**Co-authored by Edgar Rodriguez**
Why try before you buy?
As a marketing strategy, offering the “try before you buy” initiative as a sales incentive makes a lot of sense. Different industries have different variations on this.
Whenever you go to a store like Sam’s Club or Costco, numerous food & beverage brands partner with these retailers to allow you small samples of the product before buying it. Automakers and their dealerships allow test drives as a standard practice and certain automakers/dealership allow extended test drives. Buying a car is a costly expenditure for most people, and having this type of experience prior to purchase helps.
In the software industry, particularly with enterprise level software offerings, there are often free trial periods or limited trial periods. Often these trial periods are a set time period and are less costly than the complete, standard version. The primary reason for this is to remove the objection of price as a reason not to engage in a discussion. If an company is allowed to use software throughout the organization for some time period without making a commitment, it eases their mind. There becomes a willingness for companies to the use software and see if it does meet their needs.
Distribion has thought of this and perfected a pilot program that we call the Quick Start. The primary reason we developed this program was to offer our clients the benefits of seeing the results that the Distributed Marketing Platform has been known to produce, but without the commitment of a large scale contract. Typically speaking, the Quick Start program produces defined and measurable results in a 60-90 day time frame. It also doesn’t involve significant IT headaches or a massive disruption in existing processes.
This is how it works: Increased Sales & Productivity is a defined end goal. We’ll get you to your end goal with Centralized Marketing, Multi-Channel Marketing, Marketing Automation, Local Customization and Campaign Insights. We waive the set up costs and conduct an initial analysis of where you stand in your marketing efforts. From there, we will work with your existing collateral or with newly created marketing materials. These materials will be integrated into templates that can be used for customer acquisition multi-channel campaigns. A combination of email, social media, microsites and forms & surveys can be used to create leads that can be converted to sales, which are the lifeblood of any distributed organization. A basic visual workflow of this process can be seen below.
At a local level, agents will have the opportunity to make changes based on corporate level permissions set, thus providing the best of both worlds. Local customization occurs to resonate with local audiences while the essence of a strong corporate brand remains intact. Detailed tracking and reporting allows sales agents and corporate brand managers the opportunity to know what works in their marketing efforts, and what can be augments to increase effectiveness. The 5 basic components above impact a brand’s ultimate goal of increased sales & productivity.
Certainly, there is a learning curve with something new, but the idea is that something new should not feared. The way in which we address this is by offering access to our client services team, who can assist a company through the intricacies of the software platform. Throughout the course of the trial period, we’re helping you get acclimated to the platform, and discovering the means in which the platform is designed to augment marketing efficiencies and effectiveness. Distribion realizes that there are numerous elements that comprise multi-channel marketing campaigns and we are focused on your ease of use. Ease of use is an idea that I have always believed in throughout the course of my own marketing career. Case study after case study in the brand world emphasizes the idea that the easiest to use product, within numerous product categories, is the product that gets a significant share of the market.
If we didn’t believe in the idea of “try before you buy”, we wouldn’t make this offer available. We are confident in our platform’s abilities to affect positive marketing changes within an organization, and within a short time frame. We think that is a strong offer. But it’s not our perception that matters most. It is yours, and you’ve got the opportunity to see our brand’s value without the peril of a long term, expensive contract that bogs down numerous departments.
**This is the first in a series of posts about the Quick Start program. Stay tuned.