Marketing Plan Tips

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Your marketing plan doesn’t have to be elaborate, set in stone or extremely detailed, but, you must have one.

The marketing plan must specify your potential customers and their long-term value to your business. It must define tactical ideas. It must include action steps you will take to acquire customers. And, of course, it must have real and doable timelines.

The plan should specifically define key information including your target audience and value proposition (the long-term, value of your customers to your business), as well as tactical ideas and action steps you will take in order to acquire customers and/or increase sales.

The basic components to include:

1. Product/Service Definition – Find your niche

You must determine what photography niche your business is in. Describe your product or service in simple and easy-to-understand terms. Consider this message to be a written version of your 30 to 60 second “thumbnail speech” that clearly describes your company's mission and reason for being. Include your point of difference and communicate the intrinsic benefits your customer will receive. Example: “ABC Photography helps families capture family memories, family legacies, and family traditions.”

2. Target Audience – Where You At?

After determining the type of photography that you are marketing, you must be specific about the demographics and psychographics (how’s that for hoity-toity? It means ‘how customers think and act.’) Once identified, focus you photography marketing resources, activities and tactics on these specified groups.

3. Goals & Objectives – Don’t Leave Home Without Them

You must set goals and objectives. For some of us, setting goals and objectives is very, very difficult. What works for me is ‘backwards goals planning.’ I imagine what success looks like to me. I picture myself spending the profits that are resulting from the successful marketing campaign. I see myself clearly. And then I ‘rewind’ events to imagine the step-by-step specifics that went into producing the end results. I imagine the interconnected strategies that led to the success. Upon crystallizing these images, activities and events, I jot them down. And that forms the short term and long term objectives for my successful photography marketing campaigns. I ‘set the bar’ by imagining success and all of its benefits. The objectives and the action steps get me to the goal of success. Although the goals are the results of imagination, they are set in concrete. They are meaningful, specific and measurable. They help me to keep my eye on the ball at all times.

4. Identify the Competition – You’re Right, They Are Out to Get You

Is your competition a series of small local photographers, or is it a group of large national photography companies with ample resources? Or, are the services of your photography business so unique that the resistance is really a lack of awareness? Either way, learn about and understand the competitive landscape. You must know who they are. And you must know where they are. It will enable you to better position and target your message.

5. Pricing – Show Me the Money

If your research has determined your specific photography service(s); has targeted your audience; has imagined goals and objectives; and has identified and located the competition, the pricing issues are really already answered. Your specified photography niche charges a specified range of prices. Do your research and find out what the prices are. (How? Call other photography business and ask, how much?). Your targeted audience has a ‘public record’ of the prices they are currently paying for your specified photography niche. You can calculate the costs of reaching your goals and objectives and the break-even points. And, your competition eagerly tells you and the rest of the world what prices they charge their customers. With those numbers, you calculate the prices you should charge. Remember, your are a successful marketing photographer – you are in this to make a profit.

6. Establish a Marketing Budget – And Then Be a Cheapskate

Marketing expenses can add up quickly, so set aside a specific dollar amount per month or per quarter. Evaluate your marketing decisions such as advertising in the yellow pages or hiring sales representatives based on the amount of business that a particular initiative generates. Track each initiative and keep what works. Unless, of course, you have no money for a ‘marketing budget.’ No problem. You then practice ‘guerrilla marketing’ strategies. Guerrilla marketing was first introduced to me by the father of Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Levinson. He and Seth Godin, in their book, “The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook,” wrote the following article: “The guerrilla is a cheapskate. She knows that every dollar allocated to marketing is essential, and she doesn’t plan to waste a penny. But she’s not foolish. When necessary, she hires the best designers, media planners, and experts in the business – she realizes that the best is often the cheapest in the end. Smart guerrilla marketers use every technique available to gain a foothold in the consumer’s mind. With guerrilla marketing, the focus changes from the volume of advertising to the impact of the message. The guerrilla would rather reach ten people with a message that works than 1,000 with one that doesn’t. The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything – the product, the delivery, the marketing – around that benefit. The guerrilla understands positioning. She knows that challenging the market leader on his turf is foolish – an invitation to disaster. Instead, the guerrilla maneuvers around the leader, repositioning him to her advantage. Every self-respecting guerrilla can recite the position of her product or service in on or two sentences. Most of all, the guerrilla is committed. She understands that marketing doesn’t work overnight. By setting a goal and sticking to it, the guerrilla has an easier time of dealing with the inevitable setbacks that occur. The guerrilla knows that path to marketing success is filled with failed marketers who gave up just a little too soon.” Jay Levinson and Seth Godin are authors of “The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook.” I personally have never found a marketing tool that I have used more successfully over the years than this specific book. It literally cut my fear of my competitors to zero!

7. Look at Channels of Distribution – Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo

The planning is over; it's time to identify marketing tactics. Brainstorm a range of ideas to reach your target market with your value message. Ask your friends, family and co-workers. Be creative and don't censor wild ideas. Pick at least 5 activities that you feel you can execute within your budget.

8. Set Specific Action Steps – Put the Left Foot in Front of the Right Foot – One Step At a Time Every tactical idea comes with its own set of action steps/road map. For example, if you want to mail literature, you need to write (or outsource) the copy, design the mailing, print the literature, and create a mailing list. Take the time to list the details that will get you to your desired end goal.

9. Set Timing for Each Step – A One and a Two

Listing action steps is not enough -- you must establish a timetable for each step. Be realistic so that you do not set unreasonable expectations, thereby creating frustration for yourself. At the same time, be careful not to set goals so far out in the future that there is no sense of urgency for you to take action.

10. Get Accountability – Who’s Your Daddy? – You Are!

The best laid marketing plans fail when they end up in your bottom drawer, never to be seen again. Therefore, it is CRITICAL to hold yourself accountable for taking charge and executing your plan. Make your marketing plan bite-size (don’t super-size it). The more that you believe in your ability to establish set ideas and goals, the less self doubt you will have in the long run. Creating and sticking to a marketing plan is the best way to keep you and your photography business focused, and on track for success. Writing the plan is the easy part, sticking to it tends to be more difficult for most people, especially photographers. To truly be successful is not very difficult, at all. We must be true to ourselves. One of the things that success demands is that we honestly face and confront the contradictions within ourselves that actively prevent us from being who we say we want to be and achieving the success that we claim we want. Keep it real. You will be glad you did. Why Me? – Why You Need A Marketing Plan A marketing plan is very important. And, you need one.

Very few businesses have an accounting plan, a manufacturing plan, or a business plan, so why focus on a marketing plan? Most aspects of your photography business is quantifiable (can be measured easily). Marketing isn’t. It will be difficult to predict how your ad will pull, how many people will respond to your sale, or what sort of word-of-mouth you will be able to generate.

Many photographers deal with this uncertainty by ignoring it. They plod blindly along, investing money in marketing when business is good, cutting back when sales go down. When an advertising campaign doesn’t work immediately, they kill it quickly. When it works well, they get tired of it and move on to something new.

The successful marketing photographer understands that a marketing plan is the primary key to success. The overwhelming value of a marketing plan is that it will allow you to see your ultimate goal with clarity, making minor setbacks and failures along the way unimportant. Just as important, a marketing plan helps you to communicate your vision.

When completed, the successful marketing photographer’s marketing plan will outline the critical and the specific step-by-step actions necessary to achieve marketing success:

• Benefits to customers

• Positioning in the marketplace – what type of photography niche they are in

• Target market – who they are and where they are and why they buy

• Marketing budget

• Marketing tools

• Marketing timelines

What Type of Photography Business Are You In? Follow these steps:

• Ask yourself what type of photography are you marketing? Be as specific as possible.

• List the ‘features’ that your photography will offer that differ from your competition.

• List the benefits to photography customers. How will you make their life better? Keep in mind, list ‘benefits,’ not ‘features.’

• Segment and pinpoint your target market even further. Ask, exactly who wants and needs your photography services? Everyone - is not the answer. Keep it real. Very, very few photography businesses appeal to everyone.

Identify exactly who wants your photography services the most. Talk about their age, income, weight, family size, profession, race, musical taste, height, taste in cars, television shows they watch, magazines and books they read.

Positioning – Fighting and Winning the Battle for Your Customer’s Mind

The following is taken directly from one of the best resources on marketing in the entire world, “The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook,” by Jay Levinson and Seth Godin:

Understanding Positioning

Before you go any further, take a minute to understand how the competition affects your ability to offer your benefit to your target market. One of the best marketing books of the 1980s was “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,” by Trout & Reis (published by Warner Books). This book is a must-read for every guerrilla.

With so many products on the market (and thousands more being introduced every year) and the countless advertisements that promote them, consumers have become virtually immune to traditional marketing tactics. They just don’t have enough room in their brains to store every piece of information about every product. Instead, they either categorize a product or ignore it.

The concept behind positioning is simple: Find a hole and fill it. People pick one or two attributes to associate with a product, then file that information away. When they need those attributes, the product comes to mind.

Here’s an example: If you could rent any care made, what car would you choose to pick up an important visiting executive at the airport? Most people would say a Mercedes, a Cadillac, possibly a Lexus. Why? Because those products have been positioned as expensive, impressive executive sedans. While they also go fast, hold an entire family, and offer safety, first and foremost they’ve been positioned as status cars. The “status” position has been filled by these cars. If you decide to market a product that competes with these cares, you’re going to have to throw one of them out of the prospect’s mind. You may find that it’s easier to invent your own position than fight an industry leader for his spot.

What car would you use to drive a carpool of six kids to nursery school? Most yuppie parents would instantly pick a Volvo. While it’s a safe car, there’s nothing that specifically makes it a parent’s car except for the advertising done to position it. The brilliance behind Volvo’s position campaign is that they repositioned a fairly boring Swedish car into the darling of well-heeled parents. Without changing one thing about the car, Volvo was able to find a ‘hole’ in the market – safe cars for families – and fill it with their own product.

7-Up used a guerrilla marketing technique to outposition Coke. While Coke’s marketing budget was many times larger, 7-Up was able to turn their bigness against them. How? By calling themselves the UnCola, they told consumers “We’re not Coke.” For those who want to be different, 7-Up provided an easy way to stand out from the crowd. The more Coke advertised, the more they helped 7-Up. 7-Up has never challenged Coke as the market leader in the overall soft drink market, but by inventing their own market (soft drinks that are not Coke) they became a market leader in a smaller, but still profitable realm.

The single biggest reason that guerrillas fail is that they’re unable to find a niche. They open a dry cleaner, or a gardening service, or a hairdresser that is not positioned any differently than heir competitors. If you’re just like the other guy but the other guy got there first, you got quite a challenge on your hands.

Can I give you a resource that will make you take consistent action with a successful marketing plan for your business? Would you like a 24 page “Marketing Plan Workbook?” This book contains a detailed outline of all the marketing activities you need to successfully attract more customers. click here....

Marketing Planning Leads to the Right Positioning

Just do it.

Got Milk?

Obey your thirst.

Wanna get away?

Fly the friendly skies.

The other white meat.

We love to see you smile.

You deserve a break today.

So clear, you can hear a pin drop.

Get it?

Positioning must be considered and included in completing your marketing plan. Others have been extremely successful following the steps. You will be also if you make and follow your marketing plan. Find your niche. Fill it. If you can’t find a niche, don’t expect customers to find you, unless you have enough money to bring them in the door in head-to-head competition with your entrenched competition. The successful marketing photographer must have a marketing plan.

Keep in mind that: Your marketing plan must exist Your marketing plan does not have to be set in stone You must follow your marketing plan - change it if it is not working for you - but, follow your plan Marketing is a process. It never ends. You are responsible for the success of your marketing plan Marketing plans must also have a budget

When structuring your budget, strive for free, low-cost and cost-effective Having a marketing plan and following the plan is mandatory.

Make the plans and always remember that a great marketing plan recognizes that marketing is a process - it has a beginning and it has a middle. Marketing has no end.