Free Doesn't Mean Great, But It Can Mean Good
The word FREE has been marketing jargon since marketing was invented. Who invented marketing in the first place? It doesn't matter, but what does matter for every business is obtaining new customers. Once the offer is rock hard and sales process proven, it becomes about obtaining new customers as cheap as possible. Cheap doesn't solely refer to your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) as per marketing cost or ad spend, it refers to how much time someone on the sales team is spending to close, cost of all your software, or any costs associated with acquiring a customer.
To Be Free is To Be Great
The faster a complete stranger discovers and trusts your brand, the faster a sales cycle will be. A great way to get someone to know, like, and trust you, providing free up-front value. This is a great way to get new clients or customers. You'll hear countless 'gurus' spewing out phrases like, "Value - Value - Value - Ask".
I like this phrase and I agree with it, but I'm not going to harp on it. I'm sure by now it's been shoved down your throat so far, you've had enough.
At the end of the day, no business owner likes to give the fruits of their labor away for free - except the legend Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and the wealthiest person to ever exist). He founded Amazon on the principle of giving books to consumers at the cheapest rate possible. Amazon takes a loss when a customer visits the site for the first time and buys $25 worth of goods with free shipping. The logic: it may cost us money to make a customer happy and show them how we work, but they'll keep purchasing from us for the next 10 years or more, and we'll end up with a CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) exponentially higher than our CAC.
Have you ever been scrolling Instagram and seen the Free + Shipping offers? This was and still is executed to perfection by people like Russell Brunson, Tony Robbins and Grant Cardone. They'll all swear by the strategy - it's made them hundreds of millions at this point.
Convince the consumer they need my product enough to pay $10 for shipping, thus covering the cost of manufacturing and shipping the book, so I don't lose money, but I gain a persons email and billing information - plus a direct line into the lead's psyche.
Data Data Data
This allows a brand to be able to continue to market to the consumer forever. Track the consumer's data (unless of course you used an VPN) forever. Companies most people have never heard of make the lion's share of their profits off buying, selling, and manipulating this data. We help companies better understand the data they have to build better sales processes.
Data will always be the most valuable asset for any company.
By data, I'm referring to EMAIL ADDRESSES, SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES, PHONE NUMBERS, and so forth.
When you download something for free, you're probably signing away your personal data to more than one different group - even if they say something like "we promise not to share your data".
Companies have no idea who they're sharing their data with.
What's important here is despite the free download you did years ago being a great 6-minute read that made you feel justified to buy a $10,000 ticket to a speaker's event - when you opt in to receive free content, you became another number in that persons virtual Rolodex.
The bigger your list, the bigger your income.
If you're looking for new and creative ways to build your list, re-engage leads, activate current customers to buy more, these are some of what we do best. Contact us to learn more & thank you for reading.
Bobby Brodney is a Creative-Technical Entrepreneur who founded Launchpadds in 2019.