Cut Through The Noise With Value-Add Marketing

Originally published by Umesh .A Bhat on July 10th 2017

@xeraconUmesh .A Bhat

How we generate $1,000 per day in marketing value.

When creating a marketing strategy for an online business, 3 obvious marketing channels are:

1. PPC (Pay per Click)
2. Content Marketing
3. 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.

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.

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..

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 publish responsive designs as a real live 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 Twitter/YouTube/Etc.

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:

1. Familiarity — we decided to place the free product website where all the other free products of its kind were hosted. For Sketch plugins that’s github.io. Our target audience is used to download free plugins from github.io so instead of placing it in our own website we wanted to create familiarity.
2. Provide Real Value for Free — 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.

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.

ROI by comparing CPC (Cost-per-Click) on other PPC (Pay-per-Click) 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.

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

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