How Do You Justify Premium Pricing To A Client?

[Jared]

How do you justify your extra costs as compared to low-cost SEO services?

For example, I just came across this:

TownSquare
Cost: $597 per month
Overview: This is the company we use for our website, SEO, directory listings, and social media. They provide a lot of services? They build your website and will do unlimited changes, ongoingly. They perform all of the front end and back end SEO and keep updating the site to stay up to date with search engine updates. This helps rank your website higher on google. They will get you a ?premium? listing on 50 online directories. They set up all social media pages, and post 2x per week to your social media pages. Basically, it?s one stop for everything online. I have one rep that I contact who manages everything for me. It?s been nice.

$597 a month for what sounds like a whole lot of time spent on the client . . .

What do you tell clients who are aware of these types of sites, to justify you charging them more than $597 a month for less monthly hours (assuming you do)?

I know Perry Marshall, for one, has some good advice on premium pricing, but I'd love to hear what you all have to say on the subject.

Thanks!

 

[mborgelt]

We've seen that most of these companies outsource their work and the quality is usually not up to modern SEO/online marketing standards. We explain that we are more expensive because of our expertise in the field. We also take much more of a custom approach to the client whereas these companies tend to have more of a "chop shop" approach.

 

[James Watt]

There's a million things that have been written on this topic, and you're right, Perry Marshall is a good person to listen to on that. Another favorite example I like is Frank Kern... don't get me wrong, I haven't bought a product from him in a very long time, and I don't think I'd recommend anyone else do it either, but his sales funnels are kick ass and well worth keeping an eye on, especially these days. I suspect everyone here knows the 'theory' of how to step outside the pricing game (I can't be the only one with a mountain of marketing books I've read through) but implementation is always where things get challenging, and that's something that takes practice, and successful examples from the field to study.

The short end of the stick though... not to belabor the obvious, but if people are looking at your credentials and considering you along with several other companies, you've already lost. This industry is poorly regulated, and I have yet to talk to a small business owner that hasn't been burned at least once. That works out really well in our favor though... if you have a relationship, they know you and trust you, and feel lost at the prospect of finding anyone else that could deliver half as well as they believe you can... well, of course you can command higher fees then. At that point it's more about ROI and the marketing budget of the business, not 'industry standards' and 'competitive pricing'. As someone who's been in both kinds of relationships ('lazy' marketing and client management, vs. something with a whole lot more connection and trust) I know which one I want to be exclusively doing from here on out. Word to the wise: an easy way to help with that is to focus on one particular vertical, and figuring out how you're going to step past just being a 'technician' that emails them a bunch of charts and graphs on the first of every month that they're not even going to read.

I've also found too that more and more people are giving advice to my clients now... not just competitive salesmen, also nephews, employees, (employees nephews)... there's a million voices in their ear, it's almost as bad as when you tell people you're trying to lose weight... everyone's got an opinion, even if no one knows what they're talking about. Your voice needs to carry a whole lot more weight on the topic, and it's challenging I think to have an adviser's level of trust when you have a vested interest in them believing what you're saying. They know you have a vested interest in their believing what they're saying, but that doesn't mean you can't have that level of trust, just means you need to put a lot of time in your outreach funnel, your client management approach, and so on.