Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we've been talking about marketing specifically strategies. And today I want to talk about a free sampling strategy, giving things away for free as a way to grow your business.

So this is one that I want you to kind of be careful with, and I'll get into that more because it's not for everyone. So I first heard about this strategy when I was working at the Coca-Cola Company. This is the way that that company grows their business, especially in new markets. I was working with them in a new market in Russia and so we did a lot of this.

But I did hear my boss, who had been with the company for like 40 years, talk about his experience as a child being on a playground and he remembers when that big red truck drove up and they brought all the children on the playground a little bottle of Coca-Cola and they give them a toy of some kind at the same time. And so the kids drink coke and develop these wonderful associations with it and this lifelong affinity for the brand. So, of course, as a grown up now, I'm horrified to hear about children being given sugar sodas on the playground but whatever that is the way that we did things back then. And that's one of the main ways that that brand grew across the world in new markets.

And you can see the same thing happening in Costco today where you go in there and they're, you know, giving out some cheese on crackers or whatever free sampling they're doing there. And when I came to work in the services business, my own, what I thought was, what's our version of this? What's the way that we can say, hey, try out some of my what I do? You know, you're consulting and you can't just hand someone a bottle of consulting, but you can give them a free sample of what you do. So I'm going to talk about the ways that we can do that in our businesses. And as I mentioned before, I do I specifically want to say that if you are a person who struggles with people taking from you or expecting you to do a lot of things for free, asking you to pick your brain or to sit down with them for some time, or if you end up consulting and end up not getting paid for that, if you have an issue with this, the first thing I want you to know is not everyone does.

So when you change your mindset about that and when you challenge your boundaries and when you do work on it, you won't get that anymore. No one asked me to do things for free, no one asked me to pick my brain, it's incredibly rare that I ever hear those kinds of things happen, I just don't have that kind of wiring and I don't invite that. So I'm not blaming you or shaming you for that happening to you, but I'm empowering you to know other people don't get that and so you don't need to either.

So free sampling is a strategy that you'll use if you're not struggling with people constantly expecting free things from you. It is a strategy that if you have a powerful position and you are offering something of incredible value, then you can use this judiciously to grow your business. So I like to be able to give value generously. So, for example, this podcast, I'm telling you the things that I would tell my private clients to me, there isn't a reason to hold back besides the fact that we've only got so much time and the listeners, you are probably doing something while you're listening to this rather than sitting and taking notes. And so I can give a certain kind of information, but not another kind. But I can do free things all the time where I'm giving information away. So giving value in your business, giving things away, giving information away, your expertise, your point of view in, you know, social media posts, all of the places where you might post about your expertise it grows the know, like and trust factor for you, and it makes people want to learn more about your business. So giving ideas and information freely can be very pivotal for you in establishing yourself as an expert brand, as a go to place for advice, for opinions and for consultations when people are ready to hire you. One of the things that you'll hear over and over again is the idea that if this is what they're giving away for free, imagine what you get from that business when you pay for it. So the more generously that you give, the more people associate the idea of value that there is much more value to come.

Now, a business that don't sell services can give tons of information away, so I always like to study blogs by software companies because they don't make their revenues on information like they are not in the information selling business or the advice or coaching business. So they can just give away everything and they have some of the best blogs out there. So a software company, a social media tool, those kind of companies are great places to go to because they make their money on you subscribing to their tool or their service and not on the information that they give away. It's a little different for you and my business as consultants because we do get paid for the information that we're sharing.

So there's theoretically a point at which we wouldn't keep sharing that. And so I want to give you some guidance on this. And the first thing is that you want to make free a strategy, you want to do this strategically in your business. And what does that mean? It means with the intention to, giving away information isn't just something we're doing, it's we're doing it with the intention of getting someone to take the next step with you, getting them to purchase something with you. So you're choosing information that will help in conversion, like what specifically should I share? So I think, a lot of times people will share the what and the why, but not the how, that's one approach you can do, so you talk to people about why you want to do something like why you want to have a free marketing strategy or free strategy and give away things for free and give freebies, that's the why and then the what is explaining exactly how it works as I'm doing and then perhaps I wouldn't share the details of exactly how to do this.

Another way that you can do this and what I really like to do, especially in my webinars and in the freebies, the kind of lead magnets or white papers or whatever that I give away, I do like to share the how in those. And that's because I'd rather someone had a piece of the whole that they got specific value from and then they came back for and paid for the rest of the whole value. So it's a step on the pathway, but a complete step that actually, you know, moves them forward to somewhere else. I might not give away all hundred steps, but I can give away a few on the path so that people feel like, wow, this is valuable and I think they experience what it would be like to work with you.

The other thing about giving away information is there's, people will say this in different terms, but there's basically three stages of it, there's information, implementation and transformation, you'll hear that in various phraseologies in different terms being used for each one but the concepts are basically the same. There's like information, which is like, you know, it's not really all that valuable, there's just tons of information out there and you just select the place you're going to get it from. So information and then implementation like the actual doing of it, which is, you know, this is the rare piece, right? This is what no one does. Almost no one implements and so you can give generously because most people won't implement. I always say when I do classes where there's a bunch of people studying networking or sending referrals or studying a specific marketing technique, and one can have the reaction of like scarcity of like, oh, my gosh like if all of these people are going to do this, then we're all going to be in competition with each other and you can always say, listen, like 98 out of 100 won't do it.

So you be the one who stands out because you're actually going to implement. So implementation is the hook here, that's why you can afford to give someone a piece of information that they can actually do something with. The value is in their taking action with it and I love to make it as simple as possible. So they actually get a result and they'll be thrilled with that result.

So that's the last piece is transformation. So transformation begins with a small result, but real transformation takes multiple results over time. So if this is the arc of our work as advisors and as consultants, then what we're looking at is, you know, we can give things away for free that make more and more pieces of those happen. I mean, I can give something away for free that causes a transformation in how someone thinks about how much to charge or how, you know, when to take leadership with a client. And again, if they get a piece of that from a free thing that I'm giving away, then it will hopefully move them towards working with me.

When we think about marketing strategies and when we think about this as like what does giving something away for free move people to do? I want it to move forward, I want that to advance those people who are implementers, because that's who my good clients are, that's who I want to work with, are people who listen to things and go take action on it and then come to me and say, I did that thing that you suggested on your podcast or that I read in your social media post and I'm here because that worked and I want more. So think about in your business what you can give away that is actually easily, easily valuable, once they do implement it and would bring forward your perfect clients, it would move them closer to you.

And that kind of moves me to my last criterion here for free things that I give away. I really love for them to be Polarizing. I first started using polarizing freebies back in my days, have ever been in one of those chamber events when they have like a trade show and everybody from the chamber has like a table, it's you know, forgive me, but they're horrible, horrible events because it's everyone who is your target audience is exhibiting, there's almost no one who's attending those things, that is it's really done for the community, kind of is like a nice thing to do and it's not a great place to generate business unless, as I do, you go around and meet everyone who has a booth and do your networking there.

So I've had many clients who say we're doing this thing and we're going to have a booth. So, for example, a conference and you'll have a booth there, this is a great place to do things, what should we give away? We were thinking of giving away these squeezy balls or this thing, and I'm always like, no, don't give away something that everybody wants at those events that I mentioned, this chamber meetings, there would be citizens who would just, you know, from the community who would come in and they would just have like adult trick or treat bags and they would go to each booth and they would take it, you know, the squeezy ball and the pens and stuff because they were it was like trick or treating, it’s like, here's a free thing, let's just go scoop that up. So what I loved to do and to advise my clients who end up having to do something like a trade show is give away something that is worthless to not your target audience and super valuable to your target audience ok, so that everybody who comes there and looks at us like, what's that junk? And your perfect clients are like, OMG, I need that and they're like, sign up for it or whatever. So a great thing to give away is going to be information, an assessment of, you know, a free consultation, something, a white paper, you know, just not a boring one, some piece of value like you would give away on your website, but a piece of value that only your target clients would want.

So that's how you're going to separate the wheat from the chaff at those kind of huge events where you don't want absolutely everyone to kind of like sign up to win your iPad. You want people to sign up to win something that nobody else wants but your perfect clients.

There are many ways that you can implement having a freebie strategy in your business, white papers and lead magnets, webinars, consultations, assessments, all kinds of tools, the things that I want you to keep in mind are being strategic about it, moving the right people to the right next step so that they end up working with you, rather than that you're just generously giving things away in the world because you're a good person and because that's the right thing to do.

Let's keep it strategic because you're a business, you're here to make money. Plenty of people will benefit from that free thing and possibly never work with you, but you want the people who are ready to take the next step with you to do so. So that's where you want to take your best stuff, really high quality work that does get results for people and give that away. If you want to know anything more about a freebie strategy, I encourage you to reach out, ask a question anywhere where you see this podcast, and I'll be happy to answer it in a future episode. Thanks.