At what price?

I don't know if it is the stirring effect of launching new product types or the slightly erratic indicators in the economy, but for the last few weeks our office has been abuzz with talk of pricing (just this morning I was sent this post on pricing digital content that is well worth a read); and it's not just us.

So many of the conversations I have with people nowadays, from closest friends to chance business encounters revolve around it. What will people pay? What would we pay? Are we paying too much? Have our recessionary pricing strategies had a damaging effect?

In the post  link to above, Chris Brogan advises against asking your community what they will pay, because they'll low ball it. A valid point; if you're asking, I'm negotiating because you've signalled that there's room to do so.

So how to solve our pricing dilemmas? This is by no means the only approach but it is the one I'm going to try:

1) Find out how much they are paying (competitor research, surveys, market research)
2) Then comes the painful bit - testing. To my mind, the only way you can be really sure of how much your customers will pay for something is to put together a decent message that accurately conveys the value of your product and see if people will pay the price you ask.

The pain bit comes with the fact that you are probably going to have to get this wrong a lot before you find the ideal level to generate the most profit in the long term. Ah well, no pain, no gain as I'm sure you all said as you hit the gym last month!

3 Tips For Better Content Creation

We all know that creating content and “publishing our way in” is the way forward right? Marketing gurus who espouse the benefits of content marketing are ten a penny, however as with many things (social media being a classic example) the theory and the execution can often fail to match up due to real world pressures and variables.

For what its worth, here’s a few ideas on how to make sure your content does what you want it to do, rather than negatively impacting your business:

• Create a content creation process map – understanding what all the steps are for successful content creation and how long they take will highlight when you’re trying to cut corners on production because you are busy. Make sure if you are using a variety of different types of content or different mediums, you have a map for each.

• Invest in relevance and value for your customer – I’m not necessarily talking about an expensive all singing all dancing market research project but you do need to spend time making sure you understand what your customer would find most useful. Easy starting points? Look at what already exists that is popular in your space, run a short survey across your database, call some of your key accounts and talk to them.

• Test and record – all too often (and I know I am guilty of this) we form opinions based on what we think we know, rather than making judgements with all the data to hand. Content has so many variables; you need to try altering one at a time and recording the test results faithfully so you can create a detailed picture. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “My last podcast got no attention, neither did the first one I did – my market must hate podcasts”.