A Slick eBay Marketing Idea

Monday, January 9 2006

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The word from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year is that everyone´s giving away thumb drives (flash drives to some). These are the USB memory devices that hook onto our key chain. You can put back-up files on them or photos of your kids or whatever. They come in sizes from 16MB to 1G and up.

I was at Staples last week and some HP reps gave me a 64MB one for hanging out for their color printer demo.

What does this mean to you? Well, if you sell something of relatively high value (like cars on eBay Motors, or mini-bikes, boats or .. anything with a value over $500 or so) this could be a very interesting marketing avenue. The drives are getting cheaper and cheaper by the minute, and since they´re a clean slate of memory, the possibilities of what you can put on them are endless. Eventually the things are going to be as cheap as printed pens. But they´re so much more powerful from a marketing perspective.

You can put super high-res photos on them, PowerPoint presentations, PDF brochures, videos, sound files, anything that helps you sell and educates the customer. The general public is still pretty hot for them, so they´re a good competitive differentiator. You could send them to your best customers, give them to prospects that express a certain level of interest, or offer them as a bonus for signing up for your newsletter.

If you have partner business or complementary products to yours, you can ask them to join a cross promotion campaign with you and spread the costs out. You put your logo on one side and theirs on the other. The possibilities are endless.

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Latest Comments

1. Great stuff Phil. It will be interesting to see what hap...

Great stuff Phil. It will be interesting to see what happens with the thumb drive market, particularly with the smaller ones. The smaller ones have been somewhat devalued by the larger ones (and the larger ones keep getting larger and cheaper). These days, drives under 100 megs aren't very valuable to purchasing consumers, but as give-aways they should be great. You're right - they would make great branded stuffers I wonder if the smaller ones will last or eventually go by the way of the floppy disk?

Comment By: Frank Ross | 1/9/06 at 12:00 PM A Slick eBay Marketing Idea

2. In an article about Moore's law, I recently read an inter...

In an article about Moore's law, I recently read an interesting thing. Several years ago the number of bytes produced eclipsed the number of printed alphabet characters produced... meaning the production of hard drives, flash drives, memory chips, etc that store data outpaced the production of characters in print -- in magazine, newspapers, books, etc. I'm not sure if it was cumulative (i.e. number of characters ever produced). Bytes are the dirt of digital real estate. You have to do something with them. Content or structure is important, of course, as is location, location, location. One way to locate in front of your target prospect is to give them a bit of your beautiful dirt on a key chain in the form of presentations, animations, photos, text and so on.

Comment By: Phil Dunn | 1/16/06 at 12:00 PM A Slick eBay Marketing Idea

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