Out of all the levers that you can pull in your business, the number one lever that generates the most profitability or the biggest losses is your price. Managing your price is a crucial part of your marketing process and we want to make it very clear that it’s not a financial decision, it’s a marketing decision. That means you need to take a lot into account here. So what do you take into account?

How positioning yourself against your competitors influences pricing

Well, first of all, what’s your market positioning? Where do you fit into the overall scheme of options that a customer has available to them when choosing a laser eye surgery provider or a cataract surgery provider? You can take that into account for all types of providers of eye surgery.

One of the first steps when defining what price to charge for one of our customers is we take into account what everyone else is charging. Now we don’t base our advice on solely that, but it’s very important to know what people are looking at in the marketplace to see what holes you can fill.

If you’re a new business, it’s really important to identify which squares in the grid you want to fill because there are only a few that can result in good profits and deliver value to your customers at the same time.

We go through a process of analysing your competition and identifying where you can fit into those different strategies, pricing strategies. Are you in the best value quadrant? Are you in the good value quadrant? Are you in the, hopefully not, rip-off value quadrant? We want to make sure that we put you in the right quadrant in comparison to your competition. And then, importantly, we want to, unlike many marketers, we want to drive your price up.

Why we often want you to INCREASE your price

Many marketers often go down the path of least resistance, which is I know how to get more leads. We’ll offer discounts. We’ll drop the price. We’ll have sales.

We’re different in the sense, we care about you making a profit as opposed to, necessarily, only caring about you making sales. We know that when you drop your price, your profit significantly drops, even more so than the price drop. And when you raise your price, your profit increases exponentially as a result.

We’re keen on ensuring that you can attract the right avatar, for the right price, while justifying that value with all of the justifications that people need to choose you. And that’s the process of creating value in marketing at every step of the journey. That’s going to help you figure out what price, what LASIK marketing price, to charge.

Don’t undervalue your services – or price yourself out of the market!

These are all different positions in the market that you can pro-actively choose. So the first thing that we do, when we start working with a client is to help them establish whether the price they have now is a good price for them to coincide with the positioning strategy that they have in mind.

We will discuss the grid and the different positions on the grid that you can hold, and we’ll share that with you in terms of a diagram so you can see what that looks like.

When we look at helping you decide what price to have, you do need to look at whether or not you can justify that position on the grid. The first thing I’m going to want you to do before we start any marketing work together before we start offering your price to anyone is to honestly assess, and this is what we do for every single one of our clients when we begin work. Assess exactly what you have to justify the pricing position that you currently are in.

Why you need to get out of “No man’s land” when it comes to pricing

Let’s say, for example, value, middle of the market is pretty typical. In most markets we go into, nobody wants to stick their neck out. Nobody wants to be considered the expensive one. The good sign is nobody also wants to be the cheapest one. That’s good as well. Everybody bunches together in the middle. But what that does is, it doesn’t provide a means of helping a potential patient identify who’s better in the market. Patients do use price as an indicator to them. That’s one indicator that they do look at to identify who is the highest-quality competitor in the market. But if you’re offering a value price, everybody else is offering a value-based price, and you don’t have anything to differentiate yourself apart from that. Then everybody becomes a sea of sameness, and it becomes really difficult for somebody to figure out whether you’re the one for them.

That’s the kill zone. That’s no man’s land.

What we do at that stage is, we take a look at where do you want to go? We tend to align ourselves with the high-value clinics in any market. Where we excel is working with clinics that are above value in their offering, but they tend to have hidden assets that they’re not sharing with the market.

We excel at going in, helping them to re-evaluate how they’re marketing, re-evaluate their offering, basically increase what it is that they’re offering to the market, both in communication value, but also service offering, and then reposition that in the market, moving them from the middle of the market up to the top spot.

Let’s be honest, we like high-value practices

Once you can do that, you’re able to charge a higher price and justify it. That is a good place to be, and surprisingly, when we do that and when we do it right, oftentimes not only are you increasing your price and profit, just on price alone, but you often tend to get more leads and more patients because now patients can see that you’re the highest-value offering. And patients do, a good chunk of patients, enough to run a profitable business, will choose the best, truly best competitor in the marketplace.

If that sounds like you and something that you’re considering or thinking,

“Yes, I do have the underlying infrastructure. I have what it takes. I’m ready to put my hand up and say, I’m the best.”

I will put my marker out and say, “I have the best price,” and raise your price because that takes guts. If you’re ready for that, we should chat because you deserve to be the top player in the market. And our mission is to amplify authentic voices to do more good in the world. So if that’s you, then we want to help you get your message out.

How do we make higher than average prices appear more affordable on pricing web pages?

Once you’ve identified the right LASIK pricing in your marketplace, whether it’s sometimes you’re offering SMILE, sometimes you’re offering PRESBYOND, sometimes you’re offering cataracts.

But once you’ve identified your pricing model for all of your eye services, then it’s important to communicate this pricing in such a way that it’s psychologically interesting to people.

One of the things that we’ve done in our career is we’ve selected clinics that offer the highest price in the marketplace. And what that’s by necessity trained us to do is communicate high price in such a way that more and more people look at the price and go, “Ah-ha, that works for me.”

A big part of it is how you communicate your prices on your pricing page.

• Should you, for example, break down your pricing into monthly instalments, or should you show a lump sum?
• Should you round out to the zero, or should you offer a price that’s 9.98, for example?
• How should you organize your pricing?
• Should you offer the most expensive option on the left-hand side of the page and the least expensive option on the right-hand side of the page?
• What should be in the middle of the page?
• What are the kinds of pieces of content that can create a perception that the price is lower than it actually is, psychologically?
• Should you have a comment on your price? Should you take it out?
• Should you have a currency sign in your price, or should you leave that out?

We’ve got the answers to all of these questions, and I would count about a dozen specific techniques that you can employ to make even the highest prices appear more affordable, more intriguing, and can result in more conversions because you should know that the pricing pages on websites are often the most visited pages.

And searches for “LASIK costs” or “laser eye surgery costs” are among the most common queried searches. And also, they have tremendous commercial intent behind those searches because you know that if people are typing in costs, what are they thinking? They’re thinking, “Can I afford this? Can I buy this? How close am I to my after?”

We’re really, really keen on helping our customers understand how to not only identify what price they should charge and how to also present that price on their websites, in emails, on video, wherever it is that they share that answer to that very commonly asked question, which is “how much does it cost?”

How price can be a marketing tactic that helps you reach your profit target

Surprisingly, sometimes the price is one of the first levers you need to pull.

Price can be a marketing tactic in and of itself if done right. If you actually decide,

“I’m going to raise my price. This is how I’m going to hit my profit target for the year. I actually don’t need to get any more leads to do it. If I raise my price by a hundred, 150, 200 per eye, I actually will hit my target, and all I need to do now is execute on a marketing series of tactics that will allow me to safely increase my price, communicate my quality, and do it so that I hit my targets this year while operating within the same level of staff, the same number of leads, the same Google ads budget.”

Sometimes that alone is a big enough lever that you can pull in one year to achieve what it is that you want to achieve. So don’t discount price as a really critical lever in your marketing tactics this year.