Establishing brand awareness is particularly valuable if you market and promote your company and products in the early stages of business. Consumers will recall your brand when they know your products are on the market. Getting your products into the hands of consumers through sampling events is a sure way to increase both brand awareness and sales. Brand awareness is measured by the degree to which consumers are familiar with your brand and products. Research suggests that the number of brands that consumers recall are influenced by individual product factors such as brand loyalty, brand knowledge, situational use factors and educational level. When consumers are tested, less than half of them remember more than seven brand names in a given category, while most consumers in low-interest product categories only remember one or two brands.
Sample events offer companies the chance to introduce new products, to increase brand awareness, to receive valuable feedback and to increase sales. Product sample campaigns are the best way to increase brand visibility, achieve tailor-made results for companies, and make leads and sales teams fit.
In the case of food, sampling treads a fine line between customer acquisition (reaching new customers) and customer loyalty (increasing brand equity and awareness). In this way, the sample increases brand awareness, builds loyalty, expands the customer database and helps to collect product ratings and evaluations. With sampling you can build brand loyalty, build a positive brand image for customers who are not familiar with the product and achieve a maximum return on investment for marketers considering sampling in a shopping environment.
Product samples are one of the most popular marketing methods and an effective way for brands and retailers to find a compelling way to engage in marketing. It helps raise awareness about a product and gives companies the opportunity to collect critical reviews, feedback and data on how consumers feel about a product. Product samples are not only something for small brands or brands trying to get their name, but also an effective strategy for established brands.
Offering free product samples or free promotional gifts gives companies the opportunity to respond to consumers’ preferences and market requirements, which rarely happens before the launch of any new product. Free product samples and free promotional gifts replace expensive advertising and marketing and allow consumers to try the product before buying, thereby promoting brand awareness and loyalty to the company. For new products, brands that offer free trials and low-cost samples are a great way to get feedback and user comments and ratings to build credibility.
If you run a sampling campaign for a product or offer it for sale, make sure that the product detail page contains customer-generated content in the future.
Smart marketers turn to product samples to increase brand awareness, increase sales and strengthen customer loyalty. From consumer packaged goods (CPG) to technology and clothing brands there are a number of industries which are focusing on product samples and showing results. Product sample marketing on digital platforms has the ability to show tangible increases in sales and conversion as a study of Edison Media Research found that 35% of customers who tried a sample bought it twice during the same shopping trip.
This switch allows companies to targeted traffic to specific brands, which in turn allows consumers to experiment with new products. This ground-breaking tactic enables brands to reach a wider network of consumers by enabling consumers to learn about a product and try it first-hand; digital product samples make product pattern marketing more efficient because it can be used by online influencers; and e-commerce options allow consumers to order free samples that are delivered to their homes. Established brands also benefit from sampling to generate customer-generated content and appeal to new customers with long-tail products.
Sales are great for understanding the different motivations of a brand, using personal marketing activities and product patterns, but conversion rates are not a measure of sales.
Looking at these figures, it becomes clear that the best way to measure the effectiveness of product sampling companies in the health environment is to target MUMs to increase sales, which in turn helps improve brand ROI.
It is understandable that brands in the FMCG industry, if you are a manufacturer of luxury yachts and product samples do not match your product result, can benefit from sampling if they choose to use it. Product sampling from companies such as Peekage can help your brand turn users into buyers, increase sales through targeted product presentation, and streamline feedback collection at a lower cost than traditional channels. It also helps build a warm connection between your company’s products and your target customers, and that connection essentially increases loyalty to your brand.
I have shown that product samples have a significant influence on consumer purchasing behaviour when they are examined by a brand. The initial feedback from Amazon Prime customers about a new targeted product sampling company that sent samples of new products to customers was overwhelming, because the samples met their needs and opened their eyes to the fact that no one knew who they were and what they were buying. This supports the effectiveness of product samples, because by giving consumers the opportunity to use the product, we reduce the uncertainty and anxiety of customers in their purchasing decisions.
We used a similar tactic in Tribe47, working with a client to launch a pet food brand with Coca-Cola samples (we didn’t have the amazing Kelly Rowland to kick off our campaign, but we did have a cute puppy).
