How can I market myself so I'm confident enough to charge even $100+ an hour?
James Liu, PhD, MBA
Empowering Teachers to Earn What They're Worth and Do What They Love | Niche Teaching | Digital Courses | Membership | Passive Income | Free LinkedIn Marketing Webinar below ??
First, let me introduce 2 pricing concepts I learned as a management consultant a couple of years ago:
- People’s willingness to pay. This measures how much people are willing to pay you for your service.
- Perceived value of the service. This is the value people perceive based on their existing understanding of your service. Please note that perceived value can be lower or higher than the true value of the service.
And the perceived value of the service determines people's willingness to pay.
In other words, what determines how much students would like to pay for your service is not necessarily the true value of your service. It is the perceived value of your service.
Once you understand these, the original question becomes
"What should you do to improve students’ perceived value of your service so that they are willing to pay you more than $100 an hour?"
You have 3 levers at your disposal in order to improve the perceived value of your service:
- Your service itself
- Your marketing
- Your sales
Let me walk you through these 3 levers one by one.
1. Improve your service to increase the perceived value of your service
Although the perceived value of your service doesn't usually equal the true value your service offers, the true value of your service sets the baseline for the perceived value.
Think about it: If you can't teach well and your students don't get results, the true value of your service is terrible. There is no way you can get a high perceived value of your service.
On the contrary, if your teaching is solid and you can deliver results, students' perceived value will be improved by seeing all the reviews you got or by talking to your previous students.
2. Leverage marketing to increase the perceived value of your service
I find that marketing is the easiest lever for teachers to understand. The concepts are pretty straightforward: People won’t know about your business if you don't market it, and they won’t understand its value unless you market it well.
In fact, teachers who had this question were thinking only about marketing.
Marketing is crucial because you need to let people know about you and your business and build the initial perceived value of your service. (You can find many actionable tips and templates in my free ebook here to help you leverage online marketing.)
Unfortunately, most teachers stop at marketing. They spend tons of time on their website, their ads, and their testimonials in order to drive up the perceived value.
All these marketing efforts are great, but they can only help so much without using the third lever—sales.
3. Conduct sales to increase the perceived value of your service
I can't tell you how surprised I was to find that teachers don't do sales when I first started this business. Honestly, sales is the biggest lever to improve the perceived value of your service and therefore students’ willingness to pay.
Just to be clear here: Offering demo/free teaching sessions is not doing sales.
A lot of teachers offer demo sessions to let students work with them first. But these are not sales sessions and will not provide the results you need.
Sales should follow a scientific, structured approach. Sales enables you to understand a student’s situation and separate their current and desired states so you can position yourself as the bridge to get them from where they are right now to where they want to be.
The conversation and the interactions that happen during a sales session help you build enormous trust and boost the perceived value of your service to the next level.
This also explains why teachers with decades of teaching experience can only charge $50 an hour, even though they have a ton of testimonials and reviews, when they rely on converting students with their website, but teachers who just started with not much experience and no testimonials can charge over $60, $80, and $100 an hour when they do sales.
In this quick article, I answered the question “How can I market myself so I can have the confidence to charge $100+ an hour?”
The truth is, you need a little more than quality marketing. What you need to do is boost the perceived value of your service to potential students because that’s what determines their willingness to pay you what you’re worth.
In short, to charge more than $100 an hour, you need to improve your service, leverage marketing, and conduct sales.
Our 21-Day Teacher-Entrepreneur Challenge helps teachers develop skills and mindset to leverage all 3 levers so they can get their own students and charge a higher rate.
If you are interested,
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2 年This is 100% accurate and extremely valuable advice! No one will just buy English (or other things) off the web at a price that is higher than their usual perception (e.g. $20 per lesson/hour), so with an actual higher-value product, it is going to require TALKING to each person to boost their perception, exactly how you said so they can see the extra value that is on offer. As you mentioned, a 'free demo' is not 'sales'. Instead, laying out your solution as a path to their success is! A changed mindset about website is definitely required. A funnel may be useful after the discussion to enable the sale, but it won't usually replace the personal value we can bring to a 'sales talk' itself.
Some very helpful perspectives James
I help nonnative English speaking CEOs and professionals become eloquent communicators to achieve your career dreams. | Accent Training | Small talk | Public Speaking | Interviews | Storytelling
3 年???you, Coach! Your reminders are always timely!!?