Give it Away Free - STRATEGICALLY
"The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing."
― Tom Fishburne
Are you someone who naturally gives away your knowledge, your services, or your products, for FREE? That can be a really, really excellent thing, as long as it’s intentional and part of a plan you’ve crafted. The difficulty comes when it’s the only approach you have in letting the world know what you’re knowledgeable about, the products you’ve created, or the services you provide. If you only give things away free because you are afraid or unskilled in exchanging your knowledge, products, or services for payment, that’s a different story.
Providing free samples is a well-established marketing approach in many industries, with greater and lesser success. One of the easiest examples to point out is the food samples readily available at the big box warehouse stores like COSTCO. While those brands do a lot more marketing than only giving free samples, that particular method has worked well for them over many years.
There are service based companies, software products, and many other fields that lead with free trial periods and free service levels. This model shows up minimally in publishing with examples of a free book chapter or an infographic.
More and more book authors are considering and implementing additional ways to differentiate themselves.
Now, how about using free distribution of a 52-tip booklet as a primary, successful marketing vehicle? We served a client who did just that. The company founders created a system for cleaning school buildings that saved time, saved money, got the job done better, made the school buildings healthier, and made the janitors, school board, and parents happier.
The company came to us to write two different related tips booklets about ways to improve the particular tasks involved in the overall cleaning process.
The booklets gave solid, applicable tips enough for the head of the maintenance department to get a sense of what this company was about, and not so much that they had the whole system displayed to them. The booklets were completely funded by a couple of companies who were vendors of the equipment and cleaning products used in this system. The high-ticket system was THE product the company was selling. The booklet was completely educational, with a “thank-you price consideration” coupon from each of the vendors on the last page of the two booklets. This was simultaneously a marketing tool that educated the janitors much more effectively than other marketing material formats could do.
If you’re already providing something free as a marketing tool, and you’re being very intentional about it, that’s great. If you’re not adding that intentionality (yet) and you think it’s worth testing, you might be happily surprised by the results you get. Either way, create your plan, log the results along the way, and decide if it bears expanding or there are still tweaks to be made. At the very least, next time you give something away, know why you’re doing it!!