The question typically arises in planning your booth for an upcoming trade show – what will we give away to the attendees? Promotional products are a great way to extend your brand, if selected correctly. I saw this article on Mashable and wanted to share it with my readers.
I know I have promotional products suppliers who are readers and I would appreciate your insight and comments. What is trending now with your clients?
Event Swag: 5 Ways To Give Attendees What They Want
Erin Bury
Erin Bury is the community manager at Sprouter.com, an expert Q&A site for startup founders around the world. You can follow her on Twitter @ErinBury and read her blog at ErinBury.com.
At the end of a long day at a conference, event attendees can hopefully walk away with a few key lessons, some business cards, and ideas they can apply to their work. But often, they also leave with an armload of conference swag from trade show participants, sponsors and the organizers. Common swag items include T-shirts, pens, postcards and flyers with company info and discounts.
Swag bags are often filled with the same old stuff, much of which is being tossed in the trash as soon as attendees leave the building. Just because an item is free doesn’t mean it’s desirable or useful, and handing out 100 pens doesn’t mean you’ll convert any of those conference goers into customers or users.
Here’s how to make sure your swag catches the attention of event attendees and doesn’t end up in a garbage can.
1. Make It Something People Want
This seems like an obvious point, but it doesn’t seem like many companies actually think about it. Put yourself in the position of the conference attendee. Would you pick up that item if you walked by that booth? If the item was in a big swag bag, would it catch your attention, or would you throw it away without thinking twice?
Chances are if you wouldn’t use it, neither would anyone else. Also, make sure it’s something people don’t have 10 of already. Sure, USB keys and coffee mugs are desirable, but chances are you won’t be the only company at the event giving them out.
2. Seed Your Supporters
You’ll likely have a small swag budget, especially if you’re at a startup. One idea to make sure your items end up in the right hands is to create a smaller batch of items and make sure they get more exposure.
David Spinks, founder of BlogDash, had a limited budget this year for South by Southwest. So instead of buying 100 smaller items, he decided to get 20 T-shirts and give them out to good friends with the promise they would wear the shirt at least one day of the conference. This way, he got the exposure he wanted, the items actually went to good use, and he managed to stay under budget.
Hashable did something similar but on a larger budget. It sent its biggest supporters to SXSW for free. They wore branded T-shirts the whole time and used Hashable instead of carrying business cards. It was great branding for them, and the attendees were likely happy to wear the shirts in return for a free trip.
3. Go Digital
One of the trademark items at SXSW was the extremely heavy, overloaded swag bag. This year the organizers moved away from physical items and instead created a digital swag bag for attendees, accessible through a SXSW online account. The “SXswag” bag included discounts on apps and services, music downloads and even a free set of “We met at SXSW” Moo cards. It cut down on waste, but the jury is still out on whether the majority of people actually accessed the online bag (I know I didn’t).
Digital swag is an emerging trend and a great way to save money, but make sure it’s easy to access and that it’s desirable enough to get people to log on.
4. Go Green
One of the biggest criticisms of swag is that it isn’t eco-friendly. Thousands of flyers, postcards and promotional items are created, and many of them are left behind in hotel rooms, or worse, forgotten in a company’s storage room. Digital swag is a great eco-friendly way to cut down on waste, but there are others.
One way is to forgo swag in favor of a charitable donation. Canadian Foodie Girl blogger Andrea Toole attended a conference where a company gave its swag budget to charity, and attendees voted on which cause the money should support. This encouraged a lot of people to stop at its booth.
There’s also plenty of eco-friendly physical swag available if you know where to look. Promotional items company Rightsleeve has an entire section devoted to green swag, which includes everything from recycled calendars to eco-friendly steak knives.
5. Pop Culture Is Your Friend
Some of the most popular swag items at conferences find a way to incorporate pop culture trends. At SXSW in 2010, ShareThis had a variety of stickers with “quotes” from Kanye West (“I’mma let you finish … but ShareThis has one of the best sharing services of all time!”) and Mr. T (“I pity the fool who doesn’t ShareThis!”). They were funny and relevant, while still getting the brand message across. It was no surprise that Charlie Sheen’s face popped up on swag this year at SXSW, and it was in high demand.
Swag can be a great way to get your brand’s message out there and start some conversations about your company. But you don’t want your company’s marketing treasure to be someone else’s trash. Take the time to think about what you’d actually want from a conference, and try to create items that reflect that.
There were a couple of comments to her article which I want you to read:
The problem with swag is that too many clients only want what’s “cheap”, not what’s effective and targeted. Ahhh, but that’s another chapter!!
Eco friendly is indeed everywhere…but there’s a lot of greenwashing if you don’t read between the lines!
Buying American made is a trend we are seeing (YES!!), but again, you have to be on top of it. Case in point: factory website says “a US Manufacturer”, but that doesn’t mean all the parts in that item are made in the USA!
Just call me Sherlock!
I went to an engineering conference in Newfoundland and instead of stuffing bags with swag they stuffed everything in a rain hat ( http://bit.ly/lBZlig ). It was adorable and useful!
I’d recommend adding to that list to think about what makes your event unique and to see if there is anything you can do from that angle.
I gave away a chance for a $500 custom tattoo at an automotive aftermarket show in Las Vegas. It was a huge hit.
Great article. One idea for some event swag are light up shirts.
You can get a custom light up shirt with your logo or brand message from NiteLifeTshirts.com.
Everyone can give away a t-shirt but not one that lights up to surrounding sounds. Attendees will be sure to hold on to such a unique item and wear them. Meanwhile, they will be displaying your custom message wherever they go. As this article stated “Pop Culture is your friend” and these shirts are gaining popularity every day. Try them at the next big event and see the results.
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