8 Killer Marketing & Strategy Tips for Your Photography Business

This is a collection of some of our very best tips for wedding marketing, business strategy and adding more profit to your business.

•  Several years ago we discontinued paper proofs with wedding packages. Since the packages do include digital files, clients don’t need both. This saves us 10-15k annually and at least a couple of trees.

•  We pre-design wedding albums for clients, and this almost always results in additional sales. Plus clients are getting a gorgeous album. Over the course of the year, income from additional albums pages is SIGNIFICANT. It takes extra time, and some clients turn it down, but the investment pays off huge dividends over time once you get a process down.

•  Business Retreat-Each year at the end of our season, we plan a weekend “retreat” to focus on our business. We review the accomplishments of the past year, and set goals for the coming year. It’s so easy to go in a million directions with marketing, new software, classes, new product, the latest gear etc. We look at how each project or undertaking will help us accomplish our goals. Later in the year, we can refer back to our listed goals to help us remember what projects we committed to focus on, and which projects we will hold off on for another year.

• Develop a Client Referral Program-encourage past clients to refer you by offering them an incentive such as a print credit. It’s a win-win.

•  Court relationships with other vendors, and make an effort to be kind to them. You never know where your referrals are going to come from. Vendor relationships are key to the foundation of our marketing.

•  Develop a line of fun & exciting add-on products, and make sure your clients know about them. By speaking with your clients before their session about the products they are interested in, you can produce images specifically for that product, while ensuring a better sale.

• Don’t kill opportunities for additional sales by giving away all the products for free. We learned this after being tired of doing engagement sessions and the typical sale was $0 because the session itself was included with all packages and we gave them the digital negatives. Now that the sessions are a la carte, our average sale is $1,000, and the clients are getting some great products to enjoy their images!

•  Outsource. It’s been the single best way for us to grow our business, by freeing us up to focus on our sales & marketing. There are so many options available, there’s no excuse not to outsource some or all of your business. Outsourcing post production is the main one, but you can also outsource your book keeping, print fulfillment, album printing and so forth.

Do you have a great marketing or business tip that should be part of this list? Add your best tip in the comments below.

Tagged as: album sales, outsourcing post production, paper proofs, photography business, photography marketing, vendor relationships, wedding marketing