick giveaway items that match your corporate branding as this will go along way to making a bigger impression with any recipient and add extra weight to your corporate identity.
Just as important, is to select items which compliment the products and services you offer and additionally fit nicely with the business image you wish to portray. For example, an IT related business or organisation will probably giveaway mouse mats, computer mice or USB drives.
If you’re going to distribute more generic business gifts such as pens, key rings or coffee mugs, it’s particularly important to choose creative designs and methods of distributing these items. These types of promotional itmes are used by virtually everyone and although in their own way are generally successful, at such an event where all your competition is likely to be using the same kind of products you do run a risk of losing the impact at your own stand.
Plastic carrier bags have always been a particularly good promotional giveaway at conferences. You can, for example, equip someone with a large number of bags, and have them stationed at the door to the trade show staging room to distribute the bags to people who enter. 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 even need to buy expensive bags for this to work well—an inexpensive but sturdy plastic bag will be perfect for your purpose. With your company name and logo branded on each bag, a large number of people will be walking around generating some publicity for your company, and will be reminding every passer by that your company is represented at the show.
With such stiff competition at the conference, many companies will have a few high valued promotional giveaways to hand and run some form of competition throughout the day with the winners receiving one of these classier giveaways. These can be more valuable items that you hand out at random times during the day, or to every tenth or twentieth person who visits your booth, for example. Distributing such promotional products in a randam manner is a tried and tested method of increasing visitor levels to a stand. By handing out these additional giveaways in such a manner is the perfect way to generate a bit more of a buz and interest in your stand during the conference.