Are you teaching your visitors to look for discounts?

When we market our businesses - through social media, word of mouth, mailings, websites, advertising etc - we convey messages designed to attract the attention of potential visitors. We give them information, and hopefully inspiration.

That information essentially 'teaches' potential visitors about our businesses. 

Usually it's positive, and we tell visitors what we/they want to know. 

Yet sometimes we convey information that contradicts what we really want to tell visitors. 

I've recently had lots of emails from business owners saying that more and more visitors are looking for discounts. 

There are many reasons for this: 

• state of the economy - we can't change this
• uncertainty - this is almost as bad as the state of the economy - but we can actually help with this (I'll explain in a future blog)
• other platforms like Booking.con promoting discounts - there are things you can do about that (I'll explain in a future course)
• we've taught visitors to expect discounts - and we don't always realise we're doing it!

Are you teaching visitors to expect discounts? 

Here's a very quick test: 

1. Go to your website. Do words like offer, special offers, discounts, deals, last-minute availability appear anywhere on your home page or other prominent pages? 

2. When you ask someone to sign up to your newsletter or mailing list, do you mention special offers, discounts, deals etc? 

3. Go to your social media and scroll through your last 20 posts. Do any of those words appear anywhere in those posts? 

If they do, then you're actively offering discounts and teaching visitors to expect special offers... 

Tough love: I've looked at a lot of websites recently and 90% of the people complaining that visitors expect too many discounts are doing at least one of these things.