How Much Should You Spend on Business Gifts for Trade Shows?

Business gifts can be an important part of your marketing strategy as well as a fairly big part of your advertising and promotional budget. How much should you spend for business gifts and promotional items? Opinions vary, and are based on everything from “how much we can afford to spend” to “whatever it costs to get the sale”. Overall, though, there are some guidelines that can help you decide how much you should spend on each of the business gifts or promotional items that you give away.

How Big Is Your Audience?
Start by considering your target market. How narrowly focused is it? Are you selling a product that is of interest or is needed by everyone, or is it a highly specific product that will only be of interest to a select few? The larger your potential audience, the less money you should have to spend to put your product and your sales pitch for it in front of them.

Logistics also plays a part. Obviously, if you have to reach thousands of people, you’ll have less money available to reach each of them than if your potential market consists of a few dozen people. If you’ve only got £1,000 to spend, it has to stretch to reach as much of your potential market as possible. Or does it?

How much is a sale worth to you?
The second factor to consider when choosing the level of the business gifts for your promotion is how much each successful contact is worth to you. If you sell disposable nappies, for instance, you have two different levels of customers to consider: individual mums who are choosing nappies for their own infants, and commercial customers, including retail outlets, nurseries and hospitals. Cultivating those individual parents is important, of course, but one commercial regular commercial customer could be worth a hundred or more individual customers. You’ll want to invest more per customer in designing, choosing and presenting your product with business gifts to those commercial clients because your potential benefit is far greater.

How much is time worth to your buyers?
Essentially business gifts and trade show giveaways are your way of thanking potential customers for taking the time to listen to your sales pitch. The more “face time” it takes to deliver, the more you should spend on the thank you reward. If all you really want is to get your name into the hands of potential customers and perhaps have them sample your product, then by all means, use low-cost trade show giveaways that will cost you less than £1 a piece. The same holds true if the product that you’re selling will only net you a few pence profit per sale. In other words, if your aim is volume, then go for cheap.

If, on the other hand, you want concentrated face-to-face time with your prospective customers so that you can establish the beginning of a long term relationship, then you should be prepared to pay what the time is worth. Most B2B sales reps are consider it quite reasonable to invest £.50-£1 to secure that kind of time with buyers for major retailers or decision makers in the industries they want to penetrate. In other words, for a 30 minute sales presentation at a trade show or event, figure that your incentive/thank you business gifts should cost £15-£25 each. In either case, your prospects will be leaving with a tangible item that will refresh their memory about your product whenever they see or use it.

Gareth Parkin is the co-founder of Ideasbynet, the UK's largest online source of business gifts and promotional gifts company based in the north of England. He has taken the UK gift market by storm by the application of modern business thinking and the latest search engine marketing techniques. For more details on business gifts visit www.ideasbynet.com