WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER DROP YOUR PRICE AS A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER
In this series, I'm sharing with you my A-Z guide of pricing tips to help you price your services with confidence and feel more confident charging what you need to support yourself. Here are letters M-O:
M is for Monthly minimums
When I say monthly minimums, I mean monthly minimum agreements.
What I see a lot of social media managers do, especially in the early stages, is just offering clients a month to month rolling contract. But what that does is put a lot more pressure on you to constantly be looking for clients. You constantly have in the back of your mind that you’ve only got the client for a month and you worry “what if they don't continue?”.
This puts unnecessary stress and pressure on you. This is why I teach members of The Pricing Academy® to have a minimum of three months agreement. That means that the client signs up with you for a minimum of three months.
Not only does this secure consistent income for you but it also allows you to really get to know the brands that you're working with. It allows you to understand the brand, to test out different strategies, to see what works for them so you start getting really good results for your clients.
By the end of that three month period, chances are they're going to want to continue working with you.
Whilst we’re on monthly minimums, I also want to say please charge upfront for your services. It's what I encourage all members of The Pricing Academy® to do because otherwise, you could find yourself putting in all that effort and work for a client for them to turn around and say “Oh sorry, I can't pay you this month”.
So make sure you set a minimum term agreement and charge up front for your services.
N is for Never drop your price
When I started out as a social media manager, a lot of the time I would drop my prices just to hear the yes because I wasn't fully confident in myself and my abilities and the results that I could get for my clients.
But when I dropped the prices and got the yes, then what happened is I began to resent the clients. I don't know if you know this, but when you resent a client, it's very hard for you to get good results for them because you feel resentful of putting in so much effort.
It’s not a nice position for you to be in.
The only time you can drop your price is if you remove some value.
If a client comes to you and they want X, Y + Z and they can’t afford your price, it doesn’t mean you’re too expensive. It just means that their budget doesn’t fit your prices.
If they’re a client you absolutely love and you know that if you took out a few things - maybe posted less, did less engagement, made them write their own copy - if you know that you could take out those things and still get them really good results, you can drop the price and remove some of the value.
What’s important is that you don't remove the value and agree to drop the price if you know that you’re not going to be able to get the results for them. It's really important that you are fully transparent with your clients about that because what you don't want to do is find that you're not able to achieve what your clients are expecting you to achieve.
That’s not a good way to do business. (Though if you’re reading this, I know that wouldn’t be your style anyway).
O is for Offering one price
When I started doing this in my business as a social media manager, my conversion rates skyrocketed.
It was easy for me to attract clients and I always had enquiries landing in my inbox but what I found difficult was converting those leads into paying clients. When I looked back at my old proposals, I realised why.
I’d list out all the different packages that I had - at the time, I had a bronze package, a silver package, a gold package and a platinum package - and I’d give them all the four different packages, the four different prices and then I’d say “you can add this, this, this and this on for this, this and this price”.
This becomes overwhelming for your clients. Your clients are business owners. They already make hundreds of decisions every single week. They don't want to have to decide what social media package is right for them.
So just offer one price. The way I teach in The Pricing Academy® is to work out your platform price using my pricing formula, create a flexible package full of value that fairly reflects the price you need to charge and then understand each individual client’s needs. Then you can tweak your package to fit them. Whatever they want, include it in one simple package and offer one price for it. Then the only answer they can give is ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
If they say yes, get this Prosecco out and start celebrating!
If they say no, you can go back to them and discuss how to make it a yes.
Catch the next episode in this series here: Don’t charge an hourly rate, do this instead
