Photography Business Success Course Introduction Lesson 4...
It all comes down to marketing, right? Wrong!!!...
As we’ve been discussing, if you’re not playing in the right markets, the best marketing in the world won’t help you.
And if you’re not giving the right markets something they want, the best marketing in the world won’t help you either!
To get the results you want, you need to put ALL the parts in place, including the marketing.
And that’s what we’re going to talk about in this lesson — marketing.
First off, let’s talk about what marketing is and isn’t.
Good marketing isn’t about using “tricks” or manipulation to get people to buy things they don’t want. Yes, you can get away with that in the short run — sometimes — but it’s not sustainable, and certainly not the path to leading a life you can feel good about.
Good marketing is simply identifying people you can help, getting them interested in what you do, educating them on how you can help them, persisting, and then delivering — and hopefully over-delivering — on your promises so they will come back to you over and over again and refer more people like them to you.
If you can do those 5 things...
- Identify
- Interest
- Educate
- Persist ~ and ~
- Deliver
you will have a sound basis for a marketing program and a business.
The way we market
Like everything we do, Pam and I originally designed our marketing to facilitate our lifestyle.
And that, of course, presented a few “speed bumps.”
For one, working at home means we don’t have any “walk-in” traffic, which means no one will find out about us simply because of our “location.”
And since we didn’t want people randomly calling and asking us about things we don’t do (like weddings and passport photos), we don’t have a business phone number, and therefore aren’t listed under “photographers” in the phone book (and when we first started out, the Internet was not a viable marketing media... more on "Internet Marketing" in a bit).
We also don’t want to have to “sell” people on the phone or in person. We’re quite happy to talk to people, but only after they know what we’re all about and what our pricing levels are!
So, as you can see, we had a few marketing “problems” to solve — most photography businesses depend on high profile locations, advertising, and personal selling to make their businesses work, but that just doesn’t fit our personalities and our lifestyle.
But even if it did — even if we had a big time location and were masters of the face-to-face “sell” — we would still market the way we do now. Why? Because the techniques we use are so much more efficient, powerful, and cost effective. Plus, they can be automated so our time is freed up for other activities.
Step #1 — Identify
If you remember our little five-step marketing formula, the first step is “identify” — you want to identify people who may be interested in doing business with you.
In addition to that, you’ll want to identify the types of people you want to do business with — ultimately, your marketing should be designed to attract the people you want, and repel the people you don’t want.
This is important. You want your clients to be fun to deal with, appreciative of your work, and not overly sensitive to price.
In our people and pet photography business, those are people who have a high interest in family and/or pets.
Notice I didn’t say people with money and kids or pets.
Simply going for “people with money” is a big mistake many photographers make.
You certainly want people who can pay you well, but money alone is not a good indicator of who will make a good client. Some people with “money” don’t like to spend it, and/or have a habit of making the lives of service people like photographers miserable (Pam and I have heard plenty of stories about this!) and that violates our “fun to deal with” rule.
So “presence of money” alone is not a useful characteristic.
What you really want are people in family-oriented professions like doctors, families with kids in private or home schooling, pet owners active in clubs and other activities that indicate a higher-than-normal interest in family and pets.
Those are the people who will pay you well, appreciate what you do, and be a joy to work with.
Within that group, some will certainly have plenty of money, but some will not. Some will save all year for a photo session because their family or pet is that important to them.
OK, so how do you find these people? There are many ways, but one of the best and easiest way is to determine who already has access to the clients you want and make arrangements for an "introduction." For example, the owner of a high end toy store may allow you to put flyers in outgoing packages or a dog club may do an e-mail "blast" for you. Even individuals can be helpful. Pam acquired a substantial amount of business with this method... an interested person simply signs up their friends and gets a free session for their efforts. The key point is to find a business, organization or person with access to the clients you want and see if they are willing to help you. Many will at little or no cost to you. It's a great way to get started from nothing, and the really cool part is, the clients you acquire will stick with you for life and refer more of them to you, if you do the rest of your business properly, but let's not jump ahead...
Step #2 — Interest
Once you have identified a general market to approach, you’ll need to create interest for what you do, and get the truly interested to identify themselves.
Notice I said “identify themselves.” This is important. You may be able to identify groups of people who you think are likely to be your clients, like doctors with kids or members of a dog club, but on an individual basis, you really need someone to contact you in some way and say, “Hey, I might be interested in this!”
In marketing, the process of getting interested people to contact you is known as “lead generation,” and this is an important step in “filtering” the general population — you want to separate the people who aren’t interested in doing business with you, from the people who might be interested in doing business with you, so you can concentrate your resources on the people with the greatest possibility of becoming customers.
Lead generation can be done many ways — from post cards, to brochures, to search engine listings, to public displays of your work, and more. But here’s the important point to keep in mind — unless you give people a reason to contact you now, you won’t be generating any leads.
For example, let’s say we run a small ad in a local magazine (I don’t generally recommend marketing that way, but it’s a good way to illustrate this point).
The typical business might include a little photo example of their work along with the name of the business, the phone number, and perhaps a web address.
Now, who’s going to contact you?... only the people who are really excited about actually doing business with you immediately.
And that won’t be very many because it’s unlikely you’ll catch them at just the right time, and you don’t have enough room in a dinky ad to really get them excited about what you do, anyway.
You can fix this by using what’s known in direct marketing circles as a “call to action.” For example, we could beef up the ad we talked about by adding the line “call, write, fax, or e-mail for a complete guide to our photographic services, plus a valuable surprise bonus.”
Now, the people who are even mildly interested have a reason to contact you (to get more information and check out what you have to offer, and see what the "valuable surprise bonus" is) and you now have some leads you can work with.
Special note — the examples here are just that — examples. There are many, many, ways to generate leads and more powerful ways to get people to contact you, but in each case, the concept is the same — you need a “call to action,” and a “reason to make contact,” so you can build a prospect list of people who might be interested in doing business with you.
Why do you want a list? So you can follow up, and do a complete job of educating your potential clients about the benefits you can offer them. And so you can stay in touch with them, and be fresh in their minds, when they’re ready to hire a photographer.
By the way, I’ve just taught you an idea that’s literally been responsible for billions of dollars in sales in the direct response and other industries. Pam and I didn’t invent this idea, we just saw what was working in other industries and borrowed the ideas for our own businesses, and it was those ideas — the ones you’re learning right now — that really helped build our business. They're simple, timeless, work online and off, and can be used to sell just about anything.
Step #3 — Educate
OK, you’ve generated leads and you now have a list of people who are at least somewhat interested in what you do. After all, they have contacted you to get more information, so there has to be at least a small spark of interest!
You, therefore, are ready to begin the educational process.
You may have noticed I used the word educate instead of “sell.” My advice to you is to forget about "selling" altogether. Thinking "selling" tends to put you in an adversarial frame of mind and leads to the kind of selling that most of us have experienced at car dealerships and other businesses of that type.
Instead of taking on an adversarial role with your potential customers, take on an advisory one. Get on the same side as your prospects and clients, fight for them, educate them, and look out for their best interest. Isn’t that what business should be about anyway? Helping people get what they want, so they will give you money and be glad they did?
In Pam’s business, for many years, we have used what we call an “InfoPak.” It tells Pam's "story" and explains how we can be of service to our clients. The InfoPak was originally a printed package (we printed it out on our laser printer as needed), but like the lead generation process, this “education step” can take many forms, online and off.
What’s important is the principle...
- Generate leads inexpensively
- Build a prospect list ~ and then ~
- Follow up with complete information
While you want people to do business with you happily and naturally because you’ve given them the information they need to make a good decision, you’ll always want to be moving your “leads” in the direction of becoming clients. And you shouldn’t be shy about that. Rest assured there is nothing wrong with being excited about what you offer, motivating in your presentation, and clear about “asking for the money!”
Step #4 — Persist
Many businesses count on the presence of an immediate need to make sales. For example, if you need gas, you’ll find the closest gas station, and if your pipes break, you’ll call a plumber who will come out now.
In the family and pet photography business, it’s a little different. You will get some “impulse buys,” but in many cases, people are not ready to do business with you immediately.
The time between someone first contacts you, and the time they actually do business with you, is what I call the “lag time.”
In Pam’s type of photography business, the lag time can range from a few days to a few years (yeah, it has always amazed us how people will call us years after first contacting us. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen!).
Persistence — staying in touch with your prospects from time to time — will help shorten the lag time by regularly reminding them of the highly valuable service that you can provide.
It will also help keep them from forgetting about you completely — so when the “magic moment” comes and they decide to act — you will be fresh in their minds.
It’s been well documented in many businesses that most of the sales come from follow-up activities. Persistence really is king, and I am sure you can you see the power of using a system that generates “leads,” rather than simply throwing your name out into the world and hoping people will call you — maybe — when they need a photographer.
You see, without leads, you won’t be able to properly educate your prospects as to why you’re the best choice for the things you specialize in, and even worse, without leads, you won’t be able to follow up, and follow up some more, until they say “yes.”
Step #5 — Over Deliver
OK, if you’ve done everything right — generated leads, educated, and persisted, there’s a good chance you will have people handing you money.
You’ve done good marketing work. But realize that your “marketing” job isn’t over, and in many ways, it has just begun because there’s nothing more powerful than a delighted customer. They feel good, you feel good, and as a result, the magic of repeats and referrals starts to happen!
Always give people more than they expect.
Over deliver.
As we’ve mentioned before, the way you treat your clients, and what you give them, is an important part of your “marketing.”
Remember, it’s your clients who will give you the fun, flexible, and creative lifestyle you seek, not your photographic equipment, or your photographic skills.
Only people can pay you, and they are the one and only “gold” in your business.
Because of this, you’ll want to treat them so well they’ll come back to you over and over again, and refer all their friends to you, too.
You should, by the way, have active referral systems in place to help this process along — offering rewards for repeats and referrals is the easiest and most powerful marketing you’ll ever do!
Automating The Process
Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming.
Yes, you’ll always want to be tracking your results and running some “experiments,” but your main marketing process, once established, should be routine. A system.
And each step in the process should be no more difficult than putting a stamp on an envelope, initiating an e-mail sequence, or having an outside service or person take care of it for you.
These days — and this is very good news — business automation tools, including ones for marketing, are very advanced and cheap.
Many marketing processes can be made to be totally “hands off,” so we can concentrate on what we do best, and what we love to do the most!
I call this the “total freedom” business...
When we first started Pam’s photography business, the Internet did not exist for commercial purposes. While we were able to automate a lot of the processes, getting things done, and running a business from remote locations was difficult.
All that has changed.
These days, in our type of business, just about anything — except when you actually need to be present to do photo sessions — can be taken care of from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.
You can run marketing campaigns, have conversations with your prospects and clients, book sessions, even send direct mail, from anywhere.
Total freedom — finally — and it is a very exciting thing for those who know how to use the technology.
Pam and I, for example, have run — or at least checked up on — our businesses from hotel rooms, outdoor cafes, even highway rest stops with Internet connections...
Above and left — running the business from our front yard, Key West, FL, a boat and a hotel room in the Outer Banks, NC
Except for when Pam needs to be physically present for photo sessions, we can now be anywhere we choose — worldwide — for as long as we like.
Some things, however, never change, like...
The marketing principles of identify, interest, educate, persist, and over delivering.
In Pam’s business, and in every business we undertake, you’ll see the five principles we have outlined in this lesson at work. The details and the technology may vary from business to business, and the delivery systems can change with the times, but the principles we just talked about are rock solid and timeless. They are the building blocks of any marketing system you create.
OK, I could go on for hundreds of pages talking about one of my favorite subjects — marketing (and if you decide to enroll in the full course, you’ll get a full dose of it) — but really, none of it falls outside of the basic principles we have talked about throughout this mini-course and you now have a very solid and time-tested framework to build a business of your own.
And do not underestimate what you now know — many people fail to achieve what they want because they try to put details on top of no foundation. Let me repeat that — details on top of no foundation. That scenario is destined to crash. In this course you are learning the foundation you need to put details into a workable system.
Now that you have a good understanding of the various elements that are required for a successful business, let’s move on to putting it all together and getting a fast start... stay tuned for Lesson 5!
Photographically yours,
Jeff Farr
co-founder, Not Your Normal School of Photography
