Swag: any corporate/branded merchandise given out for free to promote the company/brand (urbandictionary.com, #5)

Giving away stuff with your business name on it is a standard promotion tactic. Current customers and potentials will accept whatever goodies you’re handing out with glee. But wielding the power of free can easily demolish our tiny promotion budgets, so read on for tips on giving the right things to the right people.

Select freebies with care

The pains of buying the wrong stuff go beyond wasting money. Useless, ugly gifts will make your business (and you) look the opposite of good.

To help us spend wisely and avoid embarrassment, Naomi at IttyBiz offers this simple checklist for choosing good swag: the items you give away must be relevant, appropriate, attractive, practical, harmonious, and “not be shit”. The craptabulous stuff handed out at conventions and trade shows embodies the need for sensible criteria when choosing freebies.

With the typically worthless bits and pieces in mind, it’s easy to cast all swag as the enemy. Near the end of his rules for startups, Mark from Blog Maverick says, “NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo polo shirts.”

IMO, unless you run a golf shop, polo shirts are a crap freebie because they ignore 3 or 4 (or more) of the Guidelines for Great Swag. But overall, swag is not a bad thing…bad swag is a bad thing.

Give what keeps on giving

If there was room for two more, I would add permanent and visible to the Guidelines. For example, unless you run a restaurant, why would you give away food? It doesn’t make sense to offer swag with a limited shelf life.

Like this: We could go gaga over chocolate bars with personalized wrappers, paying extra for a full-color logo with our clever tagline. Customers may love us for the yum, but after they’ve eaten the chocolate and discarded our promotional wrapper, what remains to remind them about our business? They won’t keep the wrappers just because our business info is on it. They won’t save uneaten chocolate bars as mementos to our generosity, either.

So instead of selecting a short-lived freebie, prowl the Web for promo items your customers will be thrilled to keep and display. When people are excited about a product or service, they eagerly show off the swag. For example, fanboys and fangirls share their love for Feedburner and Adsense with Google’s free laptop stickers.

Raving fans are worth their weight in Euros, so take the time to select suitable gifts they’re happy to save and share. And if you don’t believe your business needs a fanclub, read this.

Focus on shoppers, not collectors

When I worked for a federal contractor, one of the bennies was entry to limited-access expos like FOSE, where vendors hawked techno-yummies and gave away swag by the double handful. At least they used to.

At my last FOSE, vendors scanned access badges before offering their swag. Along with our name and office branch, they knew instantly our rank in the procurement process. If we didn’t have the clout to put money in their pockets, they didn’t put any freebies in ours.

Whether the vendors were frugal or stingy is up for debate, but I appreciate their decision to focus on potential buyers and bypass folks out just to collect bags of free stuff. When your resources are limited, it’s more effective to focus your promotional budget on exceptional swag for a few than to buy crates of cheap freebies for the many.

Considering the Guidelines for Great Swag and my two add-ons, what would you choose to give your favorite customers? Would you prefer to buy for the whole crew or just a few? Let me know down below!