How your digital marketing agency can provide a discount without cutting yourself short

Best ways to provide discounts for ‘new’ customers

Yes, we understand, times are tough for just about all people and businesses thanks to the world being closed for years over a cold so some really rich people who probably support Jeffery Epstein get even more rich. Look at where we are heading now, not a recession, but a collapse! I guess that’s what happens when everyone shuts down their businesses for years while the big corpos stay open and just reap all the benefits. It’s not rocket science, but more and more people are proven to be a bunch of NPC’s that are programmed to do whatever they are told and shown. Pretty embarrassing to say the least.

Anyway, in saying that it is time to offer new customers some incentive to use your digital marketing services. Once you are able to show results, it won’t be hard to upsell them to get even better results. However, don’t let anyone lowball you to a point you are not able to get them good results that bring profit to their business. This will not only have them cancel their services with you, but also may lead to some negative reviews, and bad news travels fast!

We recently canceled one of our lower-end projects with one of our customers as we felt we were not meeting their expectations and they were having trouble with payment. The last thing we would want to do is keep having them pay for a service that we felt was not right for them. Customers always come first, or there will be no business to run!

Get customers to see the value in your digital marketing services

A lot of customers tend to want to pay a lot less because of a few things:

• They don’t understand the concept as they have never done this before.
• They have had a bad experience with another online marketing company.
• Jondeep is promising them the world with a $400 SEO package.

This is where you really need to show the value of your work and even provide some examples and case studies so they can appreciate the costs of the project and understand how they can generate revenue from it.

To put it in simpler terms: The customer wants a 458 Ferrari but only wants to spend the equivalent of a Toyota Camry Hybrid. The Camry will not perform like the Ferrari, it doesn’t look good, sounds like sh*t, doesn’t handle like the Ferrari or go anywhere as fast, and looks like a taxi. This may sound arrogant and there is nothing wrong with not being able to afford a Ferrari, but don’t expect to get the same performance from your Camry.

The same goes for SEO services or other digital marketing services you offer, and the thing with SEO, is if you think you are getting a nice cheap deal chances are you are being conned. That money is either too little for your SEO team to be doing any work so the company is just pocketing all the project fees, or they are doing ‘black hat’ (dodgy) work which will end up potentially penalising your website and not being able to rank at all.

Therefore, it is vital that you get customers to see the value in your services and why it is priced in such a way.

The consequences of cutting costs of your online marketing offering

We have to admit, we did cut the costs of some of our digital marketing services during the lockdowns to help businesses stay afloat while the government, big corpos, and pharmas are laughing at us. A lot of customers used the lockdown as an excuse to get discounts, we knew this, but it didn’t worry us as anything else could have happened that would have really hindered our customers businesses.

One of our customers (eCommerce) we worked with for 4 years wanted to drop their online marketing costs by 60% during this period, we told them it is not a good idea because they are selling online and during this time everyone will be online. Anyway, they were already ranking amazing for big search terms so even if we did drop costs and resources they were able to enjoy all the benefits due to their already good results. However, 6 months passed and they did not want to put their project costs back to what they were originally on. Another 6 months passed, same thing, but then they started to notice drops in traffic and online revenue and started to panic. After several phone calls and face-to-face meetings with the client, we were able to have the marketing spend back to what it was originally however, we are now playing catchup. It was over one year we were working on lower prices, so fewer resources were put into the campaign (for a few months we still worked at 100% capacity, but then we were losing money so had to pull some resources), and because of this, even if the budget is back at what it originally was results don’t happen overnight. We are very transparent with our customers and we did let them know the longer we leave this at a lower budget, the longer it will take to catch up later. After a bit of time, we were ghosted by our loyal client of 4 years and then were sent a letter from their liquidators.

You can see from the results below what happened to traffic.

This is a perfect example of what happens when you decide to let customers lowball you. There is only so much an online marketing agency can do with the resources available at low budgets. Our other eCommerce clients put their spend up during lockdowns and their businesses flourished even after these totalitarian lockdowns ended.

What to do if a customer cannot afford your services?

You might be great at what you do and have shown value to all your customers time and time again, however not everyone will be able to afford your services, and that is perfectly fine. We have told many customers that we rather see them save their money than pay for a campaign that will be under-resourced due to budget constraints.

So, once again, it is ok to provide discounts but cut down costs so much that you won’t be able to provide good results to customers and meet expectations. This only shows that you don’t care about the customer and will take whatever you can just to fill your pocket a little bit more. Customers come first!