Strategic Advertising & Promotion

Strategic advertising will be a very important aspect of your photographic

business venture. It will determine how effective you are at getting the word

out that your business exists and that you are ready to do business. It will

also help the customer to realize how much better or different from your

competitors. Time never seems to be on our side. Sometimes it doesn’t seem

like there is enough time to do all the things that we need to accomplish in a

day. Well maybe there is not enough time to do everything in a day so what

we will do is concentrate on timing. In this business you must be able to use

timing as your secret weapon of success. Let’s say, for example, you

discovered tonight that that the cost of wedding photography will go up 300

percent across the nation.

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If you are an opportunist like myself then you would immediately learn the

fundamentals, skills, and aspects of photography and become part of the

growing trend. What I just described is a window of opportunity and they

exist every now-and-then. When there is a major holiday like Christmas or

Easter then photographers have a small window of opportunity to capitalize

on these holidays. This is why retail stores begin advertising well before

these holidays are near so that they can capture their segment of the market

well in advance. The best way to be prepared for any window of opportunity

is to:

9 Plan ahead for holidays and major events

9 See how your business fits into those holidays and
events and how you can obtain a segment of the
market spending power during these holidays or
events.
9 Consider the best methods for your area for
advertising to the market segment that you are
targeting.
9 Begin advertising at least 45 days before holidays
and 60 days before major events because your

Copyright (c) 2006 Hydraudia Publishing

 competition will definitely be trying to beat you to
the punch.
9 You must be prepared to offer a better savings and
discounts than your competitors during major
holidays.
9 If you must save money, wait for your competitor to
make the first advertisement move (radio,
newspaper, flyer, etc.) then come back with a better
advertising offering what the competitor is offering
, but at a better rate. Since your advertisement will
always come after the competitor’s you will be one
step ahead. Only do this if you can afford to beat the
competitor’s price and make a reasonable profit.
9 If you hear about an up and coming event you will
need to contact the person of contact immediately
and see if they will need a photographer to set up
and provide formal portraits at the event.

Copyright (c) 2006 Hydraudia Publishing

 The Critique Card

The critique card:

The critique card was put into operation by us in later 1996. This is the most

effective tool to use against the competitor as it exploits their weaknesses,

allows the customer to see these weaknesses, and allows the customer to

instantly omit the competitor from their list of consideration. Here is how the

critique card works.

1. You will fill out a card with anywhere for 3 to 5 questions for them to

ask the competitor about their

Wedding photography services. (See Example Below)

Question 1. Does the photography company allow unlimited time. Y____ N ______
This is one of our main questions on the critique card because we no from

our research that most photographers in our area of competition only give 3

to 4 hours and charge a steep hourly fee after that time has expired. Most

photographers will answer no. We can answer yes to all of the questions on

the critique card since we run our business based on feedback from what

customers want in a wedding photographer, but are not getting from

photographers in our area of competition. The card was designed based on

their weaknesses and things that we were informed that they should be

doing, but were not doing. So most of our competitors would end up

answering no to all of the questions and some may be able to answer yes to

maybe one, but we let the customer know that we can answer yes to all of

the questions. On the critique card it tellsthe customer to ask the perspective

photographer all of the questions and give them one point per question that

they answer yes to. There has never been a photographer yet to answer yes

to all three questions. Here are some major points with most photographers

that brides and grooms are mostly against and you may want to exploit these

shortcomings by your competitors.

Unlimited Time: Convey to the bridal couple that any photographer who

puts a time limit on their wedding day festivities can not really be worried

about their wedding or concerned about their peace-of-mind on their

wedding day. You can explain to them that there have been weddings (which

there have been) where the bride and groom got ready to cut the cake and the

photographer was gone. Let them know that you offer unlimited time (you

must offer unlimited time to use this strategy) and they will not have to

worry about additional hourly fees or not having a photographer to capture

all of the precious moments.

Unlimited Special Requests: This is another question to add to your

critique card. There are a lot of photographers who are real penny pinchers.

They spend more time worrying about how much film they are using and not

enough time concerning themselves with capturing the moment. They will

have a set number of photographs that they will take and will not take any

additional shots or honor any special requests. One of our customers that had

visited several of our competitors before coming out to us said that of all the

photographers that she visited, there was only one that actually honored

special requests and that particular photographer charged an additional

$50.00 per special request shot. We inform our customers that we take

unlimited special requests. This approach once again exploits the

competitors weakness and eliminates them from the decision making

process.

Allowing the guests and family members to take photographs:

Many photographers want to make as much as they can on wedding

Saturday without respect for the bridal couple. We have heard from most of

the couples that have come in for a consultation that many of the

photographers that they met with did not allow the family and guests to take

pictures. I personally think that this is an unfair business practice and a very

bad business approach. When I was in school for photography many years

ago, I had learned the concept behind not allowing friends, family, and

guests of the bridal couple to take photographs at the weddings and here is

the rationale behind the practice. It is believed that if you allow the family,

friends and relatives of the bride and groom to take pictures then the bride

and groom may not order as much when they can easily get the negatives

from their family, friends, and relatives. Photographers are worried about

setting up the shot and the guests of the bridal couple taking the picture and

giving the negatives to the bride to get enlargements elsewhere.

Photographers also believe that this also reduces the orders that would have

been placed by the guests and in a way reducing the income potential of the

photographer. This is a bad practice and brides and grooms are voicing their

complaints about it to photographers who are willing to listen like myself.

Bad business practices will not get you ahead in this business especially

when there are photographers like myself around who believe in fair

business practices.

Rushing the bride and groom to get all of their pictures done before the

wedding:

Another concern of brides and grooms is the impatient photographer who

wants to hurry up and get the job done so the he or she can leave. We book a

lot of weddings for couples that visited a photographer and the photographer

wanted them to get all of their wedding photographs done before the

wedding. Another word of advice is to never force the bride and groom to

see each other before the wedding. Any true professional photographer will

know about the tradition involved with wedding photography and it is

traditional for the bride and groom not to see each other before the wedding

ceremony. Once again, it becomes apparent that some of these so-called

professional photographers are not professionals after all. I studied at the

New York Institute of Photography, as an apprentice under various master

photographers in the United Kingdom where I received my mastership and

was licensed by the British Bureau of Professional Photographers, and still I

don’t consider myself a professional just based on my schooling.

I consider myself a professional based on what people that hire me think

about my skills and what they tell me. I have had to teach many students

who have graduated from college photography courses how to be a wedding

photographers because upon completion of the course they still felt timid

and inferior to other photographers. I have been hired by Dupont to train

their training photographers. Please understand clearly that you do not have

to be a graduate from a school of photography to be a great wedding

photographer, because there are those that graduate that lack the natural

qualities and characteristics required to be a photographer. One strong

quality that I suggest that you have is a love for whatever photography

you do. If you don’t love what you do then I strongly suggest that you find

something else and please don’t enter this profession just for the money

because your work will suffer. I encourage all of my students not to enter

this profession just for the money because when you love what you do, your

work will show. If you are doing it just for the money, that will show as well

and you will be out of business as quick as you got in business. Two of my

competitors have already realized this to be true. When you have a spare

moment on your hands this will be a great time to do some extensive

research of your own. You will want to start of by taking with brides and

grooms either married or getting married, and finding out some of the things
that they disliked about the photographer that they hired. Once you get a

good idea of these bad business practices you will want to call around to

your various competitors to see who is actually using these unfair or bad

business practices. When calling you will want to be creative in how you

ask. You will definitely want to sound like a sincere customer and not a left

hand that is trying to find out what the right hand is doing. We are used to

our competitors calling us because we know that they hear so many great

things about us that they can’t help but call to see if it is true. We have some

of our competitors so worried that they are cautious about talking about time

limits for wedding photography. We were told by one of our customer after

giving her a critique card that the photographer didn’t want to discuss time

he just wanted her to come in. That was another battle won by us. That

photographer may not have realized it, but by declining to discuss how much

time he would allow the customer, the customer didn’t consider him any

further for her wedding and that was a customer that he had just lost. These

are just a few of our trade secrets and as much as I would love to tell you

more. I must not give all of our secrets away. I must say that it feels good to

be home based and have my competitors in the shops and shopping malls

worried about us taking their business and constantly wondering what we’re

doing. We must really be doing something right!!!

 Word-of-Mouth -VS- Traditional Advertising

I have heard customers tell me over and over again how important

word-of-mouth advertising is. I used to think that free advertisement was no

good because it didn’t reach the masses of potential customers that

newspapers, radio, and direct mail did. Well for obvious reasons, we will

delete and forget about direct mail since most customers see junk mail in

their mailbox and throw it away before ever reading it. If it contains a check

that they can cash with no strings attached then you may have a better

chance of them reading your direct mail advertisement (We will get to the

magic postcard exception soon enough). One thing that we have realized

about direct mail is that it is like a direct endorsement from the person that

referred you. From experience we have learned that when we get a call from

a customer that was referred to us through word-of-mouth advertising we

have a 100% track record of booking those referred customers. This means

that when someone refers a customer to us we are guaranteed to book them

and this is solely based on the experience that the customer that referred

them had with us. Normally when a customer is referred to us, we do not
have to try hard to sell our services as most of the referrals are basically

ready to come in and pay their deposit to book their wedding.

 The Magic Post Card

I know that I have just recently warned you against direct mail. I will keep

my position on direct mail simply because the trends of customer receiving

mail from unsolicited sources remains the same. They simply throw the

junk mail in the trash! They always have and they always will. Now I will

make one exception. You can successfully send a post card to one of your

previous customers because they know you and will recognize your name

when they see the post card. The best form of direct marketing is to your

previous customer as they know that when they receive mail from you that it

is related to a previous photo session. With this in mind you should always

send your wedding customers some type of post card annually on the date of

the anniversary. You may want to offer them a free 8 X 10 with the purchase

of a family portrait package. If you do not have a photography studio then

that is not a problem at all. You may select all of the wedding customers that

were married in the warm months and send them a post card for a FREE on-

location sitting under the condition that they purchase a package. As you can

see there are an unlimited amount of specials that you can offer. The object

is to keep the repeat business coming from these great customers. You may

even want to contact them a few months after the wedding and offer to sell

them their negatives. The possibilities are limitless and the crea tivity is up to

you.

Copyright (c) 2006 Hydraudia Publishing