Participants in industry conferences often have their own display space for presentations and information handouts. It makes sense to use the opportunity to promote your business and your company where you have a gathering of people in your industry. Conference gifts offer a great way to send your message and your name home with fellow attendees at your conference.
When you choose your conference gifts, take the time to make it consistent with the message that you're putting out. If you key the gift to the conference theme and your presentation, it will be more than just a take-home bauble that will be tossed in a drawer and forgotten. Here are some tips for choosing conference gifts that will be used and remembered long after the conference is just a fading memory.
Start by asking yourself why you are giving away conference gifts. The obvious answer is to promote your business, but get more specific. What do you hope to gain from it? Visibility, brand awareness, customer prospects, good will? Any or all of those are legitimate aims for gift giveaways at a conference and each of them can be accomplished by a number of different conference gift items.
Visibility To increase your visibility at the conference, choose giveaways with a big visual impact. An excellent choice is a carrier bag in a unique, useful style. As conference attendees take them away from your booth or table, they'll be advertising for you and inciting curiosity and anticipation in other attendees.
Pens are another conference gift item that have ?legs?. Rather than hand out pens and other small items like key tags and small tools individually, package them in a folder or carrier bag. Those are the kind of item that will travel home with the conference attendees and often be passed around to others who didn't have a chance to attend.
Another big visibility item is apparel. Branded hats, t-shirts and other wearable conference gifts will get noticed in the crowd, and others will flock to your booth to get one of their own.
Finally, don't underestimate the value of a unique novelty item or something as simple as a balloon, water bottle or travel mug. Anything that stands out from the crowd and points them in the direction of your conference table is a good choice for a conference gift.
Brand Awareness If you're looking to implant your brand in the minds of the crowd, any of the suggestions for increasing visibility above will work, but you can go much further if you plan your conference giveaway to reinforce the image that your company is trying to present. Key your conference giveaways to the specific service or product that your company is promoting. If you're running an ad campaign that uses the tab line ?Shedding Some Light In A Dark World?, hand out miniature torches with the slogan and your logo on them.
Prospecting for Customers If you're prospecting for customers, you'll want to choose conference gifts that they're likely to take home with them ? and you'll want to hand them out in a way that gets their contact information. Pens are great choices for this, as are day planners, organizers and pocket calendars. Any of those are useful items that will put your name in front of your new prospective customers every day.
The key to choosing conference gifts that make sense is to understand what you want them to do for you, then choose accordingly. For more ideas on how to choose and use conference gifts, talk to one of the many experts available at some of the internets leading online promotional gift stores.