In today’s episode, I’m going to help you become a premium in your market!
We’re going to talk about why to be the premium in your market, and how to be the premium in your market.
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Episode 310: The steps to increasing your prices: tashcorbin.com/310
Nail Your Niche: tashcorbin.com/niche
Let’s dive in!
First and foremost, why would you want to be a premium in your market?
I want to answer that question with a question… Why would you race to be the cheapest?
Being a premium offer in your market means that you’re able to attract higher rates, you need fewer clients to make the same amount of money (or more!), and people can often perceive a higher quality of service if it costs more.
I have a big caveat for this: Just because your price is a premium doesn’t mean you are a premium.
Your delivery must match the price point.
To be a premium in the market, you must deliver a premium service.
I know that there are a lot of marketing gurus and mentors out there who tell everyone to put up their prices. Those “gurus” aren’t taking into consideration the quality of the offer, the experience of the provider, the pricing sensitivity of the market, or any other factors.
It’s simply used as a marketing strategy…You go and meet with a mentor to talk about potentially working together, and without them knowing anything about your business, market or products and services, they blanket tell you that you need to put your prices up.
The reason why they use that as a marketing strategy is because that then gets you thinking that you’re going to get such a quick return on investment from working with this person, because all you need to do is triple your prices and you’ll triple your income.
But that’s often not the result of working with someone in that space.
Increasing your prices doesn’t take your audience with you. It doesn’t keep your conversion rates the same. It doesn’t automatically increase your conversion rates.
We do want to make sure that when we talk about being a premium in the market, we’re not just talking about being a premium price. We’re talking about having a premium offer and being a premium provider.
The biggest reasons WHY you should want to be a premium in the market are:
1. You need fewer clients.
2. It’s often perceived as a higher-value product or service.
3. If you charge at a premium and deliver at a premium, it gives you space to really meet the needs of your clients in a high-connection, high-touch way.
Think about it: If you’re charging the bare minimum that you can for your products and services, and your client needs a bit of extra support from you, you don’t have the capacity to be generous with them. You’ll start to resent it.
Or you’ll have to charge them extra, even though you promised a certain outcome for the price that you charged them.
One of the really valuable things to me about being a premium in the market is that I can be hyper-generous.
If I’m working with a client and we need to add in a little quick 10-minute catch-up, or I need to offer to do something for them behind the scenes, I can because I have the capacity.
I have the space and the abundance in my business to be generous.
It also means that I can send little gifts to clients without having to give up 90% of my profit margin.
The market allows for more profitability when you’re a premium. It allows you to pitch yourself as being a premium service provider, which creates income and profit benefits for your business.
But how do you go about being a premium in the market?
Is it just a matter of telling everyone that your prices are going up and then increasing them? Well no, it’s not.
Unfortunately, I have had the displeasure of needing to help rescue a few people who’ve been through that process.
In most cases, a manipulative guru or mentor has told them that they need to just jack up their prices – sometimes by three or four times what they’re currently charging.
This puts them in a position where they go into feast or famine.
I’ve had clients who have been told by a previous mentor that $1,500 is far too cheap and that they should be charging $5,000 instead. So these clients pay $15,000 for the privilege of working with this mentor, they make one sale at $5,000 and then they don’t make another sale for six months.
Six whole months!
There was only one person in their existing audience who was able to invest $5,000 or who saw the value in investing $5,000, and the mentor that they worked with didn’t have any other strategies to back up the price increase.
They literally just had pricing as their only marketing strategy for increasing their client’s income.
When looking to increase your prices, you need to take into consideration your:
- Market
- Audience size
- Delivery
- Expertise
- Pricing sensitivities
- And other factors!
One of the things that I love doing is using an incremental price increase strategy.
This ensures that you take your audience with you through the move into being a premium in the market.
I highly recommend you check out episode 310 of the podcast. This episode teaches you how to increase your prices, and how to use that as a conversion event in your business so that you also get a big influx of new clients and cashflow in the process of increasing your prices. Watch, read or listen at: tashcorbin.com/310
That’s the pricing aspect of becoming a premium in your market (potentially using incremental price increases to get there)… but how else do you support being a premium in your market?
One of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with is niching.
By getting much clearer on your niche, you can become much clearer on the transformation that you’re facilitating for that niche.
You can be more tangible in speaking to the difference between before working with you and after working with you. Therefore you can speak to the value proposition of that transformation far more confidently and effectively.
It stops you from using wishy-washy language when talking about the benefits of working with you.
I see a lot of people out there who have amazing healing modalities and mindset practices, but when they talk about those gifts and talents, their language is vague. Their message is wishy-washy.
This is because they’re not niched enough in who they are speaking to.
When you niche down really tightly, it gives you the opportunity to resonate with that niche, through tangible, practical, value-laden messaging.
This is how we fast-track you to being a premium in the market.
You’re now a specialist for people who have a specific problem in a specific niche.
A great example of this is a client that I worked with who was a pain specialist.
She had a really beautiful combination of physical and esoteric healing practices that she brought together to help people who were in pain.
She was a qualified physiotherapist, but she had also learned these other amazing healing modalities, and she wanted to bring those two tools together.
She’d been promoting her business online and in her local community for three years, and really struggled to get people to even pay her the bare minimum.
As a qualified physiotherapist, people could charge their sessions with her through their health fund. But even getting them to pay more than $10 on top of what their health fund was covering was almost impossible for her.
She was really struggling to recruit new clients.
We decided to do a little experiment for three months. For those three months, we got very niched with her online marketing in particular. We niched down to a certain subset in her market.
One of her personal interests was triathlons. What we decided to do was niche to people who were triathletes – whether they were professionals or weekend warriors – who wanted to improve their triathlon results but were experiencing niggling pain.
For just three months, we focused her message on triathletes, niggling pain and training. We gave really tangible examples.
As a triathlete herself, she was able to really speak to some of those examples and tangible things that a non-triathlete couldn’t understand.
As a non-triathlete, I wasn’t the best person to come up with this messaging. But I extracted it out of her by asking some really powerful questions about this new niche.
She went from charging under $120 a session – and struggling to get people to even pay that – to moving into selling packages for $2,000.
Her hourly rate went up from $120 to over $300 an hour by offering a premium package for triathletes.
The pathway to being a premium was to get really specific about her niche.
If you’re looking to be a premium in your market, and you’d like to explore moving your price point up and being able to differentiate yourself as a premium (not just putting your price up, but also by presenting yourself as a premium offer), then I’d love for you to come and get started with me by nailing your niche.
Check out my free Nail Your Niche training here: CLICK ME
Don’t forget to also check out my podcast episode on how to increase your prices: tashcorbin.com/310
If you’ve got any questions about this episode, make sure that you come over and slide into my direct messages on Instagram or on Facebook, because I LOVE having conversations about becoming a premium in the market.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
