Antimacassar Marketing

Think Upgrades! The Small Change That Transforms Your Marketing & Revenue

Ever splashed out on an “upgrade” that didn’t quite deliver? From first-class train seats, to beach cabanas that blew the budget… Victoria’s upgrade obsession has a big lesson for your business.

In this episode, you’ll discover how simple upgrades and VIP options can reshape buyer decisions, boost your revenue, and make your existing offers work harder – without creating anything new from scratch.

You’ll learn practical ways to add value, play into buyer psychology, and give your clients irresistible reasons to say yes to more.

Come away with quick-fire actions to turn your offers into upgrade-friendly revenue generators.

Grab free templates, checklists and guides at allstarmarketingclub.com/resources - everything you need to market smarter, not harder.

About Victoria: Marketing Coach & Trainer Victoria Vickery serves up marketing advice with fewer buzzwords, more belly laughs, and stories you’ll never un-hear... because memorable marketing starts with memorable lessons.

For More Tales, Tips & Tangents: @victoriav1ckery

Transcript

I thought I'd treat myself to an upgrade. A first class train ticket to go and visit my friend. Only it turned out that the difference between everyone else and my first class seat was a little tiny square of white fabric that sat on the headrest of the seat. So that nice little upgrade didn't really quite work out for me. But let me tell you, there are people out there that are just dying to to purchase your upgrade. Welcome to what's that Got To Do With Marketing, where we start with a story you did not see coming. It might be fun, could be funny, or even a little bit frantic, but in the end, it will all make sense, leaving you with a takeaway, a to do or a transformational way forward. And I'm your host, Victoria. And you, my friend, are here for unlikely lessons and unforgettable marketing advice. Just for small B2B expert led business owners. Let's get into it. Today's episode is called Anti Macassar Marketing. So I'm a bit of an upgrader. I don't know about you, but I cannot help myself. If there is an upgrade on offer, I am all for it. And that's where me and Mr. V vary quite a lot. He is absolutely not my kind of person when it comes to upgrades. But if it's there, mark my words, sign me up. I'm literally a marketer's dream. I should know better. But if there is, for example, a business conference and I can see that there's a VIP upgrade where I get to go to the after party, guaranteed I'll be there with my glass of wine in the evening if I can get front row seats at something. Yes please, I'll take those as well. And as for hotels, if I show up to a hotel and they say, would you like to upgrade, Mrs. Vickery? Hell yeah, I am upgrading. So I just can't help myself in all things. If there's an upgrade, I'm all for it. And everyone knows that about me. That's just who I am. And I ain't changing for no one. So two stories that I want to share with you around upgrades, and the first one is a trip to Majorca when I was there. I'm laying on the sunbeds and I look across, there they are, the cabana beds. And I just couldn't help myself. Yes, you've got to pay for them. But look at them with those lovely net curtains all draped and blowing in the wind. Just had to get myself one of those. So off I go to find out how Much they are. It's only €20 for the day. Sign me up for that as well. So off I go to my cabana bed and then have you ever been to Mallorca and many places do this? You can go to the beach and on the beach you'll have these ladies or gents that walk up and down and you can have a massage just laid in the sand. So off I went in search of one of these people and I found my lady and I laid on the sand and she said, it's €20 for the whole of your back to be done, which means your back, your shoulders and the backs of your legs. So I'm up for it. €20. What an absolute bargain for a massage on the beach. You just can't get better than that laying there with the sound of the waves and the heat. Oh, absolutely gorgeous. So once she'd finished my €20 massage, I've just said to her, no, keep going, keep going. So I'm creating an upgrade for myself, I'm creating more by saying, well, yeah, just do the same again on my back, I'll give you another €20. And then if you could just massage my head for a little bit longer, I'll give you another 10. So I'm spending €50 now on my back massage on the beach. Loved it. Every single second. And here's another great example of an upgrade. So there was this one time I decided that I'd treat myself to a train upgrade and opted for first class to go and travel to see my friend who lived a couple of hours away. And on this occasion I'd done my upgrade and I was looking forward to getting on the train and getting into that first class seat, only to realize that the only difference between normal people where they were sat, because obviously now I'm vip. And me, the first class passenger was just this little tiny square fabric that sat on the back of the headrest of the seat. Zero else, that was it. And it was just two rows of a normal carriage. I later found out that that little square of fabric is actually called an antimacassar. So there's a little bit of knowledge for you there. What have these stories got to do with marketing? Everyone generally will have a product or service that they can build an upgrade for and your customers are just waiting for it. Now, there's many different reasons why we really need in business to be thinking about upgrades. Number one, it is just quite simply buyer psychology. So the first thing to be thinking about is, is about the perceived value. If there is an upgrade offer, then people perceive that to be better than whatever it is that is of a lower grade. When you've got something to trade off against the other, it makes that lower grade offer just not look as appealing. So typically what I would say is if you do have an upgrade offer, expect about 20% or so to go for that upgrade. So that's the first thing, it's just about perceived value. Secondly, when you think about upgrades, people are buying identity, they're not just buying your products and services. So when you've got that upgrade offer, it gives them a little bit of an ego boost. And we've all got ego. And that's exactly what it does. That ego boost is there. So that upgrade really, really works well, certainly for certain types of people. And again, thinking about the whole upgrade thing, what else is there? Well, higher offers actually just frame everything else as more of a compromise. And no one wants to compromise. So really, really good reasons here to have, you know, different upgrade offers within your business. And the last thing that I would say really is that, and this is probably the biggest thing of all for me, when you've got an upgrade offer, it removes this whole yes or no thing. So let's imagine that you're selling to someone and you're saying to them, look, I've got this product available for you or service available for you. Would you like to buy it? Now, as humans, if we fill in that position of I'm really not sure what to do here, we say no. If we're not certain, we say no, it will just be our default position. But when you've got that upgrade, you take away that opportunity for them to say no. Because you're now saying, do you want this or do you want this? So it becomes now an either or situation, rather than it being a yes or no situation. And let me tell you, this absolutely works. And I've got so many examples that I could share with you around this. But what I will do is I'll share with you an example of my own business. Now I have a business that has a membership as part of it. It's called my inner circle. And it's a program that business owners come onto to learn how to do marketing. And they basically grow their marketing capability and their lead generation over time. Like I say, it's a membership. So if we actually look at the numbers on that, on my lower tier, so the, the entry level, I've got 58% of my clients sat on that level. And then if we go up from that, I'VE then got about 35% or so set on my second level and my top level, it's a much smaller percentage, so around about 7% or so. I hope that adds up to about 100, but that's roughly it. So as I said, about 58, 30 odd and then 7% in my top offer. So they span all of them. Now imagine if I only had one level. That's what you've got to think about is, you know, what can you do to create other opportunities to get income into your business. Now, there's a really good example, and this is kind of like, this is what is called the decoy effect. There's a really good example. And if you nip onto YouTube, you can probably find the video somewhere. If you, if you type in something like popcorn decoy effect, you can watch it. And essentially what this proves, this experiment proves, is that having other alternatives really does enhance people's capacity to move up to your higher ticket offer. So in this instance, they had two types of popcorn on offer. You had the lower, smaller version of the popcorn and then you had the large. And I think it was something like $3 for one and $7 for the other. So of course they looked at people coming into the cinema and choosing which popcorn they wanted. And you'll guess if you've got the option of $3 or $7, which one are you going to go for? Most people went for the small because $7 feels so much more, doesn't it, than 3? So they went on to the experiment next to put in the, the decoy, the one in the middle, and they charged 6, $6.50 for that. So now we've got $3, we've got $6, 50, and then we've got the $7 offer. So what one did they go for? Of course they went for the most expensive popcorn, the $7. Because if you've got a medium there for 6.50, why would you not spend that extra 50 cents and go for the upper offer? So with these upgrade options, pricing pays a plays a massive part in it. You have to really think about clever pricing as well as all of this kind of buyer psychology that's going on now, it's over to you. I want you to have a little think about your offering and how you could perhaps put in some kind of upgrade offer or even a couple of different tiers that you can use. Because when you do that, you will get for sure a percentage of people that want to go for your higher ticket simply because it's there, and, and they're an upgrader or they want the best value, so whatever their reason is, they will go for it. So the first thing I want you to think about is what offers have you got already that you could do this with? Because this works best when you choose something that's already out there, that's working for you. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Just find something that you can use. And how can you then create something that bolts onto it? So ask yourself, what is it that actually my clients will pay for? So is it for extra time with you? Is it for some work that's done for them on their behalf? Is it that they just need to get something done really, really quickly and you can facilitate that with an upgrade? So have a little think about what your customers really need and that's the second step that you can take. So once you've decided what you're going to tag it onto in terms of your current offering, then think about what they really need from you. And then once you've done that, you can start designing this upgrade. And I would suggest that first of all, you just try it out with one or two people and see how it flies. And then once you've done that and you've proven that it's a really good offer, you can then start offering out much more widely and scaling it up. And quite quickly, what you'll see is you will increase your income, increase your revenue, simply because you put a little bit of extra effort into thinking about what your customers really want and what would make the biggest difference to them in terms of an upgrade. So this could be anything, really. This could be adding in one to one time. It could be a template bundle, it could be something like a welcome pack, it could be a special invite, it could be a VIP package. What can you add in that will really, really make a difference? And remember, as long as you can show the transformation that it's going to bring to your customer, you are going to be winning with this new offer. So work it out, give it a go. And I would absolutely love to hear if you do this and the results that you get. If you want to get your offer bang on just right and have something that just flies off the shelf, then drop us an email infoallstarmarketingclub.com and have the subject line as revenue ready and I will send you over a little bit of magic. I'll see you next time.