David Maister is an expert on the management of professional service firms. In his post Pricing Consulting Services he writes:
Raintoday.com has just released a new study Fees and Pricing Benchmark Report: Consulting Industry 2008. 645 respondents in the consulting industry completed the survey. Among the findings:
Firms that are well-known in their target markets receive higher fees, see their revenue grow, and earn higher profits than their lesser-known counterparts. Brand leaders were more likely to price their services at a higher level than their competitors in the market (42% of brand leaders were premium-price vs. 28% of lesser-known firms). And, they were more likely to actually get higher fees by up to 35%.
There are a LOT of ways to become “well known” to your target market.
- You can spend money on advertising in various media that reach your target audience.
- You can write articles for publication in magazines read by your target audience.
- You can arrange to speak before groups of your target audience.
- You can write a book to demonstrate your expertise to your target audience.
If you want to become well known to your target audience, I STRONGLY encourage you to engage in any and all of the above activities.
However, if your budget is screaming and your time is limited, then the best low cost, highly effective method of becoming “well known” to your target market is to launch a self hosted WordPress blog.
Becoming well known used to be thought of as an “ego” thing. The report above demonstrates that becoming well known is necessary to affect the bottom line performance of your service based business.
