DON'T LOWER YOUR PRICES, DO THESE 3 THINGS INSTEAD
Pricing stops many social media managers in their tracks.
You may spend a few weeks increasing your confidence, finally feel like you can increase your price and then no one signs up within the first week.
So you instantly want to lower your prices back down.
Here’s the thing, it’s going to take you just as much time, energy and effort to sign a new client at £200 per platform as it would £600 per platform. And my guess is, you’d much rather a handful of higher paying clients than armfuls of lower paying clients that just about cover your bills…
So before you think about dropping your price just to hear a yes, do these 3 things instead.
Think about the ROI for your client
The first thing you need to do before you lower your prices is think about the ROI you’re getting for your client. Whatever you’re helping them with will help them achieve one of both of these things:
More time
More money
These two commodities are extremely valuable.
Let’s start with time: If you’re managing the social media for your clients, you’re taking a rather large part of their business off their plate for them. This frees up time for them to stay in their core zone of genius, to spend more time doing the things they love and to help them focus on their clients (therefore delivering a better service to their customers).
If you offer one off services like workshops, power hours, hashtag research, profile audits, etc, you’re also saving them a shit tonne of time because they aren’t spending hours trying to figure things out on their own.
Think about someone who’s clueless around social media strategy - can you imagine how many hours they would waste just trying to figure it out alone? Whereas a 2-3 hour session with you could solve all their problems and leave them feeling confident to show up for their community.
This is incredibly valuable for your clients and you deserve to be fairly compensated for it.
The more obvious result you can achieve for your clients: More money.
When you’re building a reputable, cohesive brand for your clients, when you’re engaging with their community and driving traffic to their products/services, you’re helping them to make more money.
Let’s look at an example:
Lucy is a coach who charges £3,000 for 1:1 coaching.
When she hires you to manage her socials, you increase her audience, build genuine connections with her dream clients and position her as an expert. Over the course of a 3 month period, you attract 3 new 1:1 clients into her world and she successfully signs them (which is totally her responsibility, not yours).
If Lucy is paying you £300 per month, she’s 10x’d her investment. If she pays you £600 per month, she’s still 5x’d her investment and made a cool £7.2k, except this way around, you feel valued and appreciated.
Now obviously this is just an example. Every business sells different products/services. And I’m by no means telling you you should charge £600 a platform (although if you want to know exactly how much you should charge, take my pricing quiz here).
But really think about it. Think about the ROI you can get for your clients in terms of time and money and remember that you are a highly skilled professional - even if it does feel easy for you.
Look at your feedback folder
The second thing you should be before lowering your prices is something I encourage all my clients to do. Create a feedback folder full of emails, messages and comments you receive on social media.
Take screenshots and create a folder on your phone or just have a separate folder in your emails, it doesn’t matter. What matters is you have a place to store all this wonderful praise so you can remind yourself daily just how good you are.
We’re often taught, particularly in the UK, that it’s rude or arrogant to brag about our success. We get called a ‘show off’ or told we’re ‘up ourselves’ but this is bullshit. The more you celebrate yourself, the more you inspire others. There’s enough negative noise out there, isn’t there? It’s time we all spread a bit more positivity.
Back to the point: Every morning, open up your feedback folder and spend a minute or two reading some of the wonderful comments you’ve received.
And if you’re brand new to business and don’t have a testimonial, save messages from your partner when they tell you how much they love you or messages from your mum when she tells you how proud she is.
Work on your mindset
If you’ve been in my world for a while, you’ll know that mindset is something I talk about a lot. If you’re new here, hi! Come join my Insta community here.
Feeling like you should lower your prices can come from three things:
Lack of confidence in your ability to deliver amazing results
Lack of belief that you can sign a client at a higher price
Lack of self worth or feeling worthy of earning that amount of money
When you commit to working on your mindset and increasing your levels of self confidence, self belief and self worth, you’ll recognise just how valuable you are to your potential clients and community and you’ll therefore find it easier to charge higher prices.
So how can you work on these three things?
We’ll start with confidence.
First of all, we need to uncover the limiting beliefs that are causing you to lack confidence and turn them into empowering beliefs.
Using your journal or a sheet of paper, write out all the reasons why you don’t think you deliver the results your clients want.
Perhaps you write something like:
I don’t have enough experience
I didn’t get a degree in marketing, I’m only self taught
Other people have been doing socials for longer than me
These are what’s known as limiting beliefs. They’re called limiting beliefs because they are limiting you from having the business you want and/or living the life you want.
When you’ve uncovered all the negative thoughts swimming around in your mind, it’s time to rewrite them into empowering beliefs. You do this by completely reversing the statement.
And remember, you don’t have to know all the answers to get results for your clients. You only need to be one or two steps ahead of them to support them.
Let’s reverse the limiting beliefs and turn them into empowering beliefs:
I don’t have enough experience becomes: The experiences I’ve had so far enable me to achieve amazing results for my clients
I’m only self taught becomes: I taught myself these amazing skills that can make a huge difference to my clients
Other people have been doing this longer than me becomes: I have the knowledge, skills and experience to get my clients results
The next part is the most important: you need to reprogram these empowering thoughts into your mind.
Instead of having negative thoughts or beliefs on a loop in your head, make the conscious choice to repeat the positive thoughts or beliefs instead.
Every day, set a timer for 10-15 minutes and start to repeat your new, empowering beliefs to yourself either in your head or out loud. Alternatively you can write them out or record and listen to them using the free app ThinkUp.
The more you repeat the positive thoughts, the more you’ll start to believe them. This in turn will increase your confidence and help you to feel good about your prices so you no longer want to lower them.
Now let’s look at building the belief that you can sign new clients at a higher price.
You can use a similar approach as before and repeat positive affirmations to program your mind into believing it is possible for you to sign higher paying clients (which it totally is) or you can use journaling as your future self to step into the confident version of yourself who believes in what’s capable for her.
Here are a few powerful journal prompts you can use to build more self belief:
Now that I have a handful of higher paying clients on my books, what did I need to believe about myself for this to be easy?
If I were to believe, without a hint of doubt, that it’s easy for me to sign high paying clients, what action would I take today?
I choose to believe that I can easily sign higher paying clients. Because of that choice, I also choose to believe this about myself:.......
Use these journal prompts to help you expand your thinking and think like the next version of yourself who has already achieved what you want.
Lastly, let’s look at an exercise to help you increase your self worth so you feel comfortable receiving more money from your clients.
To build up your self worth, you need to find evidence around why you are worthy of receiving. The truth is, you are worthy for no other reason than you are you. You were worthy the day you were born and you are worthy now.
As we go through life, different experiences can impact our levels of self worth. Perhaps we were cheated on by someone we loved, betrayed by a friend, let down by a boss or criticised by a stranger on the internet. Each time a negative experience happens, it can chip away at how worthy we feel.
But we have a responsibility to work on changing this and to choosing ourselves. When we choose us, we encourage others to choose us too.
To increase your levels of self worth, I like to use a tool I call an Empowerment List. The idea is that you write a list out of empowering things about yourself. Here are a few examples below:
45 Things I love about myself
35 Reasons my clients love to work with me
25 Reasons I know I am worthy of being paid well for my services
You can create any empowerment list you like. The idea is that seeing all the evidence in front of you for why you are worthy or deserving will make you feel good about yourself. It’ll give you an instant confidence boost and, over time, it’ll slowly start to increase your levels of self worth.
And if you really, really have to lower your price….
I’m hoping that after following all these steps you won’t need to drop your price but if you have a dream client who really can’t afford you and you can still get results for them if you don’t offer the full package, then this is what you need to do: Lower the price and remove some of the value.
This might look like engaging for less hours a week, sharing a smaller number of posts or not including sharing stories for example.
When you lower your price and keep the service the same, you’re essentially saying your services aren’t worth that price in the first place.
But when you lower the price and remove some of the value, you’re setting solid boundaries for yourself, standing by the value of your package and positioning yourself as an expert.
To recap, the 3 things you need to do before lowering your price are:
Think about the ROI for your clients
Look at your feedback folder
Work on your mindset
If you’re struggling to know what to charge for your services, join The Pricing Academy® now and discover the exact price you need to put on your offers.