Giving Product Away, Good Tactic or Bad Tactic

[KristineS]

One of the forums I post to on behalf of one of our companies is a forum about selling decorated garments like t-shirts. A lot of the people on that forum often talk about giving away samples of their t-shirts in hopes that people will wear them. Some just give the garments away randomly.

Whenever I see these posts I always try to impress on the OP that giving away merchandise can work, if you give it away to the right people. If you can get your clothes on people who influence buying decisions it could make a difference in your sales. If you don't, than you've just given away merchandise for nothing.

Do the rest of you give product away in hopes of reaching influential people? Do you do research before you give something away to try to determine where your best benefit would be?

[vangogh]

I think it depends on what you give away and how you give it away. For example I give away free content on my blog as part of a way to convince potential clients that I know what I'm doing.

A free 30 day trial is almost a must with software at this point.

If your give away is the kind of thing that helps you build a relationship with people and keeps them interacting with you then the giveaway can be a good idea. If it serves as a form of advertising like with t-shirts it can be a good idea too. But it's not an automatic. It shouldn't just be random. It should serve as part of a marketing strategy.

[KristineS]

That's the point I keep trying to make to these people who are randomly giving things away. They say "I'm going to give t-shirts to my friends and have them wear them around town." Are you friends popular? Will people want to wear what they're wearing? Will anyone even notice?

It isn't enough to get things seen, they have to be seen in the right places by the right people. I think a lot of people fail to understand that.

[vangogh]

Exactly. What good is giving away a t-shirt to someone who will always wear a sweater over it. Or who never leaves the house. Now if you gave it to customers as a way to say thanks then you might be looking to build a stronger relationship with an existing customer and looking for repeat sales. If they wear the shirt in public, great. If not, no big deal.

[Marcomguy]

I think it depends on what you give away and how you give it away. For example I give away free content on my blog as part of a way to convince potential clients that I know what I'm doing.

Yes, it is about what and how. Food marketers know that giving away free samples in the supermarket almost always leads to higher sales.

Some copywriting coaches advise doing a sample project for free to win a new client. I've never done it. But then, to vangogh's point, you could say my blog posts and monthly emails are free samples.

[vangogh]

I'd say the blog posts and emails count as giving away something for free. It's free content that serves as proof you know what you're doing. You could have put all that content into an ebook that you sell after all.

[orion_joel]

Although the primary example here is t-shirts, i have to say that giving away product can be good and bad depending on your business.

For the T-shirts, i think it may be a good thing if they are a very different tshirt that does really attract attention, and actually may get people wanting to ask where they can get one. If it is primarily for custom or fairly plain or ordinary type designs, then giving away product is almost a useless endeavor. But really on both sides be attention grabbers or otherwise, how many people are really going to be inspired enough to stop someone and ask where they get their tshirt from.

For other businesses it can be a double edged sword. I know a lot of companies in IT try and give away any gimmicky product they can with there name printed on it. While often this is probably a money hole for most of these companies, there is always the chance i am assuming that they are hoping someone will have it in sight when they need someone to fix something.

Giving away product in my opinion is more a drain then the benefit it provides, mainly because the actual benefit cannot really be gauged, if it is a sample of your product for that purpose, then hopefully providing a sample may lead to a large purchase in the near future, if it is just to get your product out there, as Kristine said you could just be giving away free product for nothing.

[vangogh]

I think if the giveaway is something useful so it gets used and also calls attention to your name it can help, but there really should be more thought behind it than just giving away something free with your name on it.

I just finished reading a post in another thread by Frederick. It's a perfect example of how to make a giveaway work. He and his wife gave away a useful product that promotes them as it's used.

[Marcomguy]

You could have put all that content into an ebook that you sell after all.

One ebook coming up!

No, seriously, I'm working on an ebook that I hope to release this fall.

vangogh, you must be psychic.

[vangogh]

I knew you were going to say that