If you’re one of the thousands of companies this year that will be exhibiting at a trade show then at some point you’ll no doubt be considering whether you should invest in promotional products to support your sales team at the show.

Exhibiting at a trade show is typically a pretty large investment in terms of money, time and manpower and as such it’s critical that this commitment is fully optimised. Whilst lots of energy tends to get put into the location of the stand in the exhibition hall, the stand design, the lighting of the stand and who’s going to staff the stand sometimes the little, but nevertheless important, things like giveaways and collateral for the show tend to get overlooked.

Whilst an exciting and innovative promotional tool or giveaway designed to draw people to the stand won’t make or break a show it will certainly help to maximise your investment. When you’re competing for the attention of potential customers against hundreds of other exhibitors its key that you equip you sales team with all the tools they need and a giveaway that pulls people into the stand works.

Your challenge is to decide what’s the best product for you and for your target audience. What really is going to deliver the greatest footfall onto your stand and what’s going to get your product and company to stand out from all the others that will be visited during the show?  After all we all know that at the end of most shows the attendees leave with tired legs, heavy hearts and laden down with carrier bags full of brochures and leaflets.  What you have to do during the show is “wow” them, ideally secure an order but failing that get them interested enough so that when they are back at home or work they recall your company and follow up with an enquiry.

There are lots of inexpensive giveaways that work on one level like printed bags which double as a “walking advert” for your brand or printed usb pens, which cost pennies. There are even sweets that can be printed with your brand and help get people to approach your stand. The problem with these is that they are either eaten at the event or thrown away after the event! With all of these simple ideas there is very little carry through post the event, there is no incentive to use them on an on-going basis and they don’t deliver much information about you’re company or products.

One product that is growing in popularity for use at tradeshows is the promotional USB flash drive. Whilst flash drives might initially seem too expensive to use a “giveaway” bear in mind that if you pre-load all of your sales material onto the promotional flash drive you can reduce significantly your brochure print costs and your storage and transportation costs. Because you can load data onto the flash drives right up to the start of the show (and even during the show if you wish) you can be much more flexible in terms of what brochures and data you take with you to the show. More fundamentally people like to be given memory sticks and they will keep them and use them after the show.

The on-going use of a printed usb flash drive means after the show means your brand will continue to get exposed and your sales material will be there every time the flash drive is inserted into a PC.  So, in terms of drawing prospects to your stand and delivering sales leads to your company branded flash drives deliver.