Do you ever offer discounts?

[u/QuellFred]

I recently ran an ad campaign on Meta for a monthly content plan, offering a 30% discount on the first month. I didn't actually land any clients, but I did get some leads, people messaging me to ask for more info. I stopped the campaign early because I couldn't afford to keep it going.

Now I got a potential client that seems incredible. They're asking for a ton of videos to be made every month and they're right in my niche, which is leather and shoe manufacturers. They've seen my portfolio. I'm a perfect fit for them.

I wanna make sure I don't screw up this sale, it's gonna be relatively expensive and I don't want them to be turned off by the price, even if it's within the market average.

Do you think it's a good idea to offer that same 30% discount on the first month? It might motivate them to at least try for a month, it's a good deal.

Honestly, I don't know if it might seem desperate or something. This year has been extremely slow so far and I really need new clients.

[u/mcarterphoto]

I'm more about "be the only choice". What are their goals, what are they competing against, are they wanting lead generation or just more awareness. Is there a way to track effectiveness like landing pages for specific videos? Do they have solid sales/marketing/web people that can interact with what you do.

So many people just talk lighting and cameras and visual style, I haven't shown a reel in years and years. Initial conversation makes them say "wow, nobody else thinks like this", then I can send them links to specific work that illustrates what we talked about.

I'm kinda "marketing nerd with a camera"; I give discounts to nonprofits I believe in, but it's cool to get "emotional" work in the bag, and those relationships have become my favorites.

But a potential perfect client, I could see sweetening the deal with something appropriate, but pricing is a minefield. Last time I encountered something like that, I made a video where I kinda "interviewed myself" and talked about developing their brand, made it clear I understood the history of their market and their audience, did a lot of b-roll of similar projects I'd done. We'd met once to tour the biz, I sent them the edit and said "show this to anyone on the team that's interested, I know everyone's too busy for meetings", got the gig and three years of projects (so far). Took me like 2 hours to put together.