Price Discovery as an Inbound Marketing Tactic

Posted by ImageWorks Creative Team June 12, 2012


Price Discovery: "The search for an equilibrium price" (Schreiber and Schwartz (1986))

Everyone wants to know the cost of products and services that they are seeking. Comparison shopping and ratings are a highly sought after "entity" on the web.

If you don't have a page about the cost of your business’s products and services than you are missing out on loads of traffic from curious visitors and a great way to take part in indirect content marketing. These are visitors that you may easily turn into potential customers if you can build trust through your content and through your brand.

The Cash Market, The Future Market & Price Discovery

Quick Definitions: In the cash market, there is a physical exchange of cash and assets right away. In the futures market there is an exchange of goods and services for money or some other asset somewhere down the line in the future.

Future markets are what determine and set the cost of cash markets. Since future markets have to weigh in many other factors besides physical exchanges of goods and services in the present (delivery, transaction time, liquidation, etc.) one is easily able to decipher the cash market. In other words, the future market is used for price discovery in the cash market. This holds true in the web design creation market, as well as many other markets out there.

How long does it take you to make a sale? The clear cut advantage to using price discovery as an inbound marketing tactic is not only to cash up on people that are "gathering and interpreting news" but to let your website do your selling and work for you. The more information you provide to the people on the front end, the easier it will be to educate them and make a sale further down the line.

Want More Proof?

Since December of 2007, ImageWorks Studio has received more than 27K visits from keywords that include words like "cost," "price," "pricing," & "how much" (not including information that is "not provided" and withheld from Google as we estimate another ~2K visitors added on top of that from visits to our price discovery landing page).

Steps for Your Small Business to Start Benefitting from Price Discovery

1) Research and Improving the Wheel - Not Reinventing it.

What do your competitors have to say about they're products cost. What is there price discovery strategy? If your direct competitors don't have an online presence with this type of content marketing strategy, what do the top results in the search engines have to say about the cost and pricing of the services that you provide?

2) Establishing Your Content as The Authority

You've been in the business for a while. You know the ins and outs of your particular service and you have your own individual and unique way of determining the cost of your products . Now it's time to put that into words and detail that will leave the customer believing that you indeed ARE the AUTHORITY on the topic and that your brand is an entity that can be trusted.

Since product and service cost related queries are some of the most sought after searches, you want to make sure that this is one of the best pieces of content that you (or you and your Agency) can come up with. And that you are hitting every detail that you have been asked over the years from your customers.

3) Promoting Your Content

This is where a third party web design agency (like us!!) can really help you. If you are a business owner interested in web design and online marketing, but don't have the time to do it yourself, then contacting an Agency that specializes in online marketing can really help to increase your revenue and online presence. Of course you could always try to do you web development, search engine optimization, and social media as well as run a business at the same time yourself...

4) Keeping Your Content & Prices Up-to-Date

As new information is made available to the market, you should also make new information available to the market. How has your pricing and your process changed? Be sure to add changes to your content as they apply and become available.

What are your opinions on price discovery? We’d love to hear from you!

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