The Teckki Says

Have you looked at your website on a cellphone, computer screen and gaming console? The Internet is becoming the common pipe delivering information to viewing screens of all sizes, meaning that you have to consider presentations for each format. This has profound implications of how businesses will purchase advertising, and even how advertising is prepared.

The ad world is still diversified where there are many mediums in which you can advertise on. Print advertising, while it continues to evolve to digital, still has requirements in terms of size and color to make ads fit onto its medium. The same is true with billboards, radio, television, websites and direct mail. As someone who produces content, I often have to produce multiple versions for clients who plan on using a number of different mediums.

The Holy Grail of software development is to write once, run everywhere (on all types of computing devices). This failed primarily because Microsoft, king of the PC world, wanted to rule this environment, and indirectly, all of the devices running the Windows operating system. No one owns the Internet, so the rules are dictated by all of us, the users. We dictate in mass by the types of devices we use, and the amount of information we access. Device makers, content producers and medium providers are left to play catch-up.

As more money goes to the Internet for advertising, your advertising providers will have to deal with a greater number of devices, and not all devices are created equally, or simply. Who is in the best positions to handle this? Ad Agencies, who already develop multiple media strategies for their clients. Who is the least? Advertising medium providers, such as print, radio and television, and many web development companies, among others.

What makes this such a problem is that many of us bypass ad agencies in favor of going directly to the medium provider. It’s a matter of economics. You have to have a sizable organization to absorb the expense of having someone else design campaigns for multiple mediums. But most advertising medium providers, such as print, are set up for those who choose to bypass agencies, so they have in-house staff, specifically orientated to THEIR medium. Everyone knows how to use Photoshop, but print people specialize in the print aspects of Photoshop, video people specialize in the video aspects of Photoshop, and so on. As clients began to understand and consider the number of devices their information will show up on, they will depend on firms that can do it all, and it won’t be media companies selling ad space for their own mediums.

For those that think this problem is relatively far off, I only need to offer up the Apple iPhone as an example. Apple has sold approximately 30 million of these phones in 2-1/2 years, and you can assume the majority are still active. It's a given you can browse the web on these phones, and your target market may well have them. However, if you have one of those gorgeously animated sites powered by Adobe's Flash product (most animated sites do since this is the industry standard), you can forget about the iPhone, because they won’t see it. If Flash programming is your website firm's only expertise, they may not be able to make the accommodation for differences in devices.

This could leave you holding a very big bag of air, waiting to pop with the release of each new hot technology.

This is a multipart series on websites that will discuss what pages common to many websites should contain. This article discusses the Price Page(s).

If you are selling something, eventually your potential purchasers will want to know costs. Bury the price, and you bury the sale. If there is anything a purchaser dislikes more than anything, it is the surprise of something that costs more than expected. However, there are few things sellers hate more than exposing their prices too early in the selling process, or divulging price information to a competitor.

Many sellers will agree that if you reveal your price too early, you expose yourself to comparative shopping. After all, you may not have had the chance to explain the benefits and answer questions that justify the price. An upfront price lessens the opportunity to justify your case.

Putting out pricing information also helps your competitors. For competition that has been in the business for a while, they know where to undercut you. For those who may be jumping into the business, all they know is to undercut you. To your prospects, neither makes a difference.

I am one who believes in posting pricing, and I began to include it on my website years ago. Upon doing this, I was surprised to find that my colleagues were also looking, and they were amazed. I am sure that they felt that I would drive away prospects, as well as expose myself to competitors. I don’t know how many competitors used my pricing as benchmarks, but I do know that prospects who called me became no longer available once I sent them to my website to check out services and prices. I was fine with that, because that is part of what I designed my site to do.

I don't feel I've lost much, if anything. This resolved a problem I spent years trying to correct. I used to spend days preparing estimates based off of spectacular sales meetings, building rapport and fostering relationships, along with identifying the customer’s needs and providing solutions to fulfill them. I asked the budget question and what they expected to pay, and the answer was that no one has a budget and no one knows what websites cost - until I gave them a price. Then they were experts. What I found was that the number was important all the long.

The web is a medium where comparison and lower pricing are generally expected. You can be wowed by dazzling sites, and clients expect everything to look great, but buyers expect it to be cheap, or at least cheaper than can be found in the offline world. If "lowest price" is not your targeted market, then let them know that upfront. In a world where the lowest price wins, not displaying one is tantamount to having the highest.

Eliminate price as a deal breaker. Your website should serve as a filter as well as an informational and selling tool. If you direct people to your site, all of the things they want to know should be there – who you are, what you do, what you have done for others, and of course, well, price. Those who know what they might pay, and still choose you, have found something else they like about you. The negotiations change to how you will get it done. You also don't have to make the client regret the price by eventually telling him that the things he thought he was getting were put back on the shelf the minute he agreed to the deal he ultimately got.

I recently got a call from a prospect who was almost sure she would buy from me. It's easy to get excited and feel that you bagged the sale. However, I referred her to my website, where a few days later, I got a call saying that they had found another provider. Price may have played a role, but I know I saved hours of meetings, proposals and modifications, and sales speeches trying to emphasize value, only to lose out because of price.

Missed potential sales cost, but lost sales attempts cost much more!