Branded USB Drives: Promotional Strategy for Maximum Impact

Promotional flash drives branded with your company logo offer many advantages for your marketing department, and they make it easy to develop a successful USB promotional marketing strategy and increase ROI:

Branded USB flash drives merge usefulness and convenience in a way that defies any other promotional product, all at a very attractive price point.

But how do you make sure a promotional flash USB drive works within your promotional strategy? Let's look at how you can increase the impact of your USB campaign...

For example, when you buy promotional flash drives from MemoTrek, you’ll typically engrave or imprint company information onto the device, such as your company logo and your contact information in order to create branded USB drives.

But these branded drives are about you. How do you maximize the marketing impact they make on each individual customer? This critical component of a promotional strategy is often overlooked.

Take a moment and think about your customers. What can you do to - or with - the promotional flash drive to make it about them? Answering this question will sharpen your promotional strategy and clarify what to do with your newly branded USB drives.

In the end, you can make every single promotional flash drive count. Here are some ideas that will easily increase the impact of your branded USB marketing campaign:

• Go for cool
Beyond merely handing out basic branded USB drives, you can actually commission designs that reflect your products or business. And if the promotional flash drive has a “cool,” “cute” or “funny” factor working for it, you instill a positive impression on your customers every time they even glance at it.
• Provide features useful to your customers
Pre-program the promotional flash drives with clever auto-run software that both benefits your customer and requires some kind of interaction with your company. For example, as long as the software provides real value, customers will be happy to register to use it. Just be sure the promotional flash drive is useful for your customer’s needs. That’s crucial for an effective promotional strategy.
• Offer options and make it personal
When your customers have input into their promotional flash drive, they become more invested in it. Offer them a range of colors and shapes, or choices for the software that comes preloaded. Just don’t overwhelm with too many choices. To further personalize, if you buy promotional flash drives in bulk, consider inscribing common names onto the branded USB drives in addition to your own logo.

In short, do everything you can to make the promotional flash drives about your customer. This will maximize the marketing impact and the value of your promotional strategy.

Feel free to discuss your promotional strategy with your MemoTrek account manager: we're happy to share with your our rich experience and help you improve the ROI of your branded USB marketing campaign!

Can Custom Flash Drives Drive More Business?

Custom flash drives can most definitely have a beneficial impact on your bottom line, but to maximize the impact of all those branded USB drives and make sure they pay off big, you need to know a few things.

With some surprisingly simple steps, your own custom flash drives can outperform your competitors, who simply toss their own branded USB drives into the marketplace without much thought or preparation. It's easy: learn how to kick-off your own successful USB marketing campaign by using our 4-step approach to effective USB promotion.

So what do you need to do in order to drastically increase the impact of your USB marketing campaigns?

Make Your Custom Flash Drives Compelling

Your custom flash drives have a couple of hurdles to overcome. For one thing, your customers probably already have a flash drive they use, so why should they use yours? For another, many customers don’t realize just how useful those little branded USB drives can be. And there goes your custom flash drives: handed off to someone else, lost into the Desk Drawer of Disappearing Items (we all have one) or worse yet: recycled.

Solution #1: Offer features on your custom flash drives that others don’t. For example, include preloaded software like encryption or antivirus programs for security, or even portable office apps that let your customers work on the go. Talk about value-added!

Solution #2: Educate your customer. Along with the branded USB drives, offer a one-page, easy-to-read handout that offers tips and tricks on how to use your custom flash drive.

For example, do your customers know that flash drives can be used to boost RAM and improve computer performance? Or have they heard of using color- or design-coded USB drives to organize different client/category/group files?

What's New at FlashDrivePros

It's sure been a very busy Summer at FlashDrivePros!

New Products:We just launched our new ultra-secure cloud storage service that offers "security conscious" folks a way to get in on online file storage. We've also switched to a new OEM flash drive manufacturer that is building us some of thefastest, most reliable flash drives we have ever seen at a price that people can afford. Finally, we're just about ready to launch our new data recovery software. It is a wizard style application that takes you step-by-step through the process of recovering your flash drive files. We expect to release it by mid-August.

New Hires: We're happy to welcome Sean and Brian to the team. Sean, the new FlashDrivePros General Manager, brings both technical experience and many years of customer support experience with him to the Pros. When you call us with questions about flash drive recovery he is likely the first person you will speak with. He's able to diagnose most flash drive problems on the phone and is happy to answer any questions you have about our data recovery service. Brian is an electrical engineer whose circuit design experience and creativity make him an incredible flash drive troubleshooter. He specializes in repairing physically broken flash drives and diagnosing and replacing failed circuit board components and is also skilled in recovering memory cards with logical problems such bit errors and bad blocks.

New Location: To create some elbow room we moved the lab to bigger facility. The new lab is just down the street from the University of Washington which makes it easier for students with damaged flash drives to find us. It will also fit with our plans to create an internship opportunity for electrical engineer/computer science students.

New Affiliate Program: Check out our new affiliate program rules and rates to see the various ways to partner with FlashDrivePros: http://www.flashdrivepros.com/Flash-Drive-Affiliate 

So that's the update. We appreciate your support as we seek to make more and even better products and services available to a greater number of people. As always, we welcome your feedback.

How to Repair a Flash Drive

USB flash drives are great for transferring files from one computer to another, backing up important documents, or even as a storage device as long as you use aflash drive backup program. Since you’re reading this blog post, that last bit of advice is probably a day too late. As you have discovered, flash drives are fragile little devices that can break or stop working in the blink of an eye. The good news is that there is a very good chance your flash drive can be repaired. So go ahead, breathe a sigh of relief, and read on.

Repairing a flash drive with logical damage

Logical damage refers to flash drive failure at the file-system level. Bad blocks in the memory chip or a lost or corrupted MBR table are two causes of logical damage. Some common indications are a USB device not recognized notification, a drive that says it needs to be formatted, or a drive that doesn’t show up at all.

Fixing a flash drive with logical damage can often times be accomplished with free data recover software like Power Data Recovery by MiniTool. After downloading and installing PDR, Just select your drive from the list and choose Lost Partition Recovery to attempt to recover your files. If your drive is not showing up at all, try following the steps in this blog post.

How to fix a physically damaged flash drive

In most cases, flash drives become physically damaged either due to impact or failed components. Repairing a flash drive that was bent while inserted into a USB port usually involves replacing the connector or in some cases rebuilding a damaged circuit board. If we suspect a failed component or components, we will search our database to see what are the most commonly failed components for this particular flash drive and also use other troubleshooting techniques to identify the parts that need to be replaced.

If we can’t identify the failed components, don’t have the part in stock, or if the circuit board is damaged beyond repair, our next step is to remove the memory chip from the flash drive and either place it on a new flash drive or, as a last resort, place it on one of our NAND memory chip readers.

Over the years FlashDrivePros has truly become a world leader in flash drive data recovery. We have a 94% success rate and are so confident we can recover your files from your broken flash drive that we offer a 100% no data – no fee guarantee. By making our client's files available for download from our secure online server, we’re often able to recover and deliver their files in less than 24 hours.

Click here to initiate a online service request now. Or for more information, give us a call or send us an email. We’re happy to speak with you and answer any questions you have about our data recovery services or flash drive recovery in general.

The Ultimate Flash Drive Buying Guide

So you finally decided to upgrade that cheap promotional flash drive with a transfer speed measured in bytes and a lifespan measured in months. Good for you! Storing important docs on a memory stick teetering on the verge of meltdown is just not smart.

Side note: If you have already lost some important data on a broken flash drive, don’t worry! You can get your files back fast by using FlashDrivePros’s guaranteedflash drive recovery service!

What features are most important to you? 

Before even looking at what flash drives are available, it’s important to think about how you tend to use your flash drive.

• How often do you use your flash drive?
• How much data do you keep on it?
• Are most of your files big or small?
• How confidential are your files?
• Are your files backed up in other locations?

The answers to these questions will help you decide which features are most important to you in selecting the perfect flash drive.

Durability

If you use your flash drive a lot, work in a rough environment, or are just prone to breaking stuff, you will definitely want a flash drive with some durability. Not only do you need to consider the physically durability of the case and connector, but also the quality of the NAND memory chip(s) inside. Flash memory can only withstand a limited amount of use before the memory chips start to wear out. Some manufacturers use a feature called dynamic wear leveling that ensures all the memory blocks do their fair share of the work. For physical durability, you will want to find a drive with a strong, metal case and sturdy connector that won’t snap off when you bump the drive with your knee.

Capacity

Do you tend to keep just a few documents, pictures and the occasional video on your flash drive, or do you need it for transferring large amounts of data from one computer to another? Generally, you should opt for a drive that offers as much storage capacity as you will actually use on a regular basis rather than getting the biggest one money can buy. For one thing, you will save some money. Secondly, performance and durability begin to decrease with drives over 32GB.

Speed

Speed is very important factor if you plan to transfer files above a few kilobytes on a regular basis. Waiting 3 hours to transfer your MP3 collection can be very, very frustrating. For the fastest speeds available, you will want to go for a USB 3.0 compatible drive. While many cheap flash drives have transfer speeds of just 1MB/s or less, USB 3.0 drives deliver actual transfer speeds of more than 60MB/s. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0 ports so you don’t have to find a 3.0 port to access your flash drive. And you will still get speeds as high as 25MB/s with USB 3.0 drives plugged into a USB 2.0 port.

Security

Work for the CIA or just really don’t want other people accessing your files? Several flash drive models come pre-loaded with component-level encryption. There are also a few software encryption programs on the market but we haven’t found anything that is user-friendly enough to use on a regular basis.

Backup

If you store anything even remotely important on your flash drive, you absolutely must have a system for regularly backing up your files! The geniuses at FlashDrivePros.com have developed a user-friendly automatic flash drive backup application called FDP Flash Drive Sync. The app is free to try and just $17 for license with free updates for life.

Having answers to these five questions should help you as you begin searching for a new flash drive. FlashDrivePros has also developed custom high quality flash driveswith these five questions in mind. Check out http://www.flashdrivepros.com/High-Speed-Flash-Drives for more details.

Should I Click Safely Remove Hardware Before Unplugging My Flash Drive?

I'll admit it, taking the extra time to click around your system tray to locate the ever elusive "Safely Remove Hardware" icon, and then trying to figure out which drive is which so you don't accidentally disconnect your printer instead of your USB drive is a bonafide pain in the rear. 

Some people argue that hitting the Safely Remove Hardware icon in Windows before ejecting your flash drive is actually unnecessary since Windows automatically disables caching for USB drives. However, we still think it’s a good idea that could prevent the files on your USB drive from becoming corrupted. Even though caching is disabled, data may still be transferring in the background. Maybe you were saving a large file and forgot about it. Or if you use an automatic backup application like FDP Flash Drive Sync, you could unplug it right in the middle of a scheduled backup operation and damage your files. So unless you just want to live life on the edge, we suggest you take a few extra seconds and hit the safely remove icon before yanking out your USB flash drive.

ZipMem Introduces the new Pen Drive In the Market

With the recently unleashed Zipmem,  is breaking new ground for USB flash drives. So far, their driving force was the Xporter, already boasting impressive speeds with models like the Magnum (which coincidentally, we will meet again in this post). But integrating USB 2.0 together with leading edge technology, Patriot is taking it up a notch. The SuperSonic flash drives use multiple channeling to make the most out of 2.0, delivering real high speeds even for large sequential file transfers. And for those on a budget, there is also more down-to-earth model. Simple yet stylish, a black and blue theme rounds off the picture. Literally!

Durable black Plastic case with lid  
10 year data retention
5 year warranty