Why And When Should A Discount Be Given
Of course, you can take the position of an “industry expert”, put on your pince-nez and start getting tired that discounts are evil, that they harm business, drive you into zero and negative profitability, and interfere in the long run. And it’s all true. But now is not the time, and let’s be honest with ourselves: if you have a shortage of orders, simple resources and there is a question of dismissing people, and then a normal client comes in, and the question of cooperation with him depends on a discount – you need to give it. And this is absolutely normal, do not torment yourself with doubts.
With an important amendment to the correct reasoning, that often a client is ALREADY ready to buy a service from you at the initially indicated price and asks about a discount in the “why not ask” mode. This good salesperson should be able to catch through communication.
And it is better to offer instead of a discount for the same price a small pool of additional work to the main scope (it is especially good to test some bold unusual hypothesis or non-standard experimental functionality that the client would not have dared to use: from this it is potentially possible to extract very good Effect).
Why Is It Harmful To Give Discounts In A Crisis
But exactly what you shouldn’t do is try to build external marketing on it. A mega call-to-action like “anti-crisis action, 20% discount” is perceived by everyone, absolutely everyone, just like white noise and is ignored in a hundred cases out of a hundred. The creative idea is even worse – trying to pass off your dumping and easy sales as some kind of help to an unknown market in the style of “we want to support Russian small business, so we now have SEO not 50, but 40 thousand a month.” Nothing, except for a sarcastic grin of potential clients and a trade-off, it will do. Does not apply to the crisis. If the client cannot afford your services, his budget for an agency from the echelon is lower, but he persuades you into a discount – be prepared for very high expectations. VERY MUCH. He will gut you and bite your brain, because he scraped up the last one in order to appeal to the “cooler” guys – and he will expect something incredible. Colleagues will not let you lie, this is one of the most gimmicky types of clients in the style “we had money for Pupkin’s studio, but we collected the entire budget for the year, knocked out all possible discounts from you, but now we are waiting for what will be right AX”. And straight AH happens quite rarely. You also need to be able to catch this.
Nobody Needs Your Case Studies
PR-managers of agencies apparently bored without conferences, rushed to publish cases. Good, bad, but a lot – my entire career-oriented tape is littered with them. Do not. Not now. Now, within the framework of the current first chaotic-turbulent phase of the crisis, your target audience has changed their problematic, they are worried about something completely different, not just a month ago, they have new difficulties in the moment. And your case “how we promoted a pizzeria on Instagram a year ago” is not interesting to anyone from the word at all. And there is no pizzeria anymore.
What to do? Provide information that is relevant right now. Look through our digital agency Portland website, for example. Not what you did for your clients three years ago (and what a cool video clip you made for the festival), but this particular week, in the moment. What problem were you able to solve. What has changed since two weeks earlier. What, albeit micro, but achieved success. As we saw that in some channels, the target audience increased, the efficiency increased and the cost of a click decreased, albeit a little. How has CJM changed on the site in 10 days. How did you begin to segment your customer base differently in such and such an industry, introduced new triggers – and what happened. How did you come up with three cool hypotheses, quickly tested it in a week – and yes, they all didn’t work. This is also valuable.
Of course, this information will be selective, framed worse than your usual festival stories, there will be many assumptions and gaps in it. But on the other hand, it will be relevant right now – and right now applicable to the current situation of a client from your target audience.
This will allow you to see that you are alive, and not the SMM robot is posting something from the past that you put on the schedule three months ago and forgot to cancel. What you work, try, try, explore. That you understand, what problems right now, within the current microphase of the crisis / news cycle, worry your customers, that you understand them and that you can help.
And then it will work. Then the client will not just skip it in the feed, but will catch his eye on the solution to the problem that has arisen right now. He will estimate the numbers that you got yesterday on his situation today, and tomorrow he will try to repeat and improve them as your client.
How Can Agencies Properly Work With Clients In Times Of Crisis?
Well, and one more very simple thought. In almost any crisis, the focus of marketing in complex niches (including in the business of digital agencies) shifts from acquisition to retention.
And everyone understands this in words. Unfortunately, overwhelmingly in agency cases, it boils down to a pattern of a manager calling a client once a week like, “Well, how are you, the budget is still frozen? Oh, okay, then I’ll call you in a week, stay there, health, happiness and that’s all! ”
Obviously, such “customer care” will cause nothing but irritation on the other side.
Therefore, it is necessary to build communication in the concept of added value. Each of your contacts / calls with a client should be of benefit to him.
1. Take an interest in ideas
Yes, in marketing, many clients have cut budgets, in production they have paused / frozen projects. But if the client’s business is not completely dead yet, then he is just like you – constantly thinking about options, side stories, pivots, hypotheses.
Ask him what ideas he has, give feedback, suggest additions in your area of expertise, joint brainstorming. At the same time, get useful feedback on business and trends in his industry (which is useful for cross-pollination from the next paragraph).
Perhaps, even if the main work on the client’s account is suspended, you will find what to do together with the client according to his quick ideas, and help him pull out the situation – for mutual benefit.
2. Extrapolate
You probably have more than one client. And, most likely, you are doing something for your clients right now on the current agenda. Cross-pollinate with ideas. It turned out on one client something in the moment, even if local – convey the opportunity to other clients with a similar situation.
3. Personalize use
Collect and send interesting information to the client (really interesting and collected exclusively for him, pointwise, and do not just throw him links in Telegram to posts in industry publications 10 pieces a day). As in the previous post about analytics, and in this case, the data may not be yours, but simply correctly collected from the market (and even more “fast”).
The effect will be even better if, along with the information, you immediately offer a small pool of ideas for implementation. For example: “We noticed that in VK the model of content consumption by young mothers (proofs) has changed, at the same time their schedule of daily activity in isolation has changed (proofs). Therefore, there are two ideas on how you can quickly use this in our SMM (ideas). ” Check out YouTube marketing SEO tools – be in the loop!
4. Check for yourself
To check the usefulness for the client of each such call / contact / appeal, use the simplest check on yourself: if your contractor sent you or offered to discuss something like this, it would cause irritation and distract you from extinguishing the burning shed, or it would turn out to be meaningful and useful, led to some benefit?
5. Adapt
The foundation of any agency / production is based on two of the most important things – team and experience.
Use your experience and expertise to create this very added value for your clients – not only in the work phase, but also in the phase of any communication, even a simple call. Transmit experience from one segment to another, project ideas, look for new things at intersections, remember the path traveled, not accepted, dig a bank of past ideas – and adapt.
The team will help you with this. This is your main asset. And retaining customers in a crisis is the main task. Use one for the other. Collect ideas from employees in real time. Set up a small operational headquarters via chat or intranet. Form a list of clients for whom it makes sense to do something, and motivate the guys: send links to relevant information from external sources, trends, statistics, successful cases; your own experience in the current work on your clients; ideas based on raw materials from the previous two points. Yes, even at least half an hour’s meeting every day with a quick collection of ideas for subsequent communication with specific clients.
6. And what about communications?
Conduct a retrospective of current communications with all clients over the past month. How large is the percentage of those that do not benefit the client on their own? Which ones are potentially irritating?
Yes, yes, a lot of this is quite obvious to any intelligent being in the universe – and it is also true for non-crisis-times. And everyone seems to know it. But they just don’t use something.
It is clear that you do not need to take purely operational reminders and working dialogues. Are there those who have been forgotten in the confusion at all (you might be surprised)? Make a slice of managers and understand who is most useful and who is most spamming and annoying. Hold a meeting with your accounts, report that the situation has changed and the communication format needs to be adjusted.
After some time of working in this format, go through the segments of failure and churn of your base over the past few months – and based on the ideas, knowledge and understanding of the situation with current customers, try to resume communication in the same concept of bringing instant benefit back in the contact phase rather than rendering themselves