Well, stop. 

Step away from the keyboard. 

And don’t you dare sneakily update your prices on your website (not yet anyway.) 

Because there’s something we’d like you to do first. 

Something that will help you both increase sales, AND build trust and loyalty with your audience. 

We want you to create content around your price increase. 

Before we begin, this is aimed at you if you want to raise your prices for brand new customers (i.e. people who aren’t your customers already). If you need help on how to raise your prices for current customers, have a read of our article here. 

What is ‘Why I’m Raising My Prices’ content? 

This piece of content goes into detail about why you’re raising your prices. It explains what your prices are now when they’re going to increase, and what the new price will be. 

It’s an easy-peasy piece of content for you to create. But it’s also great for sales and delivers excellent customer service. 

Why is this content so effective? 

There are three main reasons why this piece of content works so well.

1. It’s sales content. It’s a piece of content that promotes the benefits of your products or services. It says ‘Hey, I’m raising my prices because I’m pretty awesome. Here’s why…’ 
2. It can act as a ‘heads-up’ to those who are on the fence about working with you, giving them an opportunity to buy from you at your lower prices. We did this with our blog post and earned 25K in a week. 
3. It’s incredibly helpful and transparent and builds trust with your audience. 

Why do I have to tell my audience why my prices are increasing? 

You’ve received one of those emails right? The ‘get in now before the price goes up tomorrow!’ type thing. You probably get one at least once a week. 

Hell, just walk past any furniture shop and there’s always a sale ending ‘soon’. 

The problem is, we’re used to this fake scarcity sales tactic. It just looks to your audience like you’re raising your prices to pressure them into buying from you. 

But the actual reasons behind you raising your prices are legitimate and justified. And when you sit down to think about it and consider why you’re raising your prices, you’ll probably come up with a whole host of great reasons. 

Think about your customer when it comes to explaining your price increase 

A lot of these reasons will relate to your customer and their experience. And when explaining a price increase, you should put your customer at the heart of it. Think about what will benefit them. 

Ultimately, take the narrative away from you and your price increase and put your customer at the heart of the message. 

For example, for web design, we explained that we were raising our prices because…

1. The projects became more time-intensive (because we spent more dedicated time with each client and took on fewer clients as a result)
2. We invested in more expensive tools and software (so the websites we created performed better and were more secure) 
3. We invested more in our own learning (and passed that onto our customers to make them more effective websites) 
4. We took on a more ‘consulting’ role during projects (so we could advise our clients on how to make their website a success, with help on content marketing to website copy)

The stuff in brackets above is what the customer cares about–the parts that actually benefit them. And that’s what led to us landing four new clients in one week from this one piece of content (earning us £25K). 

But we would not have done that if we’d simply emailed our list and told them our prices were going up without explaining why and how our customers benefit. 

Why does this content need to be public? 

We hear you. Creating public content around your price increase is scary, to say the least. What if your competitors see it? What if you put people off? What if you’re on the fence about raising your prices? 

Our favourite thing we like to say is ‘people don’t care what you say, they care what you publish.’ 

When something is published publicly it’s more trustworthy than something that is private. You can say anything privately or by email. But, public content is out there for the world to see, and when you’re talking about money, it’s instantly more trustworthy. 

Do you have to give a deadline? 

A big part of the success of when we did this was that we gave our audience the opportunity to buy from us at our current prices before they increased. 

However, you don’t have to do this. If it’s important you raise your prices and not offer your current rates that’s okay. You can still create this kind of content. It’s still incredibly helpful for your audience to understand why you’ve increased your prices and the benefits of what you offer. 

How do you promote your price increase content? 

The thing about price increase content is…people love to see it! 

Why? Because people love a good nosey that’s why. Our most popular blog post (in terms of social shares) is the one about why we’re increasing our web design prices. 

So don’t just create this content and shy away from any promotion. You have to take full advantage of your price increase and share it everywhere for it to be effective. 

Here are some ways you could promote it…

1. Send it to your email list 
2. Post on LinkedIn (company and personal page) 
3. Post on Facebook 
4. Go live on Facebook or LinkedIn 
5. Create Instagram stories or posts 

Make Sure You Promote this Time-Sensitive Content 

Remember, this is a time-sensitive piece of content because once your prices have gone up it becomes less interesting and relevant to your audience. 

So you need to give yourself time to promote it, and if you have a deadline where people can buy from you at your current prices you need to give your audience time to take up that offer. The amount of time will depend on what you sell. When we did this with our web design service, we gave a month’s notice as the investment ran into the thousands. You might not have to give that much notice with a cheaper product. 

What format should the content be in?

There’s no particular rule for what format your content should be in. Just that it’s public and shareable. We do everything via our blog. 

What if don’t want to publish your prices publically? 

Now, all of this is futile if you don’t actually publish your prices publicly. There’s no point saying your prices are going up if you don’t want to state how much they are now. 

If you don’t currently do this (or at least, give an indicator on price) then seriously consider doing so. The benefits for your business are huge, as highlighted in this blog post about why you should publish your prices on your website. 

The best question to ask yourself when it comes to publishing your prices is this, would you rather find out the price of something from a website. Or would you rather call someone and speak to them? 

Most people prefer the first option, right? Even if it’s not an exact price, just an indicator. We’d prefer to have an idea before we speak to someone in advance. 

Publishing your prices is just good customer service, as well as having a whole host of other benefits. 

Need some extra help? Try our blog post templates! 

If you’d like some extra support when it comes to writing your ‘price increase’ content, then check out our blog post template pack. This pack includes 10 blog post templates (including a raising your prices template) and saves you so much time when it comes to writing content. Check it out below. 

Martin & Lyndsay

The post Publish This Easy Piece of Content Before You Raise Your Prices (And See Amazing Results!) appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Lukey, our 10-week old son, was fast asleep.

Our cats were fast asleep.

We both had hot coffee.

It was a rare scenario in our house, and we had zero excuses not to talk about OUR PRICES.

We’re constantly telling small business owners to stop underestimating themselves and raise their damn prices! But, as always, it’s easier to give out advice than follow it yourself. When it came to our own business, we’d kept our web design prices the same for the last 18 months.

So why do small business owners, in particular, find raising their prices so hard? Because let’s face it huge corporations never seem to have this problem. 

I think we worry that people will say no and we’ll lose potential clients. In some cases, we feel like we’re not good enough to raise our prices, even though we know we deliver real value. Maybe it’s just because we’re British and we get all squirmy about talking money.

Martin and I felt all of these.

But the wonderful thing about being a team of two of is that we can have a discussion. I remember asking Martin, “Okay, but why should we charge more? What’s changed in our business?”

So we talked about it, and the more we talked about it, the clearer it was it had to happen.

Below, I’ve pretty much summed up our discussion: Why we’re increasing our web design prices.

How much will we charge for web design from April 2019?

Currently, our minimum package is £3497+VAT, and this will be increasing to £4497+VAT from the 4th of April. Yep, that’s a 28% increase. Quite a leap!

These are the reasons we’ve made that leap…

1. Our projects are getting more and more time-intensive

A website is more than just coding and techie stuff. It’s everything – design, user-experience, SEO, copy and content marketing. There is so, so much that goes into making a successful website and, as we’ve grown and developed, our projects have become more time intensive.

We take the time to delve into your business, understanding what your goals are for the future and who your ideal clients are. We plot how your users will journey through your site and how we can best convert them into leads. We consider everything from your big bold statement to the wording on call to action buttons. We experiment with different colours, fonts and styles. In short, we research and tweak and test constantly.

Don’t get us wrong, this is what we absolutely love to do, but our business model has slowly shifted over the past two years. We now take on fewer clients and spend more time and energy with those clients to make sure they get the best possible website for their business.

Essentially, we’re not a stack them high agency. We prefer to dedicate our time to a smaller amount of clients, because of this, we have to charge more for each individual site.

2. We invest heavily in our own learning

As I said before, a good website isn’t just about coding. It’s about design, user experience, SEO, copy and content marketing. We’ve learnt a hell of a lot about these topics through our own experience, but that doesn’t mean we can stop expanding our knowledge or not gain outside perspectives.

In order for us to deliver the best websites to our clients, we need to have the most up-to-date and in-depth knowledge. That’s why a few years ago we took the decision to cull our advertising spend and invest that time and money into learning and development.

We’re constantly striving to improve our own skills. Do we have to invest in our knowledge? Of course not, and many other web design agencies don’t do this. But we feel it’s the best thing to do for our clients’ websites.

We hire amazing people such as Col from Pixels Ink, who casts his expert eyes over the designs we create for our clients. We’re part of some amazing membership communities, like CMA (Content Marketing Academy) and Atomic, so we know exactly how to design websites for businesses who love content marketing. In fact, many of our new clients are coming to us because we know how to design a learning centre – a fantastic idea coined by Marcus Sheridan and introduced to us by Chris Marr (CMA).

We’ve also invested in experts like John Espirian to teach us about LinkedIn, Gavin Bell to teach us about Facebook ads, we’ve joined Derek Halpern’s course on how to write sales pages. And even though this has little to do with web design specifically, we still help our clients from the amazing things we’ve learned from these experts, and if they need more in-depth knowledge, we know who to recommend!

We spend tens of thousands of pounds every year on improving our skills and knowledge, and this is increasing year-on-year.

3. Many clients want advice and support

As we’ve grown, we’ve attracted a different kind of client. Clients who don’t just want an agency to design them a website, but need help with making their business a success.

This was (and still is!) very exciting for us because we love to teach. We love sharing our knowledge with our clients on how they can grow a successful online business. We’ll talk about branding, positioning, who they want to work with, where they want to be in the future, what their aims are for the next five years and what kind of lifestyle they want to lead. We’ll tell them how content marketing can help them or how to use SEO best practice in their business.

It’s a kind of holistic approach to web design, where we don’t just create our clients a website we help them build a successful online business. We build relationships with them which last and we absolutely love watching their businesses grow.

But all of this takes extra time and it also takes our expert knowledge. Knowledge we’ve spent a lot of time and money continuously developing.

4. We invest in the best tools

There are a shit-ton of free tools and plugins out there, especially when it comes WordPress, however, we like to invest in the best software for the websites we create.

We don’t offer a done-for-you SEO service, but we still invest heavily in SEO tools and software like SEM Rush, AHRefs and Majestic SEO. This allows us to identify where our clients can improve their rankings so we can make sure their traffic increases when we redesign their sites.

We also invest in tools our clients can use, such as Thrive Themes (which helps you build amazing sales pages). And if we do use plugins on our clients’ websites, we invest a lot in paid plugins. For example, there are tons of free contact form plugins out there, but we recently purchased a license for Gravity Forms to use on our clients’ sites.

So why do we prefer to pay for software rather than get it for free? Well, paid-for software is generally more accurate, more secure, and more trustworthy. It’s worth the investment from us to get it right for our clients.

5. We’re still a lot cheaper than other agencies

When we redesigned Janet Murray’s website, Janet said something quite interesting. Having done her own research Janet was getting quotes for new websites at 10/15K. You can listen to that podcast episode here. 

Many larger agencies charge tens of thousands for website design. So, yes, we’re more expensive than many other agencies or freelancers, HOWEVER, we’re often more affordable than a lot of bigger agencies too. The reason we can keep our costs lower than the bigger agencies is because our overheads are significantly lower. We don’t have a fancy office (we work from home) or a large team of staff. And we certainly don’t wear fancy suits or drive Audis!

We want to deliver a great return on investment, and we truly believe we do that.

Why the pricing discussion works

In the end, it was a no-brainer. Seeing all this on paper made it clear we had to raise our prices so we could continue to deliver an amazing product and service to our clients.

If you’re in a similar situation, where your prices have remained stagnant for years, I’d highly recommend thinking about how your business has changed, the extra things you do, how much you’ve developed and honed your skills. And ask yourself, are you charging enough to sustain what you currently offer?

Why do feel the need to explain our pricing?

I could’ve just edited the pricing page on our website and left it at that. But we made a commitment early on in our business to be open and transparent with our audience. Part of that is explaining our pricing and why we charge what we do so you can make a better buying decision.

Still thinking of getting a website redesigned?

As I said, our prices are going up on the 4th April 2019 and the minimum we will charge is £4497+VAT.

As of publishing this (11 March, 2019), you still have time to get in touch to get a website designed at our lower price.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post Why We’re Increasing Our Web Design Prices appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.

Yes, you definitely should put your prices on your website. Why? What’s the first question you ask yourself when buying a product or service? Yep, How much does it cost? Now, imagine you answered that question on your own website – you get tons of traffic and build up so much trust and credibility.

But, even with all this, the majority of business owners still shy away from displaying their prices online. It’s a debate we get into often. So, we’re here to put forward our view on why you SHOULD display your prices on your website.

Prefer video? Watch our Video on Why You Should Put Your Prices On Your Website

You Don’t Need a Pricing Table

Before you run and hide, hear me out. I’m not saying you should have a pricing table on your website that clearly defines what you charge. That would be bold. However, the least you can do is talk about your prices.

If you take a look at our pricing page, you’ll see we don’t tell you exactly how much a new website will cost. Not because we’re sneaky, but because it depends on a number of factors.

We say our prices start from £3497, and we tell you what that includes. We also describe what will add to that cost, for example, an e-commerce shop or a booking system.

You don’t HAVE to be too specific, although the more detail you give, the better. The least you should do is open up the conversation and give your reader an idea of your prices.

What About E-commerce Websites?

It’s worth noting that I’m not talking about B2C e-commerce websites here. Hell, if you’re wondering whether to display your prices in this instance, the answer is absolutely and unequivocally, YES!

If you run a service-based business and you’re currently not displaying your prices on your website, here’s why you should:

1. It Builds Trust

The biggest benefit to displaying your prices on your website is it builds trust with your audience.

Your potential audience will feel comfortable dealing with you if they know what you’re likely to charge. They won’t have those thoughts. You know the ones I mean: ‘Will this guy rip me off?’ or ‘Will they charge me more than someone else?’

By displaying your prices, you smash your potential customers’ protective barrier, and they’ll feel more comfortable in dealing with you over your competition.

2. It Avoids the Awkward Conversation

Customer: So…er…what are we talking?

You: Well, that depends. I mean, what’s your budget?

Customer: Well. I’m not really sure. What do you normally charge?

You: Well, erm….it all depends really.

I hate that conversation. You hate that conversation. And most importantly, your customer hates that conversation. So why the hell are you having it?

Since we started displaying our prices on our website, it’s so easy to talk money. Nine times out of ten, the potential client already knows how much we charge. We don’t have to ask them how much money they’ve got (it’s none of our business), and we get to delve right into the good stuff of learning more about them and their business. No awkward conversations. It’s a win/win for both.

3. It attracts the customers you want

Displaying your prices on your website helps attract the kind of customers you want. You may think that your potential audience will go to a cheaper competitor, but often that’s not the case.

By displaying your prices, you’re making it clear who you’re targeting.

We’re not cheap by any means, but we also don’t charge ‘high-end’ agency prices upwards of 10k. This makes it clear that we work well with established small-business owners and personal brands. We’re not the right fit for new business owners or huge corporations.

We find that our target market responds well to our prices, and you can do the same. If you’re cheap as chips and wanting to attract the very price conscious, then fine, say it! If you’re more expensive and want a different kind of client, no problem, but explain what makes you different, and why they should choose you.

4. It Could Save Hours of Admin Time Per Week

Before we started displaying our prices on our website, we spent approximately two-three hours per week having calls or replying to emails to people who were completely wrong for our business.

Some had a budget of five hundred quid, and some had a budget of twenty grand.  We spent time getting to the bottom of what they wanted, when in the end we were either too expensive or not the right fit. We wasted our time, and there’s too.

5. It Will Make You Stand Out

One of the most common concerns business owners have when it comes to displaying their prices on their website is this: It’s not the done thing in our industry.

Our response?

Well, that’s bloody fantastic.

Imagine being the first in your industry to say, hey! You know all these guys (this is where point to your competitors), they’re not going to tell you their prices. But guess what? I am. I have nothing to hide. I want to be upfront, open and honest with you.

Do you know how powerful that is? It’s huge! We’ve seen countless examples of this working, and your potential customers will respond positively. It makes you stand out from the competition and positions you as a leader in your industry.

6. Search Engine Optimisation

How on earth does displaying my prices help search engine optimisation?

Good question. Do you know what’s likely to be one of the top questions about your industry? How much does it cost?

How much does it cost for a website?

How much does it cost for an editor?

How much does it cost for a business coach?

Cost-related keywords and phrases are highly popular search terms. If you discuss your prices on your website, especially when much of your industry shies away from it, then you could be looking at so much more traffic to your site from Google.

But more than that, you can write articles about it. Yes, entire articles just about your pricing. We do it all the time. Look at…

Why are we so expensive
Why are we so cheap
Why New Businesses Shouldn’t Spend 1000s on a New Website
How Much Does it Cost For a Website

Not only do these articles get huge amounts of traffic from Google, but they also explain what makes us different, attracts our target audience AND builds trust.

Where did we get the idea?

We’d love to tell you that this is all our idea, but it’s not.

If you want to know more about why we started displaying our prices on our website, then check out Marcus Sheridan’s book, They Ask, You Answer. This book has been hugely influential in our lives and has transformed our business for the better. We couldn’t recommend it enough.

I hope this article has shown you the benefits of displaying your prices on your website. Are you still considering it? Is there anything holding you back?

I’d love to know your thoughts. Let me know in the comments below.

Lyndsay Cambridge

Owner at Jammy Digital, Digital Marketing Specialist and Writer of Young-Adult Fiction.

jammydigital.com

The post 6 Reasons You Should Put Your Prices On Your Website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.