🛣 Meet Me at the Intersection of Marketing Ave & Pricing Blvd
Hello Reader,
This week my friend Karin interviewed me for her new podcast, Counsel Cast. It's not live yet (that'll happen next month) and we dug into the intersection of pricing and marketing. People often wonder why I, longtime marketer, talk so much about pricing models so much, so Karin and I dug into that topic and it's been on my mind all week.
But here's the crux of my answer to this question: you can have the most stellar marketing in the world, for the best service/product/cause/whatever ever seen, but if people cannot figure out how to pay you, if the pricing is confusing, or people have to "hop on a call" 🙄 so you can then reveal the price after 30 minutes or an hour of conversation, you're missing out. You're instead engineering a friction-filled, frustration-laden experience that harms your marketing.
It's that simple.
(An aside: Compound this confusion with the further disconnect organizations that silo their marketing and operations create when the brand and the pricing are totally disconnected and we've got massive confusion bordering on mistrust. Yep, I've experienced this in previous careers and it's not great!)
Confusion and stress about the unknown really messes with our heads, and yet, so much marketing does exactly that.
What if instead of creating tension, we started with empathy? Empathy is very powerful in marketing (assuming it's real, and not just for show—people can tell), and pricing is a piece—not all—of that.
Now, you may be hearing me as if I'm saying "Post prices, use productized services, do it my way." But that's not the case at all.
What I'm saying is to be cognizant of the role your pricing strategies and communication around pricing play in creating clarity or confusion.
Have a highly customized service? Cool! Write case studies that discuss budgets so people can understand HOW you arrive at pricing. (One of our old web design clients did this recently around an HVAC project and I loved this approach. Think about how much clarity and calmness this information would create for someone looking at an HVAC project.)
Pricing clarity is a work it out-able problem that will help you market more effectively, to the right people.
Talk next week,
Sarah
P.S. Want to book a 1:1 with yours truly? Grab a spot here!