How we generate $1,000 per day in marketing value. When creating a marketing strategy for an online business, 3 obvious marketing channels are: PPC (Pay per Click) Content Marketing Email Marketing Since everyone is doing that, it’s very hard to cut through the noise. So, how do you set yourself apart? Here is one way: “ ”. Value-Add Marketing Value-Add Marketing Value-Add Marketing s building a complete product that provides value to our target audience. Instead of charging for it we use it to grow our community and get in touch with our future customers. To understand better what I’m talking about, let’s look at some real life examples of Value-Add Marketing: 1.Tax calculator by TurboTax TurboTax is a Saas product for preparing taxes. One very popular search a person makes before actually paying taxes makes is “free tax calculator”. For a company that offers tax preparation software, it makes sense to offer a free product, TaxCaster, which happens to be the first result on Google. Of course once visitors finish their calculations they are presented with an offer to actually file their taxes using TurboTax, the paid product. Target Audience for both TaxCaster and TurboTax: People that want to file their taxes. Turbo Tax — Paid Tax Preparation Software 2. Pitch Bot by Gigster “Want to ace your investor meetings? Chat with Pitchbot to perfect your VC pitch in 10 minutes.” If you’re an entrepreneur here is a great way to practice your pitch. Oh and hey by the way.. if you don’t have a tech team they offer to solve that for you.. Target Audience for both Pitch Bot and Gigster: Tech Entrepreneurs. Free Pitch Practicing Product Gigster — Software Development Services 3. RequestBin by Runscope Hey developer, need to debug your HTTP requests? Here is a free online tool for it. Oh you want to automate your API tests as well? Just click down here.. RequestBin — Free Tool for HTTP Requests Debugging Runscope — Paid Service for Automating API Tests 4. Auto-Layout for Sketch by Anima Auto-Layout empowers designers. It’s a free plugin that enables designers to make designs responsive, directly in Sketch. Once designs are responsive, we offer our users to get more done with Launchpad — a paid service to responsive designs as a real live websites. publish Auto-Layout for Sketch — Free Plugin for Responsive Design Launchpad for Sketch — Paid Plugin for Publishing Websites How we did Value-Add Marketing with Auto-Layout In our experience, after validating with our users, we’ve figured out that providing a way for designers to make designs responsive is very valuable. Re-enforced by overwhelming love Auto-Layout received on social media such as / /Etc. Twitter YouTube You know you’re providing value when your users are asking pay Standalone Product With Value-Add Marketing, the product free product which is the gateway to your paid product is best to be a . standalone product Which means it should: Have its own name — different than your paid product. Have its own domain name. Target the same target audience of your paid products. When launching Auto-Layout we’ve made some key decisions: — we decided to place the free product website where all the other free products of its kind were hosted. For Sketch plugins that’s . Our target audience is used to download free plugins from so instead of placing it in our own website we wanted to create familiarity. Familiarity github.io github.io — the product needs to provide real value. Although it seems counter-productive to give away for free something that you can probably charge for, you are simply getting the ROI in a different way. Provide Real Value for Free . Auto-Layout is generating $1,000 per day in marketing value Let’s calculate how much actual money we’ve gained by releasing Auto-Layout for free. PPC (Pay-per-Click) ROI by comparing CPC (Cost-per-Click) on other channels Today, 6 months post-launch, we are getting more than 15,000 unique visitors per month through our Value-Add Marketing channel — Auto-Layout. Stats for https://animaapp.github.io/Auto-Layout Auto-Layout website numbers are: 500 unique visitors per day (Clicks). 50% conversion Click-> Sign up (Conversions). That’s 250 sign ups per day. Experimenting with Facebook Ads revealed Cost per Conversion of $5 (Click -> Sign up) That means that today . Auto-Layout is “generating” for us $1,000 per day in marketing value In conclusion In conclusion: We’ve invested a lot of time into making Auto-Layout a great standalone product. Although we are giving it away for free, we are getting the ROI in real dollar value that would otherwise be spent on PPC channels. Thank you for reading! Join our journey https://www.animaapp.com