Esther
Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast. I'm Esther.
Melanie
And I'm Melanie.
Esther
And today we're talking about doing work for free to get exposure.
Melanie
You ruined it there for me.
Esther
I'm so sorry.
Melanie
Anyway, yes, and we're going to take two sides throughout this today, we're going to be talking from the perspective of a complete startup small, so that's more SMA and Esther is going to be taking the role of the soap already in the business corporate side of things, because they do have to they do have different perspectives on ways of doing things for free.
Esther
Yes, so in terms of larger businesses that have already been trading for a little while, have a little bit of experience and stock under their belt, and you could be tempted to do a competition, and so you've bought the supplies, you've bought them and everything that you need, you've used your time, your experience, your expertise to paint a picture, so you've got this painting that nobody has bought, nobody commissioned it from you, but you have it sitting there, you think that's a good idea to do a competition, to get away, you know, to give it away for free and therefore have more exposure. So what do you do? You set up a competition page on Facebook or competition inside your on Facebook and you start promoting it, and lots of people like your publication, lots of people like your page, you ask them to like, share, tag, not allowed under Facebook conditions, by the way, but they do it anyway because we've all been conditioned to do that, and so you get three, four thousand extra followers, you get lots of likes and comments on this one and image because people want they like to win stuff, ok, but what happens after somebody wins it, your organic reach goes way, way, way down because of those extra people who are not liking the page, they only did it for the competition, so they weren't genuine people coming in to like the page, after all, ok, something else that keeps popping up when it comes to the Stanage is influencers, ok, we've all heard of them, we all see them on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter all the time, these people who are followed by hundreds and thousands of people, they come to people, they come to corporations and businesses and groups, and they say, if you give me X, Y, Z for free, then I'll mention you to my thirty forty fifty-one hundred thousand followers and larger corporations could be able to absorb that cost into their budget, because let's face it, it's been happening for years with other people and you've got your famous sports people who have their sponsorship from the different sports MCs. I'm not going to mention any because we're not affiliated to any, but they've been getting free stuff for years and they have all the money in the world that they could buy all these trainers and shoes and tracksuit bottoms of everything, but they don't need to because large companies like to see their brands on the sportspeople, does it work? Probably does, because then the kids and the young adults turn around and they want to buy the same brands because they're idols are wearing them. So that's from a corporate perspective. It can work. What about from the small business guys, Melanie?
Melanie
Well, I've got some great examples actually following on from the one you just mentioned just there about sports. One of the people I follow on Instagram is a young lady in her twenties. And she's very athletic, very strong, very fit, and she shows a lot of her training and she's got a great physique, and over time, she has been given clothing, fitness wear, and now without being you know, she's not if she's getting paid for it, she could be, I have no idea, but now these brands are using her Instagram to demonstrate their fitness wear, and it makes sense because she's got a great audience of people watching her journey, going, developing her fitness and getting ready for competitions, and what a great way to go, and this is just one young lady, you know, in her early twenties. But, you know, it doesn't have to be exposure of sorts that you can get. For instance, you can get free images from certain websites that you don't have to mention then its credit. And one of them, one of my favourites would be Pixels.com, you can also use Canva because you can have free images from them or next to nothing with one euro, which is here, but it will be one dollar if you're over there and also doing live so you can go life virtually every platform these days, and they are completely free, and it's just as long as you've got a good audience to give you a large audience, as long as you've got a good engaged audience, you've put up your information at the right time, make something semi-controversial, good timing, good informative information and then ask people to share, you'd be surprised how much of a reach you get organically without spending a cent. And when you first start is so difficult, so discouraging because you can't do all the same things you see your competitors doing, but like the corporate even describing, they've been doing it for a number of years, they've got influence, they've got the knowledge and they've got a better understanding of the audience, but to start from somewhere, then look at doing these small things for free, you can also set up a HootSuite account with three accounts for free so you can schedule your content to go out for free. And another platform is Facebook, your schedule free, Facebook so that you go for channels that you can schedule for free just using Facebook and HootSuite. So don't dismay for startups out there, I and everybody I know, frankly, have started there and it does take time, but you do build up and reach a point where you've actually got a small budget.
Esther
Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, everybody has to start somewhere and we all have to start from zero, ok, everybody started with zero followers, zero customers, even the big guys, and I had to start at the bottom, but as you grow and as you get more followers and as you get more clients, start to spend the money, ok, so, yes, start with the free platforms, and if they still work for you in a few years time after you started, that's fine, but remember, they're not going to give you the analytics that you are going to need to go and look for some of the platforms. If someone has asked you to as a favour to set up, for example, their MailChimp or their HubSpot or their HootSuite or any platform. At the start, you may be able to say, yeah, that's no problem, I'll do that, it'll take me five minutes. I'll do that for you. Yes, I'll give you an hour of training for free, no problem. But as you grow, don't rely on those freebies to then turn into paying customers to set a limit, set your limit whenever you say, yeah, I'll throw that in for free, set the limit so that after X, Y, Z amount of time, you then say, you know something? Not anymore, enough's enough. I will start charging.
Melanie
I've got a very good example of that myself. When I first asked my business, I was on the east coast of Ireland, I've now moved to the middle and when I first moved to the middle of Ireland, I went to three large businesses in my local area and offered my social media review for free, and I said, the reason why I'd like to do this is the hope is you're happy and would be delighted if you could give me a testimonial at the very end of it, and that helped me set up with a new audience in a new location, I only did it three times and it had to be completely honest about the testimonial, all three of them worth. I got them all good. And that's another great way to get something for free.
Esther
Yeah, but you did you set your limits and you said only three, only these three, and that's it, because otherwise you could end up completely inundated with people asking for things for free.
Melanie
So I think very much we've covered a great deal today. We've come from two different perspectives from the sole traders, small SME to the larger corporate business. I hope you found it informative. And we'll be back next week on the Monday morning marketing podcast bye.
Esther
Goodbye.