CHAPTER 15: The Value of Marketing

Marketing is one of those words that many people don’t truly understand. Marketing is the constant delivery of the same message—in your case, that your company is the solution to the clients’ photography needs.

Many photographers confuse the concepts of sales and marketing because it is difficult to tell them apart. Marketing is the collection of activities you engage in to generate leads for your business—brand awareness campaigns, advertising, social media, email campaigns, and so on. Marketing is more of a macro activity: being actively engaged in promoting your photography services to a variety of prospective clients in hopes that people will be interested in learning more about your services. Marketing strategies are covered in-depth in Chapter 16. They include:

• Print advertising

• Networking

• Blogging

• Mailing brochures to local businesses

• Advertising online

• Fairs

• Events

• Social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter)

• SEO (search engine optimization)

• Direct mail campaigns

• Getting published or editorial coverage

• Handing out business cards

• Partnership marketing

• Email marketing to existing clients

Once you identify a prospective client (through your marketing efforts), the micro activities to turn that lead into a client are considered sales. Sales are when you are actively engaged in trying to sell your services to a prospective client.

To run a successful business, you need to understand how marketing is different from sales (which was covered in Part 3) and how to implement it successfully. First, let’s start with what marketing should actually do, and then move on to creating a marketing plan.

What Marketing Should Do

When you start a business, one of your first goals is to get your name out there. Figuring out how to do that, though, can be confusing and frustrating. Should you be listed on different websites, do you send out a mass mailing, and what about Facebook and Twitter? Do you need to attend fairs or events?

Unfortunately, there is no single answer to these questions. What works for one photographer may not work for another. Whether a certain type of marketing is effective depends on many things, including your personality, location, price point, clientele, and niche. For example, many photographers have great success with search engine optimization (SEO), while others don’t. In my case, my clientele of high-end brides are not searching online for their wedding photographers. They are apt to find their wedding photographers through trusted recommendations, and therefore my marketing efforts reflect that.

As an example of what effective marketing does, let’s look at the benefits to a wedding photographer of being published and how it ties into marketing (the same benefits do not apply to portrait photographers). Brides don’t see a photo credit in the crack of a magazine and beat a path to your door begging you to shoot their wedding at any price. That’s not how it works. If used correctly, though, editorial coverage will lead to more bookings for a wedding photographer. It’s just a matter of doing it effectively.

It’s not getting published itself that gets you more work; it’s how you use that feature as a tool for your own publicity, photography brand, and marketing. It’s a piece of big news that you can use to further your brand’s reach. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is to use that publicity to reach out to the other vendors on that event or wedding.

Make a point to share the credit with them and offer them copies of the feature so they can share with their clients and use as part of their own publicity and marketing (and, in turn, they are marketing you). Send copies to the bride, the planner, the designer, and the venue. They are going to be thrilled and will in turn show the piece to as many brides as possible, and of course be talking about you (marketing your company for you) to brides. And not just in a perfunctory “here’s the name of a photographer” way, but in a giggly, breathless way that is pure excitement.

I tell wedding planners we work with that we get many of our weddings published. If they are interested in increasing their marketing, it’s a huge advantage to work with us (i.e. refer us to their clients). Vendors are usually thrilled to get published, so they like to send us referrals so we can work together. When a bride comes into our studio, she might have been told about our work from another event professional sharing the latest feature on a wedding blog or magazine. We might have a sample album from a wedding that’s recently been published, and she recognizes the wedding (which is exactly what we intend) because she has seen it in a magazine.

As she leaves the consultation, we hand her a gift bag containing a magazine with another editorial feature. Those elements are incredibly effective when debating a luxury purchase. Why do clothing designers spend so much money and time getting their goods worn by celebrities? Because it connects their brands to a celebrity thrill factor. Same idea.

Putting Together a Marketing Plan and Budget

Developing a marketing plan is critical to your success. Without this roadmap, you won’t know where you are going or what you want to achieve. The marketing plan needs to detail the strategies you will implement to bring in more business. Without a plan in place, you won’t know how much time and energy to put into any single strategy and you won’t have a way to evaluate its effectiveness.

Without a plan, you are reacting to the day-to-day issues and concerns of running your business. You have a mom on the phone threatening a bad review, so you respond to that. A client needs his product rushed, so you scramble to make that happen. You need the business, so you are constantly treading water.

We’ve all been there, but that’s not an effective way to run a business. When you have a marketing plan to follow, you have taken the time to select priorities for your business. When that next great new idea comes along, you won’t get distracted because you already have a plan that you are following. Perhaps that great idea gets jotted down for your annual business review when you plan next year’s activities.

Your marketing plan should be broken down into three parts:

1. Goals

2. Strategies

3. Budget

The first step to putting your marketing plan together is to develop goals for your business that you would like to accomplish through marketing. Goals are the outcome you would like to see for your business, such as to increase overall profits by 15% or increase portrait sessions to 50 per year.

The second step is to choose the marketing strategies and the estimated time frames for each. You need both long-term and short-term strategies, as some things take more time and focus while other strategies require minimal effort and can be done during your busier times. The different types of marketing strategies are covered in Chapter 16, but you should also refer back to Chapters 13 and 14 to help you choose strategies that will reach your target market. For example, high school seniors are more likely to be looking at Facebook for their senior portrait photographers and not in print media.

A short-term strategy would be to develop a Facebook business page, and begin promoting via your blog, website, and email signatures. It might take a few weeks to create a viable community, but after that, the time required would be minimal.

A long-term strategy would be developing strong contacts within your industry that lead to more business for you. In the fashion industry, that would be makeup artists and stylists, while in the pet photography niche that would be pet groomers, veterinarians, horse-riding academies, and so forth. This type of strategy takes more planning and effort to implement, and the results take longer. However, the payoff is likely to be much greater.

The third part of the plan is to calculate what you can spend on marketing. For my studio, the marketing budget ranges between $10,000 and $30,000. Usually the marketing budget is directly tied to the amount of gross revenue you are bringing in, so if you are starting out, you might allocate a few thousand dollars to marketing while pursuing free and low-cost marketing activities that require more time than money. As you get busier and have less time, you might move toward strategies that cost more money but require less time, as I have.

Keeping your social media up-to-date and blogging are practically free and are great ways to market your business without a huge budget. Networking and developing contacts who will refer business to you is another effective strategy that costs little money, but requires more time.

Scheduling Marketing Throughout the Year

One of the biggest marketing mistakes you can make is to believe you can do some marketing at the beginning and then ignore it. Marketing is something you need to do all year long and continually update. Even if your business comes from word of mouth, you still need to stay in touch with your referral base, otherwise they may stop referring you over time.

Within your marketing plan, you want both short- and long-term goals and strategies that you work toward each week or month. This ensures your business is moving forward. Break down the marketing plan into time frames—things that can be done immediately for a quick return and tactics that take a longer time to work, but with a bigger payoff over time.

Photography businesses ebb and flow. You will have slow times or a slow season. That is a great time to focus on your marketing. For our wedding photography business, that slow time starts in December so that’s when we focus on marketing. This allows you to break the year into sections, with a shooting season and a marketing season.

Think about how your business works. Do you have a certain time when you get a lot of bookings? Or are your bookings spread over the year? The idea is to match the timing of your marketing so that it is out there working prior to when your clients are most likely to book you. You need to start marketing several months in advance so those efforts have time to pay off. Plan your marketing so that people not only know about the new offerings but they know about them at the right time.

Think of marketing in terms of campaigns. Break down the services you offer, and market those to specific clients. For example, if you want to offer family portraits as a holiday gift idea then you need to make sure that the marketing hits when people are starting to think about the coming holidays, like September and October. Just because you have a special, a new service, or a new product, it doesn’t mean you will automatically book up. You have to let people know about it, and it usually takes hearing about the promotion several times before it starts to click with customers.

This could mean several seasons of refining your marketing before your efforts start to pay off. For example, when I first began offering holiday print sales, I didn’t sell many prints. It would have been easy to give up and say, “print sales don’t work for me.” In fact, that wasn’t the case at all; it was that I did not know how to do them effectively. I thought if I sent out one email and posted about the sale on my blog, people would get the message and buy prints if they wanted to. However, it wasn’t until I refined my strategy over several attempts that I realized I needed to send out multiple emails in order to remind people about the sale. Instead of thinking of it as harassing them, I had to think of it as helping clients take advantage of a great deal.

Evaluating Effectiveness

You need to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing, otherwise how will you know what works and what doesn’t? There is no point in spending money on marketing plans that don’t work for you.

Ask your clients how they heard about you. This lets you look at what worked and what didn’t, what you want to change, and how to implement new changes in the coming year.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Where did the majority of your leads come from?

• What marketing efforts brought in few or no leads?

• Do you have a strong reputation established yet, or should you focus more on brand awareness?

• Do you have a clear message and distinctive style?

• Who is recommending you?

• What is your social media reach?

• How do traditional marketing efforts compare to web marketing and social media?

• How effective are contacts and industry relationships compared to time spent networking?

• How effective have events, shows, and fairs been, and what’s the cost per lead?

• What is the effectiveness of editorial submissions and publicity?

The answers to these questions will help you choose the right marketing strategy for your business. So, how do you find out the answers to these questions?

You have to track your leads and booked jobs, and talk to your clients. Do you know how many bookings you got from Google, versus a doctor’s office with your artwork and brochures, versus the fair you participated in last month? If you don’t know exactly how many bookings you’ve gotten from each marketing effort, that is where you need to start.

If you aren’t basing your marketing decisions on where your past bookings have come from, you are making a huge mistake. The only real way to see if something is working is if you are getting paying clients from it. For example, if you invested in 6 fairs this past year and you got only 2 bookings, you can conclude that it is not an effective strategy for you at this time—the cost per lead is too high. Compare that to the 12 new clients and numerous inquiries you got from a mini session weekend you did at a children’s clothing boutique. That is probably a much better use of your marketing time and money, as some of those new clients will become repeat clients.

Remember, effective marketing is not the number of leads you generate but the number of actual clients you book.

Develop a Tracking System

We use a simple spreadsheet, named Booked Weddings, to track our bookings. Each year, we track every booking and the key details in the spreadsheet. This helps us look back over the years and see what has worked and what hasn’t. Here is what we track in our spreadsheet:

• Photographer

• Wedding date

• Booking date

• Months between booking and wedding date (this helps us estimate the total number of expected bookings for the year)

• Client names

• Total spent

• Venue

• How they found us

If you are a portrait photographer, your spreadsheet might look like this:

• Photographer

• Session date

• Client names

• Total spent

• How they found us

Update this spreadsheet regularly. At the end of each year, you can analyze the information in your spreadsheet, deciding which marketing worked and which didn’t. The strategies that prove effective get allocated more money and time for the next year to expand those efforts, while of course strategies that failed are given less money and time or stopped completely. This is extremely effective, and helps you avoid making the same costly mistakes year after year.

This spreadsheet also lets you review the trends in your customers and their habits. You can look at average money spent to see what the trends have been, and this helps you understand how to adjust your pricing to make sure you are calculating the overhead and cost of goods sold (COGS) correctly.

If you haven’t been collecting this information for your business, it’s not too late. You might be able to go back through old emails to find the “how you heard about us” details. It’s worth the time to set yourself up for this. You can also send out an email to past clients asking them to answer a quick couple of questions, including how they heard about you.

Do More of What’s Working

As you begin to see what is effective and what is not, refine your system by doing more of what is working and less of what isn’t. If you are getting bookings from your Facebook page, that would be an area to put even more time into in order to see if you can further improve the results. If jobs are coming from certain contacts, make sure you do everything to keep those relationships strong. At the same time, you’d want to focus more time and energy into building new relationships as well, since that strategy has proven to be effective for you. If online search is bringing in business, invest more time and effort into SEO.

Once you figure out what is working, see what you can do to expand those results. Drop the less effective or more costly strategies in order to give you time to dig deeper into the most effective strategies. Now that you know how to think about marketing and put together a plan, let’s get to marketing strategies in Chapter 16.