The golden rule of marketing is that you are performing a value exchange. There is risk on both sides of that contract, whether you are B2B, B2C, B2G, or any other configuration wherein resources are being exchanged for some good or service. It's your job as a marketer to reduce that friction-whether it be value perception, lack of awareness, cost, or otherwise-in order to get your product to its best audience.
Free is a powerful tool. It's the ultimate in lack of risk. For the consumer, you are receiving a product at no financial expenditure. In fact, the only downside of free for you as the recipient is that the vendor may not be serious. That means whatever product or service they offered you may never materialize, or could be incomplete or otherwise shoddy. This certainly is a risk, and should be weighed as you make your decision to enter an agreement for anything labeled "free."
Regardless of your offering, you as a marketer should identify and cater to some sort of pain point that your customer needs to have solved. Once you've done that, you can use "free" as a promotional technique.
- Build a Suite of Free Resources to Promote
The first step of any solid promotion in today's digital world is tackling and organizing your content marketing strategy. That means creating a library of whitepapers, tools, spreadsheets, infographics, or other resources that bring value to your audience. Not only do free resources build trust with your customers, but they also assist in visibility by becoming shareable nuggets that house a wealth of useful knowledge. Also, resources like these can be tweaked, customized, and promoted to various segments of your audience, addressing a number of pain points that affect the people that matter to you most in the sales funnel.
- Offer an Expert Review
Every company or person has some problem, some how. The idea of a free expert review both proves your value, assuming you have that, gives you further insights into the pain points and business traits of your audience, and gives you a foot in the door to becoming their go-to product or service. Almost no one would argue that a fresh set of eyes on a problem is a bad idea-and if they do, you don't want to be doing business with that entity, anyway. Making recommendations to your customer improves your trust, and that's in addition to the other aforementioned benefits. If you really want to be a rock star, try using your Twitter like an office hours to gain visibility, engagement, followers, and authority, all while getting the word out about your product or service.
- Provide a Training Course
Third party services like Udemy are a great way to promote your brand (if it matches your offering). Think about all the places you can promote these courses on third party sites. Of course this increases your visibility, but even more importantly, they provide backlinks and leads to your blog for supplemental resources. The dissemination of your course means you increase your share of voice in the space, all while familiarizing your audience with the advantages and value of your offering.
- Offer a Free Trial
Obviously, you'll want to weight the benefits of offering a free trial if this practice is at too great of a loss to your company. However, many companies can comfortably offer a trial of their software, service, or product in an affordable-and effective-way. Offering a trial has many benefits, the most of which being that your value is easily proven in the trial time, making your customer that much more likely to bite off on a real, paying contract.
If you can't offer a free trial, think of an alternative way you can bring value to your customer in a way that instills some permanency. For example, this Brand Scorecard is not an actual SaaS, but does provide quick, lasting value to a marketer.
- Make it a Free Spotlight
If there's one thing people love talking about, it's themselves. If your company produces a blog-which it should-offer to do a spotlight on the CMO of a company likely to be a good fit for your product. You'll of course get the visibility of that company's network, all while building trust with their employees. The next time someone on the marketing team needs to research marketing software to propose in the budget, there's no doubt you'll be at the top of their list when it comes time to make the purchase.