Some may think that giving away free stuff to your audience stops them from converting and buying, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
In many cases, giving away a freebie that speaks to your audience’s pain points will show your expertise, the value of your services or products, and be the first step in developing that valuable long-term relationship for network marketers or direct sellers.
Let’s look at freebies in more detail.
What is a freebie?
A freebie is something that you give to your audience for free in exchange for a desired business action, which is most commonly subscribing to a your email list.
You may have stumbled across one or two freebies before and they can come in many different forms.
Here are some examples:
- Checklists
- Printables
- eBooks
- Video courses
- Free Webinars or Workshops
- Guides
- Cheat sheets
- Discount codes
- Special offers
The format you should choose depends entirely on you, but it needs to be aligned to your business goals and, most importantly, your audience.
To ensure you pick the perfect freebie format and topic, the rule of thumb to remember is:
If it’s content that you would pay money for its valuable and a good choice. If not, where’s the incentive for them to sign up or try and get it?
Here are the steps to coming up with the perfect freebie topic to suit your business:
Step 1: Understanding Your Audience
For your freebie to be valuable to your audience, you will have to understand them well. This doesn’t just mean looking at the demographic data like their age or gender, although this helps, it’s also doing in-depth research about their issues, fears, worries, and hopes that will drive their decision making.
Every single piece of information matters here so that you can develop a freebie that will capture their attention and they take the time to sign up.
Step 2: Picking Your Upsell
Your freebie should not be about selling, selling, selling; it should provide genuine value. Picking the product or service you’re hoping to sell will help you frame the content that you write and the topic you choose.
For example, if you’re selling make-up products, you might want to sell highlighter kits from your range specifically.
Your freebie topic could then be something like: ‘The Ultimate Guide to Highlighting and Contouring Your Face to Look Slimmer.’
Remember that your upsell shouldn’t be your main focus in the freebie, but a small call-to-action at the end to tell people about your product is fine. So long as you’re giving that full value.
Step 3: Offering the Perfect Solution
The point of your freebie is to offer a solution to a common problem that your audience has. You can find this out through regular engagement with your audience on social media, checking out forums and groups that target your audience or niche, or visiting question and answer sites like Quora.
All of these strategies work, but always try to get information from your audience directly. After all, that’s who you’ll be marketing to.
Step 4: Choosing the Right Format
This will depend on your audience, industry, and upsell, but the important part to remember is to offer a format that helps your audience instantly and offers a no-hassle solution.
In the make-up example above, you could use a step-by-step printable with plenty of images, or opt for a video tutorial. A long article that has a lot of text and no images, for example, would not perform well.
Step 5: Creating that Personal Connection
Once you have your topic, it’s the connection, emotion, and relationship that you create with your audience that is going to sell. It’s what gets them to buy your products or service, and opt in to get your freebies.
Make sure when you’re writing, you do it in the first-person. Talk directly to your audience and be specific about the problem you are addressing. That way, they will feel like your freebie and your products are created specifically for them.
Step 6: Design Considerations
When it comes to content, design matters too. Use designs that don’t take the focus away from the actual content that provides value.
Ideally, you want to aim for colors that represent your products or your brand so that your readers can instantly associate it with you.
When it comes to branding, make sure to include your logo and color palette throughout your freebie. Research has proven time and time again that people retain more from images than just text so including both pictures, your logo, and your brand colors is the perfect way for your audience to remember your great offer.
Now that you have come up with the perfect freebie topic, it’s time to start building your email list! Use your freebie as part of list building strategy by grabbing my email follow-up planner below.
