With marketing and advertising costs being tightened its incredibly important to make sure that the budget you do have to play with works incredibly hard for you. Some people see memory sticks as just too gimmicky, a little over-rated and expensive, particularly when judged against more traditional promotional items. To be fair it depends what you’re trying to achieve and perhaps even more importantly who you target audience is.

If you simply want some promotional give-aways for a large consumer show or you’re looking to raise the general awareness of your brand/product then memory sticks might not be right for you. Equally, if your target audience are unlikely to have access to PC’s or have any little or no requirement for portable data storage solutions then memory sticks are unlikely to be appropriate.

Even the cheapest 64Mb branded memory stick is going to be quite a bit more expensive than a branded key-ring, a pen with a logo printed on or a packet of sweets or mints with your company name on. These small gestures/tokens are great to have on a stand to hand out en-masse, they will help to draw people to your stand and they’ll engender some basic form of recall and association with your company but memory sticks are in a different league.

If you’ve targeting business clients, partners, and journalists or perhaps you sell high value products to high net worth individuals then branded memory sticks should be on your list of candidate promotional items. Pretty much anyone who uses a PC will be familiar with the benefits of a USB memory stick and will be delighted to be given one (particularly free of charge)!

The real beauty of a memory stick is that you can pre-load the stick with your sales data, your price lists, links to your web site, media files (videos, music etc) and you can even protect this data and/or make it run automatically when the memory stick is used. Whilst you could argue you could achieve the same results with a CD or DVD the reality is these CD/DVD’s rarely get used/played and more likely will end up in the bin. On the other hand flash drives offer real convenience to the user so they have an incentive to use them. As such the content is far more likely to be read and viewed and because memory sticks can be carried around easily on a lanyard or key-ring your brand will get on-going exposure.

In the context of the additional value memory sticks deliver they are not expensive but they need to be purchased for the right event/audience. If you do pre-load data onto the memory sticks instead of printing catalogues, brochures, press releases etc. you can save yourself a small fortune and make life easier for yourself in terms of transportation and storage. Used smartly printed memory sticks will pay for themselves in a way in which an inert cap or mug simply can’t.