In our recent article How to Get Started with Lead Gen, we showed you some easy ways to interest potential and current customers in your company. One of the best ways to do this is by offering them free stuff! Free resources might include webinars, white papers, how-to guides, infographics, and more.
If you offer fascinating information or useful instructions for free about a topic people are genuinely interested in, you will be sure to increase brand awareness. You’ll take an important first step toward converting some of those leads into customers!
Challenges of Providing Free Resources
There are three main challenges to offering free resources as a marketing strategy. They are:
- Time: You already have your hands more than full managing your business and products, or services. Finding the time to create great resources that will spark a lot of interest in your brand can be very difficult.
- Staffing: Like the challenge of how do you find the time to do this, finding the right people to do it can also be hard. The great people you already have on staff probably already have very full plates.
- Developing Content Your Customers Will Love: You probably have a good idea of what you love when it comes to free resources offered by other companies, but that doesn’t always translate into what will be the best fit for your leads and customers.
Ideas for Providing Great, Free Resources
Pain Points
Think about what you offer. What problems do your products or services solve? What do your potential customers need, even though they might not be aware of it yet? What problems do your products or services solve? What do your potential customers need, even though they might not be aware of it yet? Click To Tweet
Pondering the answers to these questions can lead to the creation of lots of great content. If you offer some free solutions to problems, those potential customers will be pleased. They will also be interested in learning more about the business that solved some of their needs.
Your Blog
We hope your company already has a blog that you post to regularly. If not, start one asap! Blogs are a great way to increase brand awareness and help with SEO (search engine optimization.) They can also be a great way to spark ideas for solid free resources. If you’ve already written helpful articles, you will be able to put together a free e-book about the same topic without needing as much time as if you were starting from scratch. This can also ease the challenge of who creates the free resources.
Showcase Your Expertise with Webinars
You, or other members of your staff, can draw on your specialized knowledge of your business to create helpful webinars. This is a very popular free resource, in part because video content continues to increase in popularity year-over-year. Like your blog, this also helps solve the question of who is going to create the content. Offer a free webinar answering a hot topic question in your field. Ask viewers to sign up for your email newsletter in order to view your solution to the topical question and you’ll increase your brand awareness while simultaneously helping your email marketing audience grow.
Just make sure the information you’re offering is worth signing up for and worth spending the time watching a webinar. There are plenty of topics, statistics, trends, and insights that can be offered in this format. Once you’ve decided the most compelling topic for your field, it will be easy to grow your audience and customer base.
If you have any further questions about creating free resources and what to do next, reach out to us. We can advise you on the best fit for your business, or even create the content for you.