Get the Most out of Using Promotional Items at Trade Shows

If your booth is well-placed on the main traffic path you’re in luck, and you probably won’t have too much trouble getting plenty of visitors. If you’re tucked away in a corner, however, you’ve got to think up some ways to get more people to your location. In either case, you’ve got some heavy competition, as the trade show is highly likely to be full of booth-owners who are having the same problems as you are and trying to think up ways to combat them.

When choosing promotional items to display at your trade show booth, think in terms of bait. The items you display work best if they are colorful, so that people who pass by your booth will be attracted to your items. Choosing items that are designed with your company color scheme is a great idea—distributing promotional items that use company colors will help reinforce your business identity, in turn helping to make your company more memorable.

Another equally important point is that the items you choose should fit your company’s image, and be related in some way to the products or services you offer. A computer software or hardware company, for example, might give out computer accessories or other technology-related items.

If you’re going to distribute more generic items such as pens, key rings or coffee mugs, it’s particularly important to choose creative designs and methods of distributing these items. They’re such commonly-used promotional items that you risk losing the impact of your own booth in the face of enormous amounts of competition from every other booth that gives them away.

One particularly effective promotional item is a simple plastic bag. You can, for example, equip someone with a large number of bags, and have them stationed at the door to the trade show staging room to distribute the bags to people who enter. This is an excellent way of distributing items that people will appreciate—most people will end up with a large amount of promotional material by the end of a trade show, but they may not have enough bag space to conveniently carry everything. You don’t even need to buy expensive bags for this to work well—an inexpensive but sturdy plastic bag will be perfect for your purpose. With your company name and logo branded on each bag, a large number of people will be walking around generating some publicity for your company, and will be reminding every passer by that your company is represented at the show.

With all the competition that you face at trade shows, it’s often worthwhile to consider adding some spot prizes to your range of promotional items. These can be more valuable items that you hand out at random times during the day, or to every tenth or twentieth person who visits your booth, for example. Giving additional items such as these and including a random element in the distribution can be an ideal method of generating extra interest in your trade show booth.