Tips for buying business gifts
Thanks you for visiting. Please consider subscribing to the RSS feed.
In my past professional life, I did several tours as a marketing manager, responsible at various times for market communications, market research, and strategic marketing. In these roles, one of the more enjoyable tasks was selecting and purchasing promotional gifts, mostly for trade shows and customer visits.
Today, this world is much easier since you can now purchase business gifts online, as opposed to the way I had to do it - catalogs and salesmen. But, I learned a lot along the way, so here’s a couple tips for those of you in marketing, or you bloggers that are thinking of bringing a few items to your next blogger-get-together so people will remember and link to you:
1. For trade shows, have two classes of gifts - the cheap giveaways to the greedy people that have no interest in you, your product/service, or your company. Pens, post-its, that kind of thing. Then, have nicer items for your existing customers that take the time to visit with you, and for quality prospects - maybe a golf shirt or something in that price range, or a hat if money is tight. At one point, I gave away nice multi-purpose tools (leatherman-like) and flew all over the country with them in my briefcase, pre-9/11.
2. For customer visits to your facility, consider how much business that customer is/will be bringing. Our customers were bringing us multi-million dollar contracts. While a nice denim shirt wasn’t going to influence that kind of decision, you don’t want to look cheap by giving them a ballpoint pen. If the boss is set on pens (been there, done that, got the cheap-o pen to prove it), get a nice business gift pen set that looks and works like a quality item.
3. No matter what, always have personalized business gifts. You have a logo, so use it! If you can’t put a logo on the item you’re giving away, you’re wasting your money. The whole point is to leave the customer with something that has your brand attached to it.
4. Consider giving your customer’s something useful. A VP of engineering at one company I worked had a collection of coffee cups, and he didn’t drink coffee. So, he set up shelves in a conference room and displayed them there - hundreds of them. We called it the Cup Room. I couldn’t remember a single logo today, and when he left those cups stayed behind. On the other hand, I have a caribiner from a company that laid me off years ago that I still use for my keys.
Hope these tips were helpful. Please leave a comment if you have some ideas that should be considered as well.
Popularity: 31% [?]
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment