Marketing 101: Free is the New Economy

What is the best way to attract new customers into your fold? It can be a challenge convincing customers to open up their wallets, so one of the most effective strategies to employ is to give it away for free. This has quickly become one of the most popular business models in the last couple of years.

If Facebook or Twitter charged for the basic service, neither site would have become anywhere near as big as they are today. In like manner, can you imagine if you had to pay for YouTube or Gmail? It would be much more difficult for those sites to get to their current level of popularity.

Going forward, more and more businesses are adopting a similar model, looking for monetization and revenue for alternate sources. Even where the conventional model still applies, companies are using free giveaways as a great marketing tactic. You can download Peggle Nights for free from Popcap Games if you sign up for an account. From there, you might be swayed to purchase more games from Popcap. Similarly, classic Command & Conquer games are now available as a free download. The hope is that you will buy the new game when it comes out.

Going to the mobile platform, the same is holding true too. The most popular apps on the iPhone are the free ones. For a mobile coupon app, the download for the consumer is free; the revenue comes by charging the advertisers to host their coupons in the app. By making the app free, more people are likely to download and try it.

Have you tried using something for free as part of your marketing plans? Did it work?

Marketing 101: Fine Line Between Engagement and Spam

Whether you are new to the business world or you are a veteran of the arena, it is in your best interest to get as many people as possible to know about your company, your products, and what you can do for them. You want them to be actively engaged with your brand, so that they will be more inclined to send business your way.

There are naturally many different strategies that you can employ as part of your marketing strategy. You may take out newspaper ads and Google ads, or maybe you try developing a company blog like this one. Another area that many businesses consider is social media, like Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as email marketing to a targeting mailing list.

When developing these avenues, it is easy to slip over that fine line between active engagement and spam. You want to reach out to a new audience and get them interested, but at the same time, you don’t want to be perceived as spam. That’s a negative relationship that you definitely do not want to foster. At the same time, you want your brand to be at the forefront.

At what point, in your opinion, does a company Twitter or Facebook account cross over from legitimate branding and marketing into spam territory? How do you decide whether you become a fan of a Facebook page or a follower of a Twitter account?

Marketing 101: Brand Your Tweets

Whenever you send out an update on Twitter, you’ll notice that it also displays what you used to send out that update. For instance, if you posted a tweet from the main Twitter website, then your tweet will show that it came “from web.” If you used TweetDeck, it’ll say that the update came “from TweetDeck.” This can represent a major branding opportunity!

Instead of giving free promotional power to HootSuite, Tweetie, or any number of other Twitter clients, wouldn’t it be better if you used it as an advertising strategy for your company? There is a free program called TweetBrand that does exactly this. When you send out a tweet using the TweetBrand platform, you can have the “via” or “from” portion read whatever you’d like. For instance, the update can say that it came via BlueFur or from Beyond the Rhetoric. This way, the branding is yours and not someone else’s.

More likely than not, the “from” link in Twitter is nofollow, but you may gain some organic traffic that way. If nothing else, it keeps your branding consistent and helps to improve your company’s online presence. There are many creative applications that you can employ with this platform; it’s almost like creating your own Twitter client.

Learn more about TweetBrand at MarketMeTweet.com. It is a free download with some minor restrictions. Alternatively, you can upgrade to the premium MarketMeTweet product from the same website.

Marketing 101: How Do I Contact You?

The strategy that you choose to use to market your business will vary based on a number of different factors. For most companies, you’ll want to have a good website at the very least and it can be well-supported with properly managed Twitter and Facebook accounts. These are great for getting the word out, but what about the words that need come back in?

I’ve come across a few smaller businesses who do not want to invest in the extra cost that may come with managing their own website. As a result, they rely more heavily on their presence on places like Twitter and Facebook. The former can allow for more direct communication from customers and business partners, but what about Facebook? You need to make sure that you establish a way of accepting contact from the outside world.

This is particularly problematic when the Faceobok fan pages are locked, only allowing administrators to post content, and then there is no specific mention of a phone number or an email address. When this is the case, customers and other interested parties really have no way to establish contact. Be sure to put something on that page, telling people where to go if they want more information.

The best thing you can do is to have a well-designed website with a good contact page, offering different email addresses for the different departments in your company. This way, people can get in touch in the easiest way possible.

Marketing 101: Proactive Twitter Marketing

Many companies have started to recognize that Twitter can be a valuable (and free) marketing tool, but many of these companies are going about it the wrong way. Twitter is a place for conversation and interaction; if you are only using it to distribute press releases, you are missing out.

There are at least two critical tools that you can use to make better use of your Twitter marketing efforts:

First, use a proper desktop client for Twitter rather than the website itself. With TweetDeck, you can create as many columns as you’d like. This can be useful for managing lists and groups, but you can also have columns set up with search terms. This way, you can monitor mentions of your company name, product, and so on.

Second, consider using a tool like SocialOomph. By registering for a free account, you can monitor keywords in much the same way as TweetDeck, but you receive a “digest email” with these mentions on a regular basis.

Monitoring isn’t enough, of course. When you see a positive mention of your brand, reach out and thank that person. When you see a negative mention of your company, reach out and do damage control before it gets out of hand.

Marketing 101: The Implied Connection

Going through this week’s flyers, I noticed a common thread among many of the advertisements that arrived in my mailbox. This isn’t a new phenomenon, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is an interesting observation nonetheless.

Most people will know that Super Bowl XLIV is scheduled ot happen this Sunday in Florida, pitting the New Orleans Saints against the Indianapolis Colts. This is a big deal and it’s easily one of the most expensive days for television advertising. What happened with the flyers is that they were trying to avoid paying the Super Bowl-related royalties.

Instead, nearly every flyer I saw featured some football-related motif, as well as references to things like the “Big Game” rather than to the “Super Bowl.” The relationship was very clear and very obvious, but there was no wording that involved the Super Bowl, the NFL, or other similar licensed content.

How do you feel about advertisements that use this implied connection rather than paying for the official licensing? I don’t mind it, but I do find it a little funny that they would try to do this.