Next week is the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit, and we marketing geeks at Kapost are getting excited.

Marketing events (particularly of the caliber thrown by Marketo) are excellent places to hobnob with like-minded pros and pick up a variety of tips at workshops and sessions.

You’ll also pick up a whole lot of swag.

You know the drill. You walk in the door of the exhibit hall and your senses are immediately assaulted with branded pens, t-shirts, plush dolls with a sewn on cape and embroidered website url…

It got us thinking, what if marketers reallocated some of that spending on swag and gave away content instead?

That idea led to the following collaboration with our friends at Beutler Ink. We researched fairly common (and uncommon) swag, and figured out what those dollars could get you in content instead. The results are pretty startling.

We looked at costs for swag for a fairly large event (factoring in prices for bulk orders), then compared that to content costs and the differences in return on that investment. For instance, $30,000 would buy you just under 2,600 desk daisies—a novel item with a hard-to-quantify ROI. That same amount would buy twelve eBooks (at $1,500 for writing and $1,000 for ten hours of design work), which could be repurposed on your blog, SlideShare account, social networks—basically supply you with content for an entire year.

Sounds pretty great, right?

So if you’re headed to the Marketing Nation Summit, stop by the Kapost booth (#222). We won’t have a lot of swag, but will give you content—the kind that will help you hire a content marketing team, measure results, and understand content marketing tools.

See you there!