Thursday, April 15, 2010

Using FREE to Market Your Business

I think most people have heard of Seth Godin and maybe most of you have seen/heard/read the book Free Prize Inside!  written by Seth.  We are aware of these marketing tactics and Seth does a good job of bringing it to top of mind, so that we remember that "oh hey, this worked on ME before, so I should try out this tactic for my own business."
Soon enough there were a ton of different businesses trying this tactic.  Free trial, samples, sign-up, giveaways, etc.  You've probably been suckered into this yourself a couple times. 
Today I was on LinkedIn checking out one of the groups that I had joined for Treasury Management and noticed that a lot of people postings were for these free ebooks.  The thing is there was less than 5 views for most of these postings and even fewer downloads. 
What does this mean?  That everybody has caught on to this trend of handing out FREE stuff, and this has caused a huge backlog of FREE stuff that customers/consumers have to absorb/read/take their pick. 
So many things are FREE right now that after narrowing down from the original list of product/service offerings, a customer then has to filter out all the FREE stuff.  Decisions, decisions. 

I don't have an answer that solves this issue but it's something to think about; if you have any suggestions please leave a comment on this post!


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