The days of pitching print ads and spending a few hundred bucks on expensive print runs for new customers are gone. When the pandora’s box of digital marketing opened, the traditional rules of marketing & sales no longer applied. Nowadays, every business is a potential customer, and creating a memorable brand experience is the key to success.
The line between marketing and sales has blurred. Nowadays, marketing teams are responsible for acquiring new customers, while sales teams strive to keep those customers by offering them products and/or services that meet their needs. The role of the sales team has changed. Instead of focusing on closing a deal and walking away, modern-day sales professionals strive to create a memorable experience for their customers. This way, when their customers come back for more, they’ll remember your company and be eager to engage with you again.
While this has opened up a world of possibilities for savvy marketers, it has created a unique set of challenges. How do I sell my services to someone that I’ve never met before? How do I introduce my pricing structure before my customer signs the contract? What methods can I use to prove that I’m a reliable source of business?
Luckily, we’re living in a golden age of online marketing. With numerous tools at our disposal, we have the opportunity to engage with potential customers and prove to them that we are, in fact, the best choice for their needs. In this article, I’ll cover 4 ways that you can charge for your online marketing services.
1. Create a Marketing Plan
I know what you’re thinking. Charging for a digital marketing strategy is something that you wouldn’t normally do. After all, it’s not a product that you sell and have to explain to someone why they should buy it. Wrong!
You might not need to. Many marketing agencies offer a free trial period. This means that you’re not required to commit to a long-term partnership in order to receive value from their services. You can evaluate how the agency performs during the trial period and, if you’re happy with the results, you can decide to continue working with them on a regular basis. In the meantime, you can also decide to cancel the partnership if you’re not getting the results that you want.
This is a smart move because it prevents you from having to explain your price structure to someone who isn’t quite prepared to accept it. Instead of starting a business relationship with a potential customer who might then try to negotiate your pricing, you can wait to engage with them until they’re well prepared to understand and appreciate your value proposition.
2. Set A Price Ahead Of Time
Another potential pitfall of selling a service is not being upfront about your pricing structures. Your customers will then have to figure it out for themselves, which can be a hassle and potentially lose you a client. However, by setting a price in advance, you remove this hassle and ensure that the negotiation process is as beneficial for you as possible.
For some reason, many business owners are reluctant to share their price structures with their customers. This is particularly the case when they’re trying to sell a service, rather than a product. This mindset can lead to problems because, in most cases, your customer is going to have the upper hand and be able to negotiate a better deal. Worse still, if your customer isn’t convinced that your prices are good, they might feel that they have to go elsewhere for the service they need. In other words, they might lose trust in you.
The solution is simple. Be upfront about your prices and ensure that your customers know what they’re getting into. For example, if you’re selling website traffic, be sure to explain to your customers that this is essentially a form of advertising and that you’re responsible for generating the traffic. As a general rule, the more your customers know about the services that you provide, the more they’ll appreciate your expertise and be open to negotiating a good deal with you. Better to be safe than sorry.
3. Use Monetization Plans
Although you might not believe it, running a successful online marketing agency is a lot like selling pharmaceuticals. Like pharmaceuticals, the revenue that your agency generates comes from two sources: Products that your customers buy from you and advertising. However, unlike pharmaceuticals, you don’t necessarily need to make a lot of money from product sales in order to be satisfied with your income.
This is because you can generate significant amounts of revenue through ad sales alone. Rather than selling a drug directly to a patient, you’re selling ads to the patient. In this case, the patient is essentially the advertiser. This is why ad sales are known as third-party marketing.
In the same way that pharmaceutical companies need to generate substantial revenue from product sales in order to be satisfied with their incomes, so too do online marketing agencies. This is why it’s critically important to have a monetization plan in place before you begin generating any significant amounts of revenue. What is a monetization plan and how do I create one?
The monetization plan is simply a detailed plan outlining your strategy for generating revenue from ad sales. It should include the following information:
- The type of ads that you’re going to run
- Your ideal customer and target audience
- How you plan to drive traffic to your blog or website
- The conversion rate that you hope to see from each ad
- The amount of money that you’re willing to spend on ads (per impression)
- Your plan to maximize your spend
The information in the above list will help you determine the ROI, or return on investment, of your ad campaign. If you’re running an eCommerce store, the monetization plan is especially important because you’ll want to make sure that your product descriptions and marketing copy are optimized for monetization. In other words, you want to ensure that your product listings and marketing copy are persuasive and convince your customers to make the purchase.
Writing a convincing ad copy is all about matching the right words to the right audience. In most cases, matching the right words to the right audience will naturally lead to matching the right words to the right product. In other words, your product will be the best possible fit for the words that you use to describe it.
4. Create A Loyalty Program
A quality customer base is the key to a profitable business. This is especially true in the online marketing world where every company is a potential competitor. In order to build and maintain a loyal customer base, you might consider offering your customers a loyalty program. Depending on your target audience and whether you’ve built a good brand, you might find that your customers are more than willing to give you some business for free. Why? Because they know that you’ll appreciate it if they’re loyal to your brand.
By encouraging your customers to become regular consumers of your products or services, you’re ensuring that they’ll generate revenue for your agency. This is particularly easy to do with digital marketing because most companies offer various levels of free trials or incentives for new customers. In the context of a loyalty program, these are known as welcome gifts.
What type of welcome gift should you offer? Typically, companies give you a freebie of some sort – whether this is a product or service – in exchange for your customer’s email address. While this might not seem like a lot, if you’ve got 1000 email addresses, this is a lot of revenue that you’re losing out on. Why? Because every individual email address is worth a few dollars depending on the size of your list. So, in exchange for an email address, you might get something free – like a coupon for a product that you sell – or you could get something valuable – like a free month of a product that you don’t sell yet. Or, if you’ve built up enough trust with your customer, you might even be able to get them to agree to promote your business on their behalf.
The bottom line is that by encouraging your customers to become regular consumers of your products or services, you’re ensuring that they’ll generate revenue for your agency. This might seem like a difficult sell at first, but if you’ve done your homework and presented yourself as an expert in your industry, they might just see you as an easy solution to their problem.