There’s a lot to discuss about marketing events in general and specifically conferences, expos and trade shows. And today I will share my views on conference giveaways. I feel that in many cases companies are spending good money in an inefficient way, or even just dumping it.
In many cases the decision of what to give and how is done based on a budget (“so let’s allocate 10K to swag), or just something we’ve done before. And as with everything else, this is a good chance to be ahead of the game.
Should You Give Any Conference Swag?
No, not every time you have a booth in a conference you should give away anything other than a solution brief. You should start with asking yourself what your goal is in the event. Is it lead generation? Brand awareness? Nurturing existing customers? Meeting investors? Ideally the answer should not be “all the above”, but “primarily X”.
Another question is what percentage of the visitors are potential leads. If it’s very high, attractive swag can bring customers which you can scan, convert to leads, then start nurturing on or off site. Validate that you can scan visitors, otherwise prepare different means of capturing leads, which may lead to different swag. A good example is a raffle, where you sign up to win something (more below).
However, in some cases, swag is counterproductive. It may attract the wrong crowd to your booth, and if you have limited resources, you might spend time and energy of doing a mini “what we do” pitch to many non-relevant visitors who just ask you what
Another question is the type of industry you’re in, and what’s expected. This does not mean you should do the expected, but you should have a good reason not to. For example, if you’re in one of those conferences where everybody’s giving away t-shirts, try to differentiate yourself by giving something else like a cap, sunglasses, or something else.
Another (not so original, but still effective) idea is to give something within a cool cloth bag, so that people will be seen holding it throughout the conference.
The Process of Choosing Conference Giveaways
Here are the main questions you should ask yourself when choosing a “swag strategy”:
- How important is this event in terms of brand awareness? This leads to the question of whether you should aim at getting a lot of people walking around with your logo printed somewhere.
- Am I looking for very specific personas? In that case you can make a highly customizable gift. It can be something that includes a joke that would be understandable mainly by people of that group of people. If you’re selling to highly technical DevOps teams, something like, “when all else fails, use the –force” (referring to the git argument). You may also simply choose something that provides value to your target audience. For example, for a target audience of field sales people, giving some flight accessory like a cool sleep mask.
- How important is this event in terms of lead generation? Perhaps the best swag would either be a raffle (where people leave their details), or something else where people will agree to be scanned to get a small gift.
- Can I ride a wave? In other words, is there currently a trend that I can use to my advantage to give away something valuable? As an example, during covid, giving away masks or hand sanitizers. Though, of course, be aware you might not be the only one doing that.
- What are the logistic implications? Keep in mind that you need to ship it, deliver it, and sometimes ship or carry it home with you (or, oops, get rid of it some other way). So make sure you take all of that under consideration.
- Make sure you have spares.
Popular Conference Swag (and my thoughts around them)
Let’s wrap it up with some of the popular giveaway items I’ve seen, and what I think about it (as a giver as well as a reciever):
- Coffee Mugs. Love getting those, especially when they’re either funny, good looking, contain coffee, or auto-heat. If you’re giving them, keep in mind that they’re heavy.
- T-Shirts. At least in tech conferences, everybody already has many conference t-shirts. So both as a giver as well as a receiver, they need to be really cool. A nice twist is to give dry-fit t-shirts.
- Duffel Bags, Tote Bags. Uncommon, but can be useful, especially if people put the rest of the swag inside it, as it’s great for brand awareness.
- Badge Holders, Lanyards, etc. Meh.
- Stickers. If you hit the right creative (or if your logo is cool), you can win the jackpot, as they’re cheap, and if they appeal to visitors, they may keep them on their laptops.
Conclusion
That’s all I had to say (today) about conference swags, a topic I wanted to discuss actually while being in our company’s booth in a conference lately. And no, after analyzing the situation for that specific conference, according to our strategy and what we wanted to do there, we did not bring any of our cool swag. Next time.