Distribution Business Articles

Marketing Sherpa put together a great 6 step article on working with the Press at a trade show titled How to Get Reporters to Write About You at a Busy Trade Show. Now, I won't steel their thunder. Step four of their approach delivers a very useful insight. They talk about providing inexpensive and practical chotchkes in the press room at a trade show. A good pen or a great coffee mug can go a long way, but their mention of USB thumb drives seems to be the most practical for the modern age. Providing a thumb drive with a press release and lots of product details and pictures, will be useful in getting your message out. It will also be a useful tool that can always come in handy for a reporter later on down the road. My company first utilized this trend almost two years at CES and it worked very very well. We put our brand on a USB thumb drive and provided them to reporters as well as prospective buyers. Since then the practice has become much more common at trade shows. So the best practice tips for utilizing these thumb drives needs to change a bit as well. Instead of offering a 64mb thumb drive and producing several hundred or even several thousand of these, think big. Consider that if many different companies are offering inexpensive flash drives with a small amount of storage, these things will feel like they are a dime a dozen. Choose a flash drive size that is large enough to hold triple to quadruple the file space required to hold the press release and the product literature. You do not want to provide a drive that is tempting to use, but requires someone to wipe your literature off at first usage. Make it big enough so that deleting your product information is tedious and gets delayed untill that last possible minute. Put aside several dozen very large flash drives in the multiple gigabyte range. Load the product literature on these devices, plus maybe a little extra. Maybe a free trial for a software, a downloaded movie, or even a coupon code to your online store. Save these large flash drive freebies for the reporters as opposed to the masses attending the trade show. A reporter may have multiple flash drives. They are more likely to consolidate their files on the larges drive as opposed to carrying around a few hundred 64mb flash drives. Try and be the company that provides the large drive that they will actually keep on their person for the next year. Technorati Tags: Trade Show Tips, Media management, Flash Drives, chotchkes