Trading Cards as Hotel Promotional Items

Hotels can be a interesting application for trading cards, and the uses can reach out beyond the hotels to other local businesses.

The hotels themselves find them useful for describing rooms and amenities. These can range from just a couple of cards summarizing the features of the property to set of cards describing each amenity in more detail. As an example cards could detail the various features available in the meeting rooms, or the services available in the business center. They could also describe the pool area; size, outside bar, Jacuzzi, whatever special features they may want to highlight. The restaurant(s) and bar, number of rooms, suite features, etc. can all be detailed on their own cards.

Besides the amenities, many hotels have relationships with other local businesses; wineries, tourism spots, restaurants, museums, and theaters. They traditionally use rack cards for these, but trading cards are a convenient way to share this information with guests. The cards are small enough to fit into a pocket, but large enough to include images, a reasonable amount of information and even a small map or directions. Even if the client would like them larger than 2.5” x 3.5”, that isn’t a problem. They key is that they can be affordably customized to contain any information they like.

For more information about trading cards as promotional products you can view the short slide show below, or take a look at the promotional products section on our website. Both links are below.

Thanks,
Dave Farpelha

http://youtu.be/nCLrNz5F6SM

http://www.customsportscards.com/select.cfm/Custom-Trading-Cards/Promotional/

Corporate Promotions

One fairly unique promotional use is for corporate theme-based promotions, and these can take a couple of forms.

A classic example is a customer of ours that is a large air control system manufacturer, they manufacture and distribute home heating systems nationwide, but they also design and install large commercial systems. For the program we supported they were the HVAC contractor for a new Major League Baseball stadium. They created cards of their regional management team that was responsible for the project. The cards were baseball themed and the information on the back included things like Position, Rookie Year, College, Achievements, and contact information.

Another customer is a law firm that hosted a large group of customers at opening day for the Boston Red Sox. They thought it would be creative to have trading cards for each of the almost 40 lawyers attending the event. We put together a very nice card that had a baseball theme but still had a corporate look and feel to it. The information on the back had their “career stats” in the form of training camp (schools attended) and positions played (areas of expertise.)

In both cases trading cards provided a creative and memorable handout that served as not just a promotional handout, but were very useful and effective business cards that left strong impressions with the people that received them…and since they did not cost much more than business cards would they did not bust any budgets.

Any and all comments and questions are welcome.

Thanks,
Dave Farpelha

Trading Cards for Halls of Fame

One very nice opportunity for Customized Trading Cards is in support of various Halls of Fame. We have been fortunate enough to provide trading cards for two notable ones over the past few years: the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, sponsored by the Sports Video Group out of New York, and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame in San Francisco.

The trading cards of course feature that year’s inductees, are collated and packaged into sets, and are given to the attendees at the event. Another nice feature are the checklist cards that have the event logo on the front and list that year’s induction class on the back.

Sponsor cards can also be included in the packs so that the sponsoring company (or companies) can include their branding message and get visibility that goes beyond the day of the event; the sponsor logos are also included on the inductee cards.

Most cities or regions have a Hall of Fame, and they typically have annual events, so this is a pretty good opportunity for recurring orders; once they incorporate these into their events they tend to want to keep doing so.

Thanks for your time, I look forward to posting these ideas weekly and sharing other ways customized trading cards can be used.

Dave Farpelha

Trading Cards for Manufactured Products

One pretty creative idea for using trading cards came to us from a promotional distributor who has a customer that manufactures equipment for large food chains. The specific product in this case was a new commercial deep-fryer that was being custom designed for a very large fast-food chain.

They created a set of 8 trading cards that highlighted various differentiating product features; energy efficiency, durability, ease of cleaning, ease of operation, etc. The cards were packaged into sets and handed out at an industry trade show.

The cards were a hit all the way around; our distributor liked the product and the price, the end customer truly enjoyed the quality and uniqueness, and they were a hit at the trade show…providing the attendees with a truly unique, memorable, and useful handout.

This is just one idea of course; the same approach would work for any type of product, commercial or retail. They could be handed out at trade shows, included in packs of sales collateral, or packaged with products to cross promote other items in the company’s catalog.

Please let me know if you have any questions or topics you would like me to cover in future blog postings.

Thanks,
Dave Farpelha


http://www.facebook.com/CustomSportsCards

Visit our Website
http://www.customsportscards.com

Trading Cards as Promotional Items

Welcome to my introductory blog posting discussing the many uses for customized trading cards. The uses for these products go far beyond sports cards for little league baseball. They are such a flexible and powerful promotional product that it would be impossible to discuss all the applications in one blog posting, so I will be periodically discussing the various applications and case studies.

Whether you are a promotional products distributor looking for a creative new idea to pitch to clients, or a company (large or small) trying to find a creative and inexpensive way to market your product or services, or maybe even to use internally to communicate initiatives or programs, this could be the product to help fill that need.

Trading cards will never replace all the wonderful promotional products available, or take the place of extensive ad campaigns, but they can certainly supplement any marketing effort as a unique and memorable item to help strengthen the overall branding efforts of any company, while at the same time being soft on any budget. Today's technology allows for smaller runs of customized products at surprisingly affordable prices.

I look forward to sharing ideas and our experiences with all who are interested, for many blog postings to come. I am open to any and all questions on the topic as my goal is to provide useful information on this and any related topic that I can.

Thanks for your time,
Dave Farpelha