5 Best Things to Giveaway at Conferences.

 

1. Drinkware For Everyone

Drinkware can include mugs, tumblers and reusable water bottles that will include your branding and logo to boost your image and get your name out there. These types of gifts are  best at events because they are sustainable and suitable for everyone.

Quality Counts:  Prioritise options made from glass or BPA free plastic for the healthiest drinkware while promoting sustainability. Choose a drinkware that will tailor to your audience, such as reusable water bottle for those who are athletic, mugs for those coffee lovers and tumblers for those who love to travel.

2. Brand Lovers

As all businesses know, branded gifts are well known in marketing as its capable at getting your brand noticed. Also, who doesn’t love branded gifts?! These types of gifts are best for annual meetings and conferences with potential clients as these are often pricier however go down well with guests.

Quality Counts:  Look at your audience and pay attention to what products your audience regularly uses, wears, or carries. Then you can tailor your products to match that criteria. From time to time, using custom printing from other companies can be expensive so to save money, why not go low tech and add your own labels to the merchandise instead?!

3. Sustainable Technology

Sustainable technology can be anything from power banks, phone stands, to USB’s but with the bonus of being made from eco friendly materials. They can be used at all kinds of events but best in larger conferences as they are reusable for many years.

Quality Counts: Try to look for materials such as bamboo since they are more sustainable than plastic and very popular with all demographics.  Technology can be different for each generation so for example, to suit all generations you could create a sustainable charger pad for Millennials and bamboo stylus pens for Generation X. Everybody wins!

4. Our Wellbeing

With today’s society being on the go constantly, its important everyone maintains a good mental and physical health. Branded items that promote those concerns could be yoga mats and step counters. These types of gifts would be best at health-related events.

Quality Counts: Try using recycled products and equipment that could be reused, for example workout clothing could be used multiple times and something everybody uses. Pay attention to the health concerns of your target demographics, millennials are more involved with mental health concerns and promote such things as meditation and yoga, whereas generations X concerns are more physical.

5. Travel Gifts

Travel gifts are more appealing when they can be used before, during and after people travel. These items could include toiletry kits, fun games to play on their journey and even luggage tags. The ideal events to use these would be events with international attendees or an event where the guests are more likely to travel or have travelled.

Quality Counts: Look at designs that are lightweight and slim, making it easier for travel so wherever they are you can simply pop your belongings into a carry on with no fuss.

What is best to put in a gift bag?

You can put all kinds of items that fit within your budget and theme into your gift bag. Choose one new and main product that will help boost your brand and matches your marketing criteria, then pick two to four complementary products based around that product that will look good together and stay relevant to the brand.

 The Best Freebies to Giveaway.

1. Reusable water bottles. Often conferences can be very busy and go on all day so many people find it handy to have a bottle they can refill as many times as they wish without having to queue for bottled water.
2. Eco-friendly totes.Everyone buys groceries, so to help the environment, choose canvas totes over plastic ones.
3. Recycled click pens. Ever been frantically looking for a pen and nobody seems to have one?
4. Bamboo Power Banks. A lot of products are becoming more sustainable, using materials such as bamboo will aid towards to the environments wellbeing while being proactive.
5. Hand Sanitisers. With the current situation around the world, it only seems right to include a hand sanitiser especially when events often involve a fair amount of hand shaking, its important for people to keep up good hygiene.

What kind of gifts do employees like?

Employees like gifts that promote wellbeing and self-care because it feels good to be healthy and in turn makes them more productive. Choose personalised gifts such as incense sticks or essential oils with your logo on the labels.

It’s the thought that counts

Think carefully about the people who are attending the event and your ideal guest. What do they like? What will they use? What will they remember receiving? For example, people who like clothes would probably appreciate having a discount code to a valued high street store. Most likely people want something they can use on a daily basis and at the same time something productive.

Furthermore, you may want to consider looking into the current trends of your audience by researching social media and making it relevant to your event and product.

Spend some time to think about how you want the gift to look, you want your brand to look tasteful and want to ensure your guests will use it outside the event. So instead of having one massive logo printed on the product, think about something small and understated so people are more likely to use or wear it.

Don’t Overlook Quality

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for. Everybody wants to save money but sometimes its important to indulge a little. After all if you were gifted something you would remember the quality and how many times you’ve used it, rather than something that broke after using it a few times.

Avoid Heavy!

Remember that people are going to be carrying this stuff around the venue for hours so try to avoid anything that’s overly large and heavy, for example paperweights are a very bad idea. They take up space and nobody wants to be carrying that around all day long and most likely have to travel home with it.

Careful Buying

Its important you shop around for the best deal without losing quality. The last thing you want to do is pay lots of money for something another vendor may offer for free or a much lower price for the same quality. You want to offer the best merchandise while staying in your budget so its best to do your research

Be Prepared

When purchasing merchandise, it would be wise to make a list of potential vendors and get a quote from each. Compare each one against one another factoring price, quality, reviews and proximity to your company. It is important you do all this well in advance to your event to avoid anything going wrong. Though, it is easy to get caught up in other duties and easy to forget that not all companies’ delivery as quickly as others.  By being prepared you’ll save yourself plenty of stress!

The Best Gifts!

Now you have decided on what exactly is the best conference merchandise, how to find the best quality,  what personalised items to include, what freebies and what your employees actually want, you can start to put together your goodie bag. Try to tie in what you have received from conferences in the past and get a good idea of how to engage with your audience.