I find that a lot of people are curious about breaking down marketing services like social media and search engine optimization to an hourly rate. I know this, because a lot of people search the Internet for pricing information and find me.

Silly me, I don’t have a standard rate sheet, but I will tell you why. I don’t know how much it will cost to perform SEO or social media marketing until I know what a company wants and needs from the services.

I understand the concern of marketing cost. After all, the reason for a company to spend money on marketing is to achieve a higher profit. This means the cost of marketing will be a factor. However, it is too common that the only set of numbers a client will clearly understand is the outgoing money, while they ignore the more important numbers such as accurate projections, goals, and increased profit.

Think about your worst times in your career. You were probably stressed by a lot of little things that seemed bigger than they really were, and perhaps some really big challenges, too. Deadlines, coworkers, health, family, finances, and other stressful issues can make it feel like everything is spiraling out of control. Some challenges can be used to build a company stronger, but it is far more common that they become destructive.

I am going to give you a bit of information that you can email to your boss with confidence, tweet on Twitter, “Like” on Facebook, and best of all … you can blame me for being the one who gave your boss this uncommon piece of common sense.

Is there a solution? I have found through more than two decades in business for myself, and from consulting with many businesses, the majority of business challenges can be improved with more money. That could mean hiring a better accountant, bringing in a strategist, improved inventory and purchasing capability, or having the right equipment to do the job at hand. The list of enhancements is long, but let’s just say that money can bring about a lot of improvements in a company.

One of the greatest improvements to a business comes from the quality of life of the people who make the business what it is. You cannot separate the people from the business, and if you try, you will fail!

Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!

It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.

I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.

After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.

The Internet has created a lot of change in culture around the world. It is not true for everybody, but on a large scale, globalization and greater awareness of the world is a reality. People learned more about the other side of this planet in the past decade than in all those thousands of years prior to the Internet. We have embraced other cultures that we were not previously aware of, and we have blended into a larger culture … the Internet culture. The Internet truly has been instrumental in creating the more global society we know today.

If you make your price the first priority in a cost to value comparison, you may want to reconsider. Cost is a fast way to get a lot of public attention, but it can also provide a negative net return. Showing a low cost has a solid place in some markets, but consider evaluating the cost and value propositions you present to your market. If you are building upon only an audience of “glancing prospects”, you may miss your best customers in the process. What I call glancing prospects are the ones who are out for cost, and that is the primary factor in their decision making. They glance in your direction and give little consideration to anything but how much it will cost. You may like these customers if you are content to offer the lowest cost, but they are also often not return customers or loyal to your brand. It is not just because you didn’t provide value, but because value is not what they were seeking. Thus, they never realized your value.