What Can You Do That The Big Photo Chains Can’t?

3 Trends You Should Be Using In Your Own Sales Techniques

Its no secret that people are less accepting of more traditional types of sales methods and marketing. How many people truly use a yellow pages anymore, or trust an ad they see in a newspaper? The percentages are dwindling rapidly.

But one thing will always remain true.

People hate being sold to. But they love to buy.

Because they hate being sold to, its more important than ever to use current marketing methods that will give your potential customers exactly what they want; without feeling like they’ve been speaking with a used car salesperson.

Attract in great numbers, then focus on filtering

When you’re in business for yourself, its easy to fall into the trap of wanting to “book” every person you talk with. Yet that isn’t reality. If you book every person you talk with, you’re actually doing things wrong. You’re prices are definitely way too low. And you probably haven’t defined your product enough to make it exclusive so that you attract a certain kind of clientele.

Yet through all of your marketing methods, it is good to drive a large amount of traffic to your business, then selectively choose the ones that are right for you. Its called funneling your prospects.

Dig Deeper: The Photographers Marketing Funnel

Funneling can actually work in two ways.

First, through all of your marketing, you can drive customers into a marketing pattern in which they learn more about you. It may be through a marketing campaign in which you mail out postcards regularly, or online as a part of a drip campaign with email marketing. Only a select few will really like what you do, calling you to book a session.

Second, once you have customers in your business as a paying client, you can funnel them to other areas of your business. A business portrait client can turn into a baby portrait client, and from there a family portrait client. You simply move them from one part of your business to another by keeping them in the know of what you do.

In either case, its all about focus. Bring people in; then focus on how to convert them into clients. Again and again. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Sales Tagged With: marketing funnel, Photography Marketing, sales techniques, selling your photography, trends

The Only Goal Of Every Marketing Campaign And Why You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

by Virtual Photography 1 Comment

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve created a number of marketing campaigns to reach out to potential customers.

Why did you create them?

If you thought, “to bring in customers” you’re only half right.

Ultimately all marketing is created to bring in new customers. But if you don’t consider the “how” within the campaign itself, you’ll never have the results you’re looking for. Let me explain.

I recently went through a wedding magazine here in my local community. Chances are its not a whole lot different from the one’s in your community. And as I browsed through them one thing clearly jumped out at me.

All of the ads are virtually the same.

Sure, the photo, logo and phone number changed. But the structure of the ads themselves was all the same.

So what makes someone choose one over the other?

An Ad Needs To Say More

As a photographer, I know how easy it is to get caught up in the emotion of your own work. You loved the client, you loved the atmosphere, and the particular image you’ve chosen for your ad really “speaks” to you.

The problem is the potential client doesn’t have that same vantage point. They don’t know the client, they don’t know the details of the image, and they don’t know how well you’ve connected with the image. They just see the one photo in the ad, and base their entire first impression from it.

The problem is their first impression becomes muddled when they see photo after photo, page after page, and they all pretty much begin to look alike. And that’s because business owners don’t take it to the next level, and put into a marketing campaign what truly needs to be there.

The goal of every marketing campaign is to create a new belief, or change an old one.

We buy because somewhere deep inside of us we know we have a “problem”. And the person that comes closest to helping us solve our “problem” is the company that we ultimately will do business with.

Don’t believe me? Think about any product you’ve recently purchased.

Let’s use household cleaners. If you go up and down the aisle at your local store, you know there are dozens of different options. Some are “extra strength”, some are “gentle”, some are “safe for the environment”. When you approach the cleaning aisle, you have a “problem”. You want to buy a cleaning product to use within your home. So you go shopping with a few ideas in mind, and possibly some preferences. Yet just by looking through the available products, you can quickly be swayed to other options. Maybe you’ve never thought about the harmful affects of cleaning products before. Would one that promised to “be safe in the environment your kids live in” make you think twice before you buy? Of course. Their marketing campaign – in this case the title and tag lines on the product itself – is enough to win you over and make you buy. And if you add in a television commercial or magazine ad that explains the same things in more detail, you may bypass looking at the products on the shelves, and go straight into the store with the sole intension of buying the “safe” product.

Okay, that’s cleaners. But does it really work for photography? Of course.

Since I began with an “ad” of a wedding photographer above, lets continue on with that example.

What is a bride looking for when she’s hunting for a wedding photographer?

Some brides may be looking for the perfect photographer because she doesn’t want to relive the horror of having “uncle Bob” shoot her wedding and lose everything like her best friend went through.

Or maybe she’s looking for a great photographer that will fit in with her personality, offer her a high level of customer service, and provide the perfect memories of her very special day.

Brides all have different visions and different wants from their photography. But if they have to choose based on dozens of ads that all look the same, it comes down to a coin toss.

Start the process by making them think. Even a simple question can set you a part from your competitors.

Then go into more detail. You may not be able to get a ton of information into an ad, but why not continue the story on your website? If you’re mailing a postcard, continue the story on the back, and explain why the average photographer doesn’t give you 100 percent of the service they deserve.

The goal is to get them to start questioning how all other photographers do things, and why you’re a little different. Once you get that question into their minds, you’ll quickly move apart from your competition. And book more.

Filed Under: Get Clients Tagged With: establishing marketing goals, gaining clients, get new customers, Photography Marketing, small business marketing, The Only Goal Of Every Marketing Campaign

The Pros and Cons of Using Groupon

by Virtual Photography 4 Comments

Daily deal sites are all the rage in today’s economy. Groupon may appear to be the leader, but many other companies are right in line, offering their own versions:

Groupon
Google Offers – beta version
Living Social
Woot!
Eversave
BuyWithMe

You can even find a variety of niche deal of the day sites

Wozofoto
Photo Deal of the Day

While deal sites are definitely the rage from the consumer side, what about the business side? Does it make sense for you as a business owner to jump on board and make your own offer?

Before you think of running your own ad, it’s worth a moment or two to put together your plan, and understand what you hope to accomplish first.

The way most deal sites work is they offer a different deal on each day, and promote it in a variety of ways, including the site itself, emails and social sites like Twitter and Facebook. If they are big enough, they know how to get the word out.

When you put together your offer, you must give a discount off your service – typically a 50 to 90 percent off deal. The promotion is only valid if a certain number of people buy into the deal within the set period of time, usually 24 hours. Then the daily deal site will keep 50 percent of the revenues made from the deal.

While there have been many stories circulating online about the value of using a daily deal site for your business, as with any marketing tool you use, you have to understand the nuances of the tool before you make your offer. Sites like Groupon have pros and cons, just like any other marketing tool. You just have to understand how to use it effectively.

Pros

Daily deals attract a lot of customers.
If you make the right offer, it’s not uncommon to gain hundreds of new customers during the 24 hour selling process. The beauty of daily deals sites is the quickness of the decision. A person will view the offer in their preferred manner, and make a buying decision within seconds. If they proceed, with just a couple of clicks the deal has been purchased. While it’s a great way to gain new customers that may have thought about trying you in the past, its also a great way of gaining repeat business from people that haven’t used your services in a while. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Online Marketing Tagged With: daily deals, online marketing tools, Photography Marketing, The Pros and Cons of Using Groupon, using daily deal sites for photographers

How To Make Your Small Photography Business Seem Bigger

by Virtual Photography 1 Comment

When our business started growing by leaps and bounds, we made a conscious decision to stay small – Andrew, myself, an office manager, and two part time assistants – yet look like we were a very large photography studio that could take on clients anywhere in the world.

Guess what? It worked.

It doesn’t matter if your business is in a large office building, or run out of the basement in your home, there are certain things you can do to give it the large business appearance. Along with the comfy feeling of being a small time studio.

Brand Yourself For Mass Appeal

Your brand is your window into the world. Just because your current client lives 10 miles from your studio doesn’t mean she won’t be mailing photographs and sharing your information with a friend that lives 1,000 miles away. Especially in today’s world, there are no boundaries when it comes to promotion. We’ve had clients in Germany plan a long distance wedding and choose us as their photographer by viewing our online portfolios and making decisions through email – that’s a long way from Colorado.

Start out by looking at the name of your photography business and your tagline. What do they really say about you as a photographer? Does it say we stay local, or does it say we are willing to travel anywhere? When we were in the process of doubling our business, we changed our logo by deleting “Denver” from our tagline, and adding “Worldwide” instead. From that point on our business grew exponentially. Not only did we have a different attitude, our clients did as well. We received many phone calls asking if we had offices in different regions of the world – and they were always surprised to learn how small our employee base really was. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Six Figure Photographer Tagged With: branding, growing a small business, Photography Marketing, Photography Studio, small business

What Photographers Don’t Get About Marketing

by Virtual Photography 2 Comments

This post is Day 29 of 30 Ways In 30 Days To Redesign Your Life With Photography. This series seeks to provide you with practical steps to get you from wherever you are today, to exactly where you want to be – this year! If your goal has always been to take your photography to a whole new level, hang on and start enjoying a new lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.

I love time travel movies. It’s so much fun thinking about the possibility of being able to leap into the future to see what its like. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the world is like in 50 years? What technology will we be using? What will our daily lives be like?

Unfortunately, we can’t make the leap today, and know instantly what we should be doing to make our future successful. And in today’s world, even a few short months can bring about drastic change.

Think about what we do today compared with what we were doing five years ago. Would you have ever predicted spending your time on Facebook? Statistics show that the average person spends over 10 hours per month on it.

I also read a statistic that a person starting a four year technical degree today is learning obsolete technology. In other words, technology is changing so fast, that what we are learning today will no longer apply a short four years from now.

So how do we look into the future and decide what we want to do when it may not exist?

And more importantly, how can you build a business today that is ready for the future?

The First Step

The first step towards the future is realizing that everything you learned in the past no longer applies.

Yellow Pages and phone books? Dead.

Newspapers and print advertising? Dead.

Television and radio commercials? Dead.

Okay, I know I’m going to get emails that say these tools are still being used effectively, and they are still generating business. And I agree. In some ways, they are still in use and people are gaining traction from them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Online Marketing Tagged With: new marketing strategies, Photography Marketing, small business, social marketing, Using Social Media, What Photographers Don’t Get About Marketing

One Great Idea – Meet Mick Buston

by Virtual Photography 2 Comments

If you have a blog, you know the routine. Create a new post, approve and answer questions in your comments, add new features. A while back as I read through my comments, I came across one that really captured my attention to a post I had created, Are You An Artist Or Just Another Photographer? So being the Internet surfer I am, I clicked over to his site and started following the trail. And again, I was enthralled in what I saw. So…

I would like to introduce you to Mick Buston.

Even though Mick is fairly new to photography, its his journey that captured my attention. He didn’t want to become a traditional photographer, jumping at the portrait and wedding markets. He didn’t want to do what thousands of other photographers are doing – and struggling to some extent. So he set out on a new path. Rather than telling you about his journey, let me show you instead.

As you can see from his photographs, he’s a great storyteller. And his goal is to “Create photo story books based on my own creations, my visions, my interpretations. Kind of like a visual writer.” I love that concept – a visual writer.

Mick also recognizes the fact that “Digital photography has many pluses but one negative is that too many images remain on a hard drive somewhere, lost, buried, forgotten, essentially abandoned.” Yep, I couldn’t agree more. And with many photographers simply handing over CD/DVD’s of the images, and people storing them that way without every printing things, we’re producing a generation that will eventually have no memories from the most important events in their lives. So Mick’s idea of becoming a “visual writer” is right on, and I feel in the future one he is going to do very well with.

So I sent over a variety of questions, to dig deeper into his photography goals.

Mick provided such great responses to my questions, I want to provide his answers in their entirety. I enjoyed reading through his progression to where he is today, and I know you’ll get caught up in the story too.

Interview

My name is Mick Buston and I am a UK-based photographer predominantly working on self-assigned music and editorial photography projects.

LORI: What was the process for finding what you are truly passionate about?
MICK: I left school with pretty much no qualifications and went straight to work in the construction industry as a plasterer. My father was a plasterer and so it was a natural progression for me to do this. In total I spent around 14 years in construction, including 18 months working in Germany, before finally deciding to try something else.

I applied for a job as a sales administrator in ’96, more for interview practice than anything else, and to my surprise I got it. This started in place another 14 year period of work with various employers in a series of sales, marketing and management roles.

In between this I also set up my own business marketing a product I designed to help people to stop smoking. The reality of launching a new product into such a competitive market meant that I did not have sufficient funds to carry on so after 18 months I made the difficult decision in February 2009 to close the company.

Photography Lens Doubles As A Beverage Cup

by Virtual Photography 1 Comment

What is it with us photographers. Sometimes I think we all sleep, eat and drink photography (I know we’re guilty).

So today I was excited to find a new way to, well, drink photography. Check out this great new beverage cup I found over on Photojojo.

In my post Tips To Become a Coffee Shop Entrepreneur, I talk about several ways you can promote yourself as a photographer simply by setting up shop at your local coffee house. Grab your laptop, a few business cards, and now your lens cup as an ice breaker, and you’ll be ready to do business spending just a few dollars a day on coffee.

These lenses are available in Canon and Nikon formats, so no matter what you’re preference, there’s a lens – or coffee cup – for you. Perfect for the holidays – get one as a stocking stuffer for your favorite photographer.

Available from Photojojo

Filed Under: Just For Fun Tagged With: beverage cup, canon, coffee cup, Coffee Shop Entrepreneur, nikon, Photography Lens, Photography Marketing, photojojo

What Can You Do That The Big Photo Chains Can’t?

by Virtual Photography Leave a Comment

One of the biggest reasons a small business can succeed when a large corporation can’t is its ability to act fast, and give customers exactly what they want when they want it.

The newest Office Depot commercial showcases this well. When a new chain hair salon moves in across the street from a small barbershop, and offers a $6 haircut, the small business owner doesn’t get worried, he adjusts his marketing. With a simple sign, “We fix $6 haircuts” he soon puts the chain hair salon out of business.

Unrealistic? Maybe. But the concept is a great one to learn for your own business.

If you’ve never had your portrait taken at a chain location, I would highly suggest heading out and living the experience. Bring in a coupon from the newspaper or your mailbox, and head in for the experience. Don’t go during off hours, head in during peak time, like Saturday afternoon. Take mental notes along the way of how you do things differently, how you can improve in certain areas, and how you can market yourself to overcome the experiences at this chain location.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Publicity Tagged With: marketing competition, Photography Marketing, photography publicity