In Episode #396, Eric and Neil discuss whether or not you should invest in typical marketing swag. Tune in to learn why Eric and Neil won’t spend a cent on swag while Sujan, Single Grain’s founder, blogged that he made $500K from it.

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 00:27 – Today’s topic: Should You Invest In Marketing Swag?
• 00:37 – Single Grain’s founder, Sujan Patel, had a lot of shirts and he made $500K out of it
• 00:50 – Personally, Eric won’t invest into swag
  • 00:58 – Although, he has gotten useful swag from conferences before, and every time he uses the swag, he remembers the conference
  • 01:18 – “You want to have stuff that people actually use”
• 01:37 – Neil believes that if you’re a big company, giving away swag is a good strategy in branding
• 01:45 – Swag can be too expensive for startups and it’s difficult to track your ROI from it
• 02:29 – If you want to try something, go to Startup Drugz instead
• 03:04 – Neil doesn’t create swag and would not even if he was a big company
• 03:30 – Marketing School is giving away a free 1 year subscription of Crazy Egg which is a visual analytics tool
  • 04:25 – Go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway for multiple entries
• 04:38 – That’s it for today’s episode!

3 Key Points:

1. Big companies with extra funds can spend on swag because it can be a good branding strategy—“can” is the keyword.
2. If you are going to invest in swag, make it as usable as possible, and don’t go cheap—you want it to last for a while.
3. Because of the associated costs with having quality swag most startups and small businesses shouldn’t consider it.

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• NeilPatel.com
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• Single Grain
• Twitter @neilpatel
• Twitter @ericosiu