As tempting as it is to dip your toe in the BFCM Sales season and serve up a discount or two, it might not be serving freelancer you. In fact, it's absolutely not.
As tempting as it is to dip your toe in the BFCM Sales season and serve up a discount or two, it might not be serving freelancer you. In fact, it's absolutely not.
If you’ve got eyes and know how to use the internet, you’ve probably become familiar with the concept of “Black Friday/Cyber Monday”. As keen shoppers, we love a BFCM discount, but as freelancers who often swap time for money and not things for money, discounts usually just leave us feeling hungry.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and any sales season for that matter is baked in discounts, deals and anything to sell as much as possible. And while it might not always look like the cliche “thousands of people busting through the door”, people often plan their spending when a discount can be had.
While there’s nothing particularly wrong with people wanting discounts, as service providers, we really aren’t set up to sell out of something that doesn’t have a stock level.
See, here’s the thing. A business that sells products generally has no limit to the amount they can manufacture, so if discounting encourages people to spend more than they would if the items were full price, the business makes more money.
Doing “more” and ordering extra products doesn’t take any longer, and it probably increases the profit margin because bulk orders cost less per unit. For retailers selling products, doing “more” and adding a discount can really pay off in the long run.
The reason this doesn’t work for service providers is because you can’t manufacture more time.
When your customers are paying to access your genius, the time you invest makes up a big chunk of the fee you charge. The rest of your price is formulated on other non-tangible factors such as the ROI you’re providing, the type of access the client has, the exclusivity of your deliverables, and a whole bunch of other value points.
When you simply make your rates cheaper, nothing changes except for your profit margin. The project scope doesn’t change, the amount of work doesn’t change, the clients don’t suddenly become more agreeable, and the universe doesn’t make an extra 20 hours appear in your week.
There is no reward for charging less and running sales. Plus, discounting usually just attracts the wrong type of clients. #annoying
As far as Black Friday goes, discounts aren’t your friend, however that doesn’t mean your business has to miss out on the Black Friday buzz.
Here are 5 ways you can use Black Friday to your advantage, making more money from your creative genius without the discounts leaving you hungry.
Serving Suggestion 1
Create an exclusive or limited spots offer
Black Friday doesn’t always have to mean cheaper prices. One way to take advantage of the Black Friday craziness is by creating an offer that’s new, exclusive, and/or limited.
Consider your current clients (as well as your demographic in general) and your usual spread of offers, then figure out what you could offer that’s a bit different to your usual. A photographer, for example, could offer a limited number of ‘mini’ sessions while a website designer creates a limited-time package that includes email automation.
Creatively coming up with something new and limited still entices your customers without penalising you in the process. Be sure to be super clear about the limited spots or exclusive element to drive people to take action e.g. only 5 spots available for December, 3 already snapped up!
Serving Suggestion 2
Build a Productised Service
In case you’re a new diner here in the Creative Business Kitchen, a productised service is where you package up the solution to a particular problem and sell it as a ‘product’. Productised services are not tailored, they have specific inclusions and exclusions, and are charged at a set rate. The key thing about a productised service is that it needs to solve a particular problem and clearly communicate what that is (you can read more about productised services here).
If you’ve been sitting on a new idea for a productised service or want to create your very first one, Black Friday can be the perfect day to launch. You could even give early access to your current clients before opening the floor to new ones.
And if you want to whip up a productised service this afternoon, the Productised to Perfection Masterclass takes you through the 10 simple steps to build that productised service and have it ready to serve up to your clients in a 60 min masterclass.
Serving Suggestion 3
Approach existing clients to offer help with their BF sale
While this Black Friday nugget isn’t necessarily a direct promo for your business, it can be a great way to cash in on the Sale Season madness without having to run any sort of promo.
As a freelance creative, you very likely have clients who are running some sort of Black Friday promo. While Black Friday sales are probably worth it for them, they can take a lot of preparation and extra work.
Think about your current clients, make note of the ones who are likely to be participating in Black Friday, and think about how the problems they’d have and how you could specifically help them.
If you’re a graphic designer, your retail clients will likely need new Black Friday images for their socials, so reach out and extend the offer.
If you’re a copywriter, there’ll be clients needing Black Friday marketing campaigns and they may not have thought to ask if you can do it.
If you make contact, clearly highlight your understanding of their challenges, and present them with a stress-free solution, you can still cash in on Black Friday without actually changing anything that you usually do.
Serving Suggestion 4
Use Black Friday to test a new service
If you’ve got some ideas on new ways to give access to your genius, a Black Friday test-run could be a good way to dip your toe in without getting totally drenched.
By offering a new service/package to a limited number of people, they feel like they’re getting an exclusive deal while you’re actually minimising the risk of it blowing up in your face. You can use Black Friday as the ‘excuse’ for limited access when, in reality, actually doing you a bit of a favour by helping you iron out the kinks of a new product/service.
This is actually how I ran the very first serving of Finding Hungry Clients Masterclass. I built a simple masterclass offer, gave an upgrade option and 90% of people bought the $57 upgrade! I’ve now served this Masterclass 3 times, it’s my most popular dish!
Serving Suggestion 5
Break off and sell chunks of signature services
Chances are when you look at your services or offers, there’s parts that could be broken off and sold individually. Similarly, if you have a system you use to deliver your signature services, or a templated approach to something you do, see if you can break off a chunk and turn it into a digital product. This is a fantastic way to sell it for some extra cheddar.
If you’ve been in the Kitchen a while, you’ve probably heard me talk about ‘negotiating the deliverables not the dollars’, and this is basically a pre-baked, chunked way of doing that.
If you’re a social media manager and offer an audit as part of your packages, you could break that audit process off and build an audit service that funnels into your other packages, but your audit is at a chunked cost.
If you’re a website designer who usually sells websites at a minimum of 5 pages, you could create a chunk option that is a single page website or sales page build, but only sell it to the first 10 people.
If you’re a photographer, you could sell headshot sessions that are 30 minutes long, or even build your own shoot day that is only available for Black Friday bookings, to be redeemed at a later date.
While a Black Friday discount might be tempting, as a service provider, it just doesn’t make enough sense (to learn more about why that is and what to do instead, feast on this). For businesses who sell products, Black Friday sales can actually make a huge chunk of money and create an opportunity to clear out old stock, but that just doesn’t happen in the service world.
