Marketing Plan Must Haves!

Marketing Plan Must be Fully-Thought-Out

The Value of a Marketing Plan! Fact: The average professional photographer makes less than $26,000 per year. Still, many other professional photographers make, on average, $26,000 per month! Guess which photographers have and follow defined plans.

As photographers, we do two things:

1. Photography
2. Marketing

Everything else is secondary – everything! Eighty percent of all businesses do not have a marketing plan and 80% of all businesses aren’t around in five years. Trust me, that is not just a coincidence! Your Marketing Plan is everything!

Having a well-defined marketing plan and a positive professional image will not only assure your survival in tough times, but it will also allow you to outshine your competition. With a clearly defined plan, you will prosper even in tough times because you will be one of the only photographers that markets intelligently and with a plan.

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Have a Clear Message/Hook

As excellent as your photographic skills may be, clients will choose to do business with you based on how they perceive you. To clients, their perception is their reality! Even if they like you, they will make their choice based on their perception and your hook. Your hook is your contribution to their perception of you. In the world of marketing, we refer to your message sent to potential customers as a ‘hook,’ and it is probably one of the most important assets your photography business has.

Develop your ‘hook’ by asking yourself a few basic questions:

• Is there something that you do that makes you stand out from the crowd and gives the customer a reason to come to you instead of the photographer down the s treet? What is it?
• What is it about you and/or your studio that is so at tractive people cannot resist doing business with you?
• Do you know what it is?
• What is it that you do in your photography business better than anyone else?
• Does your photography work make ‘regular’ people look real good or ‘regular’ (regardless of what people might say, when taking por traits, they do not want to look ‘regular’)?

Once a customer has made up their mind about something, it is nearly impossible to make them believe otherwise. The exceptions are the low-price-shoppers. They will be your customers until they find an even lower price. They will then move on.

Professional Looking Literature

You have heard it before – “First impressions are everything!” Rarely, if ever, do you get a ‘second-chance’ for a ‘first-impression.’ Everything that you do must project and match your image. If you want to be known for Mercedes Benz quality, then everything you do must be consistent with that goal.

Clients judge us long before we take a single photo. As a matter of fact, humans make judgments about people, businesses, food, and other products within five seconds! As professional photographers, we must always be prepared to be assessed. After all, every business decision we make from – marketing, to positioning, to image creation – expresses to clients who we are and what we do.

When a prospective client meets you, the professional photographer, they evaluate:

• What you wear
• How you look
• The way you walk
• The way you talk, and
• How you communicate with the rest of the world

It’s as much about essence as it is real substance!

Make Sure Prices Allow for Overhead, Costs and Profit

One of the saddest challenges in the photography business is that we photographers are afraid to charge what we are worth. For whatever the reasons, we fail to fully understand the costs to produce our products. There are many resources available that will walk you through the process of determining your full costs – and what your profit is. You should investigate the topic and include it as part of your brainstorming and planning sessions.

Your marketing plan must is enhanced when you develop the marketing tools to make the process simple, uncomplicated, consistently profitable and effective.

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