Planning A Winning Tradeshow Giveaway Strategy Make The Most of Your Message	Visited: 2008 2.6/5.0 (8 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Linda Bustos March 27, 2007

Trade show giveaways are hot marketing tools. They can enhance your company's branding and image, create a positive and memorable association with your company or products, and even help you build a list of qualified leads. But not all tradeshow give away ideas are effective. Quality giveaways with value to the recipient create positive impressions about your brand, where cheap, thoughtless items do the opposite.

Tradeshow freebies can be anything, some popular ideas are:

*Pens
*Notebags
*Candy
*Baseball hats
*T-Shirts
*Mousepads
*Key chains
*Coffee mugs
*Product samples
*Magnets
*Calendars

Great giveaway ideas are ones that have utility for the recipient and are not disposable. The best ideas are items that will be seen and passed on to others in your target market after the show.

Make sure your give away includes a take away about your company, product or service. And always put your company name on your gifts.

To avoid “grab-and-go,” present gifts individually and make sure the consumer learns something about your company at the same time. Creating a theme for your booth and giving away gifts related to the theme, or asking the consumer a question about your company in exchange for a gift can help recipients remember your marketing message.

But beware of skills-related giveaways such as dart throwing or mini-golf. A prospect who fails at the task can go away feeling embarrassed or angry at his or herself, not with a positive feeling about your company.

When collecting valuable lead data by giving away gifts in exchange for providing personal information such as name, e-mail address and phone number, allow prospects to “opt-out” of receiving direct marketing from your company. Marketing messages sent to people who don’t want them can quickly tarnish their perception of your company.

Remember, you don’t have to give something away to every visitor. Keep higher value items behind your table if you want to be selective in distributing them.

How Can You Measure Success?

You can track your tradeshow giveaway program’s success in the following ways:

If you have a website, create a separate landing page, subdomain or even register a new domain that redirects to your official site and tie it in with a Web statistics program like Google Analytics to measure how many visits and conversions you receive from your giveaways (another reason to print your information on every item). If the gift is a redemption item, you can add an identification code that indicates that you can trace back to the show.

You can also ask your exhibit staff to monitor how effective the gifts were at attracting attention, monitor reactions or ask visitors probing questions about their opinions of the items.

Conclusion

Taking the time to plan your tradeshow giveaway strategy including what to give away, who to give to and on what basis, what your gift items will say, how to maximize the take away and how to measure results is essential to the success of your marketing efforts.