The Freemium Business Model - Alan Percy - Hard Corps Marketing Show #139

The value of marketing cannot be measured solely on quantitative results and KPIs. Marketing needs to build a brand, stimulate interest, and construct buyer loyalty. Marketing Thought Leader, Podcaster, Speaker, and the CMO of TelcoBridges, Alan Percy, challenges departments around marketing to not just think of the department’s success as equal input, equal output. He discusses the value that marketing can provide for a company and how a freemium business model helps to build a pipeline of interest.   Takeaways: A freemium business model offers a lower level product or service for free in order to build a pipeline of people that are interested. Then a percentage of those people will become paying customers for a higher level product or service. Webinars done with partners give both businesses a chance to reach out to each other’s community of buyers. Be sure to set clear priorities that the webinar is to provide value to the audience, not be a sales pitch. A great way to ensure that a presentation or webinar provides value is to make sure that the material answers a question that your market has or presents a solution for how to solve a problem that your market has. High value content should be gated, while lower level content that helps to build the interest of the buyers in your brand could be ungated. When you are offering a high value piece of content, or the free trial for your software, consider asking more qualifying questions. High value warrants high qualification. Put in the time to prep for trade shows that you and your team attend. Look to see who is attending from your database, reach out to speakers of sessions that interest you on LinkedIn, book meetings, and create personalized swag packages to give to strategic accounts. Marketing should not be about just serving their KPI’s, but also about serving their team. Think about what weapons and ammo you can provide sales. A case study, report, or success stories, what could they use to help close their next deal? Be genuine about your technical knowledge, it is better to admit that you will have to research something more, rather than try to fake it and make mistakes.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alandpercy/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlanDPercy TelcoBridges: https://www.telcobridges.com/   Busted Myths: Marketing is like an electrical circuit board, when you invest a certain amount, you can expect a predictable outcome to happen within a certain amount of time. - Marketing is NOT an electrical circuit board. Marketers are dealing with influencing the feelings of their buyers and building brand awareness and loyalty. Those are not items that can be measured with quantitative data.