Using Promotional Items at Trade Shows and Career Fairs

By Imogen Brown

If your organization attends Trade Shows and Career Fairs, you need promotional items to use as giveaways so people will easily remember your company's name, their positive experience with you at the event, and what it is that your organization does. A Trade Show is an industry-related event meant to showcase a variety of companies, and is often held in the context of a larger event like a symposium or educational experience. In an exhibition hall at a Trade Show, attendees at the larger event will go from booth to both, giving you the opportunity to win them over as a customer. A Career Fair is an event often sponsored by a particular industry, school, or professional or community organization, and is used to attract quality employees to your organization. Both of these kinds of events are often very busy and attended by many different organizations. Therefore, it is important to choose promotional gifts that you can give to each attendee with whom you make contact, to ensure that you have imprinted on their memory.

At a Trade Show or Career Fair, you will often have very little face time with each potential customer or employee who stops at your booth or table. Therefore, it is of vital importance to make a good impression quickly, to engage attention and create a more lasting memory in their mind. Bringing effective promotional items will help an individual to recall not only your organization but also the conversation you shared at the Trade Show or Career Fair.

What promotional gifts are most effective at a Trade Show or Career Fair? It all depends on the setting, the basis for your organization, and the type of customer or employee you are hoping to attract. Many organizations invest in a variety of different promotional products in order to give a potential customer or employee the opportunity to choose which object they would like to keep as a reminder of their brief time spent with your organization. Other organizations will choose just one promo item to giveaway at Trade Shows and Career Fairs, ensuring that the item so closely identifies with the aims of their company that it would be impossible not to make an association.

If you choose to purchase a variety of promotional products to represent your organization while you exhibit at a Trade Show or Career Fair, ensure that the variety is well-rounded. You will often learn as much about a potential client or employee by the item they choose than from the conversation you share. Common promotional gifts used by many organizations include coffee mugs, key rings, squeezee balls, pens, pencils, bags and notebooks. No matter which of these items or any variety of others you choose, ensure that you elect to have your organization's name and, if applicable, logo displayed prominently and flatteringly on each object. In the context of a Trade Show or Career Fair, there will be far too many competing organizations for a promotional item to be entirely representative of your organization if it is not properly branded.

A Trade Show or Career Fair is the perfect opportunity to show off your organization. With the right promotional items, you could attract new customers or employees and at the same time ensure the future success of your company!

Imogen Brown is the marketing manager for Clickpromogifts one of the UK's premier suppliers of promotional items and custom printed promotional gifts.