This is a great marketing idea

Who says money has to change hands? Whatever happened to good ol’ trade, one wonders. Here is a great example of an excellent trade. Think about where you could apply this in your business and how you could benefit from it.

Tim Brownson is a Life Coach based in Florida, USA. He wrote a particularly good post on trends with respect to life coaches vs counselors. Those stats were quite illuminating. It also means he’s a true marketer, being aware of what his potential client base is thinking.

For every life coach search on Google, there are 20 searches for counselors. For me a concise way to distinguish between the two: counseling is looking back and coaching is looking forward.

I’m getting side tracked into a debate about the two and that’s not the point here. In any case what do I know! Not my field. Was talking about marketing so how did the whole counseling/life coach debate get in the way!

The real point is that Tim is offering 6 free life coaching sessions. That’s worth a fair number of Dollars. It’s a great offer. It’s during a time where folk are really needing some encouragement and help to face the future. It couldn’t come at a better time. So Tim is offering superb value. And for no money at all.

What’s the catch? Well there isn’t one really. What he is asking in return is for the person benefiting from these free sessions to run a blog talking about the experience. And the blogger can voice his opinions. There are no editorial restrictions.

Win win isn’t it. Tim wins a new client who is going to refer him to other people. He is helping out in a time of need when people are facing major issues and might not have the money to have a life coach. And he just asks for a small return.

That return is vitally important to the person receiving the coaching. Because it means it’s not a ‘freebie’ in the true sense. Some effort has to be expended and commitment shown. And you can only truly benefit from this kind of gift by being with the program.

For Tim it means good publicity and brownie points for helping somebody. Always excellent karma. For the person receiving the gift, it pushes him/her for feed-back, reflection and buy-in.

Isn’t this the essence of a true customer relationship? We offer something that we truly believe is of value and the customer commits to the product. Both parties benefit. If either one slips up, there is a problem.

Look at your business and think about where you could have that kind of trade off. This is especially so during a time when you might not have that many clients because of general money tightness. It’ll keep you working and the value of the trade could be worth more than if you received money.

While you’re contemplating that, why not sign up to my RSS feed or really take a huge step by filling in your e-mail address to receive my articles via cyber delivery. It’s free! No strings attached. You don’t even have to blog about it.