Is Freebie Marketing Useful for Businesses?

Free gifts giveaway is a marketing strategy several brands use to attract the attention of new consumers. Freebie marketing is a method adopted by brands by offering free gifts when consumers make a purchase. This is done to both increase brand awareness and to also increase sales. Companies often choose between a very hard-discounted product or many-a-time offer a product/service for free. The typical technique is offering complementary products.

Nevertheless, freebies cannot always profit a brand. There are many aspects that need consideration before adopting this method of marketing. Moreover, if your brand offers various services and products, identifying and selecting the most purchased item is essential as a freebie product to grab the attention of new or old customers.

Recently, there was a lot of talk on freebies and freebie marketing has come under the radar. This shows that the freebie marketing is a business promotion activity which requires a thorough examination of its pros and cons for companies as well as products and services.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Freebie Marketing

Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of creating freebie marketing strategies for your brand to ensure that your promotional activities are well thought out.

Advantages

Charm Buyers

Freebies can attract prospective buyers. A brand can screen potential prospects by finding out their interest levels while offering a freebie. Even if they don’t buy it, you can gauge their interest. Some small free samples also attract consumers like beauty samples.

Consumer Time

Time is money. So, by controlling the trial time or the sign-up duration, brands can test customer interest. If they are still around after 10 minutes of a free trial, then you have your potential customer. In today’s day and age, market time is the most valuable asset for customers and businesses. Therefore, if you are curating a free trial, ensure to lure the customer within the few minutes to eventually make a potential sale.

Establish a Market Standard

Free giveaways can develop a certain standard for your potential clients for your service or product. However, ensure to plan the marketing strategy in such a way to ensure that consumers buy your products instead of waiting for another freebie event. Moreover, the branding and the giveaway products need to match top-quality assurance to entice potential customers to gain trust in your brand name.

Brand Building

Add your logo, company name and contact information to turn the free gift into a promotional tool so that consumers see and recollect your brand each time they use it. This is when the freebie is doing its job and it can even prompt future sales.

Disadvantages

Not Every Free Trial is Used by Potential Customers

Though many are interested in freebies, very few are actually used by potential customers. With modern fast-paced lives, it is difficult to confirm that your potential consumers use trial items or services.  Therefore, ensure that your products are easy to use and consume less time for your potential leads. Furthermore, a waiting period that is more than 10 minutes is another aspect that will lose attention of leads on a free trial.

Forgetful Consumers

If not done right, consumers may not remember who the freebie is from. Randomly giving out pencils with a soap is hardly marketing unless you brand the pencils and your target is children. There has to be a strategy in freebie marketing. Also, a high end brand needs to offer a high end freebie to entice its customers.

Your Business Time and Budget

All the marketing strategies will cost money, time, and effort for your business. Hence, with every freebie promotion activity, your team develops new ideas to implement, attract and put together the campaign to gain potential consumers’ attention. This is both time consuming and will involve high budgets.

Make customers antagonistic

When the free trial/offer stops, some consumers may become antagonistic and this can create a negative impact on the brand image. Some might even walk away from the brand. It is therefore important to communicate the nature of the offer like ‘limited time deal’ or specifically mention that this is only for trial, etc.

When it comes to freebie marketing, businesses need to have a competitive edge on the product, service, and market conduct. If done well, it can ensure sales and profit & also help increase traffic on digital platforms and gain attention of the potential market leads.