How to Position Your Brand for Premium Pricing
Jul 18, 2018You are amazing at what you do and your clients get phenomenal results. Isn't it time that your income reflect all your hard work?
Being paid more for your services is totally possible and easy with a few tweaks to how you're communicating your business to your potential clients.
By following the 5 steps below (all of which I had to learn the hard way), I went from charging $200 per month for 4, 60-minute coaching sessions, to $2,000 per month for less of my time. All while adding more value and better results for my clients.
Here's how to position your brand for premium pricing:
1. Narrow your focus
If you had a brain tumor would you be willing to pay a brain surgeon more than a general surgeon to remove it? Of course, right?! It's a no brainer (pun intended) because you trust the brain surgeon to be more experienced at treating your specific problem and therefore get you better results.
Same goes for you and your brand. When you narrow your focus you are trusted as an expert at solving the specific problem your potential clients need help with. And they are willing to pay you a premium price to get the results they want.
2. Package your services into high-end programs
If you're a soul-o-preneur with lots of tools in your tool box (e.g. yoga, nutrition, meditation), you can't command high-end pricing when you sell one-off sessions here and there.
A single yoga session, nutrition consult or meditation instruction can only be sold for so much no matter how experienced and awesome you are.
But when you bring your tools together into a powerful, step-by-step program that is positioned to help a very specific type of person (your ideal client) overcome a very specific problem, the price you can charge for your services will skyrocket because the perceived (and actual) value will be so much greater.
If you had a brain tumor would you be willing to pay a brain surgeon more than a general surgeon to remove it? Of course, right?! It's a no brainer (pun intended) because you trust the brain surgeon to be more experienced at treating your specific problem and therefore get you better results.
Same goes for you and your brand. When you narrow your focus you are trusted as an expert at solving the specific problem your potential clients need help with. And they are willing to pay you a premium price to get the results they want.
2. Package your services into high-end programs
If you're a soul-o-preneur with lots of tools in your tool box (e.g. yoga, nutrition, meditation), you can't command high-end pricing when you sell one-off sessions here and there.
A single yoga session, nutrition consult or meditation instruction can only be sold for so much no matter how experienced and awesome you are.
But when you bring your tools together into a powerful, step-by-step program that is positioned to help a very specific type of person (your ideal client) overcome a very specific problem, the price you can charge for your services will skyrocket because the perceived (and actual) value will be so much greater.
3. Clearly communicate your results (and stop talking about your tools and techniques)
Once you narrow your focus and package your services into a high-end program, it's time to get your tribe psyched about working with you!
The best way to get them excited is to show them the results they can look forward to. And the more the results strike an emotional chord, the easier you will be able to position your brand for high-end pricing.
When choosing which results to highlight, remember this: results are the things that motivate your ideal clients to put down money to work with you.
Results are not what you, as the expert in your awesome modality, know your ideal clients need.
Meet your ideal clients at their motivation, then give them what they need once they get through the door.
Bonus tip: The opposite of communicating results, is boring your audience with paragraphs of text explaining your tools and techniques.
You can geek out on these things all day, I get it, I'm a passionate biz owner too.
But nobody cares about your tools and techniques as much as you do. What they care about is how you're going to help them get out of the shitty situation they are in, or help them achieve a huge goal that would mean the world to them to accomplish.
4. Share social proof
The more you can demonstrate real-life results that current or past clients have experienced by working with you, the easier it will be to position your brand for high-end pricing.
Social proof will be most effective when it focuses on specific outcomes. For example:
Generic and useless: "I feel so much happier and healthier since working with you."
Specific and effective: "Since working with you, I lost 10 pounds, and got a 20K raise at work because I finally had the confidence to ask for what I'm worth!"
Social proof can be shared across your business in the form of testimonials on your website, emails and social media platforms.
5. Look the part
If you want to be paid high-end prices for your work, you can't get by with a DIY brand that looks like it was created by an amateur in Canva or PicMonkey.
You'd be amazed at how many brilliant women entrepreneurs I come across who are keeping themselves stuck and broke because they are committed to bootstrapping their brands.
First impressions are made within less than a second.
Ask yourself this: When the clients I want to serve land on my website, do they see me as someone who they would want to pay a premium price to work with?
On second thought, don't ask yourself... ask me!
It's sometimes hard to see ourselves as others do, especially when we've slaved away at our website header for the past 3 hours and we're convinced it must look good if we've invested the past 3 hours into it. I've been there, believe me.
