Many, many years ago, when I was first learning about marketing (we’re talking way back before Social Media existed and email marketing was unheard of) I learnt about the 4Ps of Marketing. They were gospel and had to be applied to any marketing that was done. I even wrote essays about them and answered questions on them in marketing exams.

Times have changed and marketing has moved on a huge amount since those distant days. However, some of the fundamentals of marketing still need to be considered, for it to be successful. So over the next few blogs, I’m going to write a mini-series in which I’ll tell you a bit about each of the 4Ps – Price, Product, Place and Promotion. I’ll show you how you can put them into practice in order to successfully promote your business.

Number 1 = Price

I wrote recently on this blog about why, when you provide a service, you should not promote your business on price. You can read that blog here. It is much more important to promote your business based on what makes you different and better than your competition. The other big challenge that we all face with promoting our service businesses, is how much to charge – and how to work out how much to charge.

How do you decide what to charge? Do you just pluck a number out of the air? Or do you look at what your competitors are charging and do something similar?

If you sell a product, you can work out how much it costs you to produce that product and then add on your profit margin, to get your selling price. But how much does it cost to ‘produce’ your service? Some people will tell you to decide how much you want to earn over a year, look at how many days you want to work in the year and from that, you can decide how much you need to charge per day. In all honesty, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has done this successfully, achieving their target earnings in the number of days they want to work. Most people end up working more days than they’d like, due to lower days rates than they’d hoped for.

However you go about setting your prices, think about how to use them in your marketing. I know I keep saying that you must not use price to promote your service … but price does have a part to play. If you want to promote the quality of your service and show how much better it is than your competitors, then you can think about charging more than they do. What you must also do in this case, is show your prospective clients the value they will get from working with you. Think carefully about the benefits that your service will bring to anyone who uses it. Don’t talk about the features – show prospects what they will get from your time and experience and how you will solve their problems. All your marketing material needs to answer the ‘So what?’ question that potential clients will ask about your service.

If you use networking to promote your business – ideal when you provide a service – it is vital that you talk about the value that you provide, to the people you meet. If you strike up a conversation and start telling someone how much you charge, before you’ve explained the value they could get from your expertise, you won’t have a very long conversation. The same applies to online marketing – promote your value and benefits through any social media where you can have a ‘conversation’ with prospects.