It can be but it all depends on your brand value in the market place. If you are a well-known brand you can get away with low engagement and low cost product sampling. People already know about your product message, you are simply reinforcing and reminding people that you existing and they should keep using you.

The newer the brand, and a brand that requires more education, the higher the cost per sample. You need to spend time educating people, engaging them with your product benefits and nurturing them to become advocates to maximise your the longer term results. Look at this way, the bigger brands have already spent million on marketing and advertising and now they can get a perk of lower cost engagement and sampling.

Hotcow write … If you want to find out how our experienced team of marketers can help you activate a campaign or give you some advise on the best methods for activation, please do get in touch on 0207 503 0442 or email info@hotcow.co.uk.

The myths about product sampling. http://t.co/MODg28929n

— Hotcow (@Hotcow) February 12, 2015

Product sampling gives me instant advocates

Yes it can but the truth is that most brands don’t really know if they get advocates from the sampling campaign because they do not follow up with new contacts or track their movements. If you want to know if you have a real new group of advocates to your brand that you can reward and nurture you need to be able to stay in touch, use an application that enables the field team to instantly connect with them and then reward them for sharing the information or photos with their wider network.

Product sampling has no wastage

Product sampling can have a lot of wastage if not executed correctly.

We often hear brands say “I need to reach the largest amount of people with my sample”. If you are targeting females who love sport, then going to a train station is going to give you large awareness, low penetration to core audience and hence larger volumes of wastage.

The more niche your market the higher the cost per sample as they get reached in lower groups. This can be a really good thing for a brand as they then get to spend valuable time talking to them and influencing their opinions and thoughts on the product. They can then carry them over to become real advocates of the brand and share the product and its value with their network.

Product sampling will immediately increase my penetration

This is true but it all depends on your current level of distribution at what rate this will increase by. If we have new brand and you have a low level of daily rate of sales we can easily increase your penetration and new customer by up to 1000%. The reality is that could just be 10 new customers – not that impressive then is it!

However, if you are a large brand and get very high levels of daily sales, we might only increase your base rate of sale by 1% which may look extremely low but if already had 1000 customers a day that is 10 new customers. The same as the previous example. Immediate penetration can easily be achieved but the real value is maintaining that penetration and that occurs with ongoing nurturing.

Product sampling isn’t comparable to outdoor advertising –

We’d definitely disagree with that statement and here is why. Offline marketing engagement can increase online awareness. It is all about the strategy you employ to do this and how it gets linked back either to your product website or your community sites. Digital marketing is extremely saturated with brands having to spend more money today then every before to get the same results they did one year ago.

To cut through the clutter you do have to mix up the strategy and make them work together to reap the best rewards. Plus my favourite saying is: Little things done consistently achieve the greatest results. People don’t do enough product sampling regularly to really see the true power behind the medium.

If you want to find out how our experienced team of marketers can help you activate a campaign or give you some advise on the best methods for activation, please do get in touch on 0207 503 0442 or email info@hotcow.co.uk.