The Daily Technophile

Free samples are everywhere! Walk into any mall or store and you will find people handing out samples. Go to a grocery store… There are samples of coffee, cookies and many other things… Go to a mall department store… There are samples of perfumes for you to try… Even technology companies that do not have physical stores have got into the game with the so called “freemium” business model. They provide “samples” in the form of limited functionality product for you to “try”. If you want additional functionality you need to pay for it. Apple store is constantly buzzing with people sampling their latest gadgetry.

Samples are everywhere because they work. Customers love free samples. It gives them opportunity to “try before they buy.” They don’t have to spend money on something new before figuring out if they will like it or not. It also lets them find new products that they didn’t know existed. With the number of product choices available to consumers increasing every day they do not have time to research all the new products before buying them. Samples provide them a way to uncover something new.

As you can see samples provide companies with an interesting marketing avenue to reach their customers. There are several ways small businesses can use free samples for effective marketing. The list below shows how you can use free samples for low-cost yet effective marketing.

Introduce New Products

Introduction of new products is the most common use of samples as marketing strategy. As we mentioned earlier customers want to try before making decision to buy. This is particularly true of new products. When the customers don’t know how the new product would taste, smell or work, free samples gives you opportunity to demonstrate it.

Create Instant Demand on Select Products

Samples provide good way to run marketing campaign focused on select products and generate demand for them instantaneously. Research shows that many customers tend to purchase products right after they receive the samples. No wonder the grocery stores are staffed with people providing free samples on the weekends.

Acquire New Customers

Customers who have tried your product and love it are going to buy it no matter what. You don’t need to spend too much effort in convincing them. It’s those new customers that you want to acquire where samples can help you. It’s the same “try before buy” principle mentioned earlier that is now applied to acquire new customers.

Liquidate Inventory

As mentioned earlier samples can generate instantaneous demand for your products. You can use samples to sell items that have been sitting in your shelves for some time. Providing samples and combining it with discounts or coupons for those items will make those items fly off the shelves.

Great piece by 60 Minutes about Jeremy Lin and his rocky path to NBA stardom.

Couponing can be a tedious process and oftentimes requires a significant time investment. But to extreme couponers like my wife, the steady collection of coupons results in a nice saving on the weekly groceries. Over the past few years, I’ve come across some tips that may help you to shave off some valuable dollars off your monthly grocery bill.

Count Your Coupons

You should be prepared before you walk up to the checkout lane with your grocery cart filled to the brim. Even though it’s part of their job, cashiers typically don’t enjoy dealing with extreme couponers for numerous reasons. So when you’re done scanning all your coupons, take a quick glance a the store receipt to see how many coupons were actually scanned. If the cashier gives you a hard time over a coupon, simply thank them for their time and waltz on over to the customer service center.

Get Coupons From Different Sources

One of the most well known places to clip good coupons is from the Sunday newspaper. But don’t settle for just one newspaper. Instead, ask friends or coworkers to give you ad inserts or approach local businesses the following Monday for any unused papers. Scour eBay listings to find coupons from other newspaper publications that aren’t circulated in your local city. Checking eBay listings on a daily basis can be very fruitful for hard-to-find products, and they are quite inexpensive! Don’t forget about online coupon resources. You can find many exclusive coupon codes and printable grocery coupons by checking a variety of coupon websites.

Putting expert couponing methods into a daily practice requires your time and attention. It’ll take some research to find the best deals for your favorite products, but once you see the savings you’ll feel good knowing you’ll never pay the retail price ever again!

A new study released by eMarketer has revealed that advertising revenue generated by Facebook has surpassed those of search powerhouses, Google and Yahoo.

With extraordinary growth especially in the international markets, Facebook continues to push full steam ahead as the most popular social networking website with over 500 million active users.

According to the study, Facebook’s domestic advertising revenue will total roughly $2.2 billion (2011). These figures represent an estimated, whopping 18% share of the display ad revenue across all websites. Revenue growth has exceeded previous year’s revenues by 34.4% and is predicted to outpace Google and Yahoo in the coming year. Comparatively, Google shares explosive revenue growth to Facebook.

With Facebook ad revenue projected to grow by 80.9%, one can only question– Is the growth sustainable even when users are leaving Facebook?