Many brands start out with offering a free version of their products and services to gain momentum. When it comes time to switch clients from free to paid, how do you do this and mitigate fallout of your current customers? Not an easy task. It starts by understanding the market (size, attributes, economic, social, goals/mind-set) and how to scale reach is to both find new prospects and convert established prospects to a paid model. Some opportunities to consider –

• Generate Content – curate and develop thought-leadership and a point of view for the market or vertical and distribute it as site content, whitepapers, podcast, blogs, educational videos. This is discover-able assets and really doesn’t have to costs much to produce. The idea is to get the message out there of the business challenges – not necessarily focused on the product or service you provide, but about the industry or vertical. Take a company that provides a a platform for the distribution of coupons for instance. They can create exciting content that lists the top 10 challenges for small restaurant owners. One of these could be about promoting their business to fill slow times (dead space) by using coupons, but the remainder are about branding, cash flow, handling personnel issues, etc. Content allows you to cast a wide or narrow net depending on the audience that you want to attract.

• Know Your Customer – Mine the database to understand key attributes that are good indicators to the proclivity for a customer to convert throughout the customer life-cycle based on the markers you have with assumptions where you may not have clear data. Make a plan to fill the data gaps (you will do this through all marketing channels – think progressive profiling) and create a plan to push clients through that life cycle. This can be used whether you cast your net for new clients or are trying to migrate current customers to paid. It can also be used to generate insights about your client base that can help the businesses you serve and those that you want to serve.

• Technical – definitely let tech work for you. By having content, understanding your customer DB and your target segments, you can set up journeys or funnels to automate outreach and nurturing through the life cycle you’ve set up. Technology such as Pardot or Hubspot Pardot are great and can be used to score your customer DB (now that you know what you have and what you need) so that you are only surfacing warm leads to your valuable and likely small sales team. In addition, they can enable Account Management to be on the same page as sales by letting you see all communication touchpoints and gives your teams intelligence for discussions by letting them see what drove engagement. It can also let you micro-target segments either en masse by you marketing team or via 1-to-1 communication from sales reps. Also, consider Machine Learning and AI to provide opportunities to personalize and scale communications so even smaller companies can set up robust, segmented campaigns. For real time communication, adding chat to the experience when and where it makes sense can make it easier for your customers and clients to engage. And I’ll stress again, blogs – where you talk about the best of the best that you see in your customer or client network and videos – howTos and interviews with current clients that you post become great content to use in these outreach campaigns.

• Partnerships – is another good way to get the word out. I am a big believer in coopetition. If you have a service platform you are selling, find some platform partners that you could partner with to create a widget to make it easier for small businesses to find your tech solution. It could be a plug-in to a CRM, marketing or content platforms – think WordPress, Salesforce, Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Cheetah Digital – any tech that offers businesses the ability to “manage” all of their digital marketing. You can offer a free version on trial basis then upsell more functionality or services, expose the thought leadership information to get leads, etc. If you are looking to scale a more traditional product, you can find adjacency partnerships with

• Process --  Making a change from free to paid is also a culture shift and everyone of your team members need to be on the same page with how to think about customers – clients, audience, members, etc. It’s important that you layout a clear vision of the change and build awareness and alignment across all functional processes support this.

There are many more ideas that you can harness to make the shift from free to paid customers, but these are a few for you to noodle on.

Now go forth and connect to what matters … your customers!