If you want your events or simple occasions to be memorable, 3D giveaways can seal the deal. Today, Tom and Tracy Hazzard discuss the benefits of 3D print giveaways for promoting your business. Most gifts are mostly junk, that is why giving away something exceptional and unique is necessary when you are in the 3D print business. All you need to do is look into companies like Voodoo and experts offering 3D printed giveaways and use their services to lead your brand to success.

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3D Print Giveaways

Discussing the benefits of 3D print giveaways for promoting your business. But if you are going to go through the effort to take advantage of what 3D Printing has to offer for promotional giveaways, make them exceptional!

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Elephants are in the 3D print giveaways category that has been way too over done.

We have done a bit of 3D print giveaways lately. When we go to trade shows, we’ve noticed that the giveaways are mostly junk. They are very contrived. It is literally broken within seconds, that is not okay. If you are going to give away something, you might as well make it something that will last at least a little while and have an impact as it hopefully has your brand on it – that’s the point of 3D print giveaways after all. Make sure your 3D print giveaways are not a hunk of junk and it is not the same old same old. The ones printed over and over again are the ones that I don’t want to see. Nobody wants that. What that says is that your company is unoriginal.

It is so easy to make something original if you have a 3D printer and you have the ability to use it. Or you can send it to a service bureau to make a hundred of them as 3D print giveaways at a trade show. There are a lot of things that you can do. You can even modify it and make it your own. It goes even further than that because it is a cop out to not make a bunch of 3D print giveaways. It is a cop out for you to not give a giveaway or not pay something for it. If you have been hocking anything other than a 3D printer, you would have had to buy something to giveaway in your trade show booth. You put it in your marketing budget. It is pennies on the dollar to print this stuff out. It costs virtually nothing for the filament. Have a little budget and pay someone to design you something original if you are incapable of doing it yourself. This is representing your company.

If you don’t do 3D print giveaways at trade shows you are saying your company is unoriginal and you’ve got no budget for something as simple as getting a simple design if this is what you do. Why do I want to do business with a company that has an unoriginal and cheaply made design? You want to stick in potential customer’s minds by giving them unique and a reason for them to be excited about you and 3D print giveaways are perfect for accomplishing that. You want be the top of the mind when you leave that show after they have seen a hundred or a thousand companies.

They really do not have excuses to not have 3D print giveaways. There are so many good designers out there. Only one person or company at all has come to us to ask if we would design something for their trade show. That’s it, one company out of all of that. If you would offer to give our podcast publicity, we would have done the trade for it. There is no excuse. Find yourself a designer, who you can give a little promo in your booth on, put a press release out too. There is no excuse to that. If you do not have time to let a 3D printer run 24/7 for a lot of time to make 3D print giveaways, there are places that you can get them made.

Voodoo is a 3D print service bureau that prints on FFF or FDM 3D printers. They do a great job and have a quick turnaround. For me, it was worth doing it. It was still reasonably priced for us and as a complex item. The other example is a giveaway but for a different purpose. My mother belongs to a yacht club in New York – the American Yacht Club. They go on a cruise up the east coast. You get a dozen boats that are going from town to town sailing over the course of the day. In the evening, they have fun activities and dinner. They do this event called a gutter boat race. They get these toy kits like a soap box derby car races. It is like a piece of wood and a little paper with a triangle for the sail. You are allowed to do some customization, but you use the same kit. They have these gutters that they take on the trip. They fill them with water and then they have these races where the people put the boats in there and blow on it to make it cross the finish line first. It is like those frog jumping race where they jump over the line first.

You have this gutter boat and they give out awards. They wanted to make these awards. Since my mother was running the gutter boat race last year, I did it. I spent more time designing this Olympic medal but it is made of PLA with one color where I got a boat in the middle. It had three different colors for the different places. They had 8 races so I made 24 of these medals, eight for each color. My mom tied ribbons to hang around your neck. I got myself stuck and got to do it again. I used the same model for this years race. I’m printing them right now and will ship them out in the next few days. It is a family thing so I’m not charging for it. It probably costs me $10 in filament at most.

I do that on my own just to do a family favor, but it is a great example of a giveaway which I could have charged them. These things are good publicity for the designers to have stuff in trade shows. You are showing off your skills. Make them original. Stop downloading files for these 3D print giveaways. Do something that is special that highlights your capabilities and what you want to be doing as well as your mission. Make them special and exceptional. There is so much opportunity that 3D printing gives you to do something unique and be top of mind for your customers.

Make something to sell that is 3D printed – that is really cool. We did that for my cousin ever year in their annual event. He lost his wife years ago and they have a memorial golf event. We auction off things for them. We have done our angels that way with her initials in them. These are things that you can do for non-profits. There are easy ways to do that. I can relate to that in our podcast with Bridgette Monegon who does sculptures of Alice in Wonderland and other things. They also do it when you have a gallery opening where you give away a small version of the sculpture as a giveaway. That’s a great idea for 3D print giveaways.

It makes a lot of sense if you have big donors. These are the things that you talk about. Whether you are doing this as a hobby or as a school promotion, or you are really a company that has 3D printing services, these things represent you after the fact. People take these to their homes and put these in their briefcases and bags. If they look like junk a couple of days later and get broken and if they see them everywhere else, then their mind is going to the fact that you are not good enough quality for them, and they will think that you are not worth doing business with. Think carefully about what you do here. This is a representation of you.

There are many 3D print manufacturers that do not do 3D print giveaways. I am surprised on how many do not. To me, that is the first thing that I should be doing to try to help people remember your brand. I appreciated it when we went back in the original days where we start buying the Makerbot the first time. The fact that you can see a simple off the machine meant something. Tom’s mother got something printed right in front of her and took it away with her and had it in her hand. Being able to do that is extremely important in the process. If you are not or if you are in the 3D print industry, 3D print giveaways are a cool modern type of a giveaway really does make a lot of sense.

We highly recommend it. Just make your 3D print giveaways exceptional. Make them unique. If you need help with that, ask your designer or hire someone to do it. It does not have to be us, we do not really do a lot of that kind of work. I probably don’t have time for it, so do not ask us actually. We can try to help refer you to someone maybe or check out our Friday episodes because there might be someone there who might be a perfect fit for you.

Hope this is an enjoyable podcast to all of you. Keep an eye out for new episodes. We used Shotbox by the way to get photos of the yacht club trophy. We like this product because it is useful to anybody. It goes a little bit deeper for me in the fact that it is hard to make something simple and completely effective to everything that it needs to do in a simple way. It is not complicated. I cannot tell you how many inventions I reviewed which are very complicated. This is not. This is simple, easy, and amazing. It is perfect to do the job just right that deserves credit.

There is that cliché to make it simple. This product is simple. Keep it simple, and make it be exactly what it needs to be.

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