During tough economic times, it’s easy to get discouraged by poor sales. Below is the eighth of ten specific things you can do starting today that will give your business the boost it needs to survive:

Click here if you missed part 1 , part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, or part 7

Trade photography for services you need

Of all the services used by small businesses, good photography is the easiest to ignore – and most needed.

Every small business you walk into today needs a good photographer for their own marketing, advertising, business cards, etc. Does every local business you frequent have one of your cards? Do they know you are willing to take your services out in trade?

For example, offer to take photographs for your lawn service in exchange for free lawn care. Trading out services was common during the depression – it will be popular again. Make sure you are the first photographer they talk to.

The sales manager for Photovision stopped by to make sure we were stocking their calibration targets in our showroom. We like the 24″ digital target, and always recommend them to pro photographers.

However, recently we took the time to watch Ed Pierce’s free Instructional DVD that comes with every calibration target. In short, we were amazed. The information on the DVD is worth more than the price of the calibration target – it’s like getting a private training class from Ed for free!

From the DVD you learn – step-by-step – how to insure that you have consistent color and density on every photograph, regardless of camera, lighting conditions, or type of photography.

You can order any of Photovision’s targets online here http://www.photovisionvideo.com/ or you can purchase the popular 24″ target with instructional DVD from our lab. Just call Heidi or Dana at 888-858-8084 and ask them to include one with your next order.

I read a great article recently about the benefits of WOM – word of mouth marketing. Almost every photographer will tell you their best marketing bang comes from satisfied customers who tell their friends.

The article broke down what it is exactly about WOM that makes it so powerful, and how you can use this knowledge to your advantage.

First, it said that WOM “works” because it comes from a trusted source. The source could be a friend or family member, but it is most often an influencer. For example, if you want to sell senior photos, hire the most popular boy and girl in high school to promote your studio. If you want to sell business portraits, shoot the president or the best salesperson in the company.

Imagine tomorrow morning on Oprah’s show she said you were her personal photographer? Your phone would be ringing off the hook before the show was over. Find the influencers in your community, make them your customers, and your WOM marketing will be explosive.

Second, the article said that WOM works best when it delivers a product that solves a problem, not because it is “cool” or “hip” or “trendy”. Here’s an example: the next time you offer a baby photo special, instead of focusing your marketing on package prices or the number of poses, focus on conveniences like free parking up close, day care for the other kids during the shoot, or sessions completed in a half-hour or less.

If you can make it easy for a mom to get her child photographed AND the photos look great AND the price is fair, you’ll not only have a customer for life, you’ll have an influencer that will push your WOM marketing to a whole new level.

During tough economic times, it’s easy to get discouraged by poor sales. Below is the seventh of ten specific things you can do starting today that will give your business the boost it needs to survive:

Click here if you missed part 1 , part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 or part 6

Take advantage of viral marketing

Viral marketing is the new online term for word of mouth. A unique product or service is “discovered” online, people write and talk about it, and some call to place an order. Multiply this by a hundred or a thousand, and viral marketing can be the most cost-effective marketing you can accomplish.

Two good examples of viral marketing in the photographic industry are Trash the Dress and Urban Grunge senior portraits. Because of the Internet, thousands of people saw examples of these new styles of photography, resulting in new products that lead to increased sales.

How can you use viral marketing?

• Create your own buzz. Recently I learned about a photographer who was able to get the Main Street in their home town closed off so it could be used as a backdrop for the high school cheerleader’s photo shoot. The entire community started talking and got involved: police, fire, and downtown businesses. I read about another photographer who took photos of Iraqi soldiers, printed them as life-sized cardboard cutouts, and gave them away to the soldier’s children. The local newspaper found out about it, and the story (and photos) appeared nationwide.
• Find a parade and get in front of it. We’ve all met part-time photographers who volunteer to take publicity shots for the local theatre group or sports team for free. If these are opportunities for viral marketing, volunteer for them yourself. A local group will always chose a talented professional photographer like you. You’re not giving your work away for free if you trade it for marketing that creates a “buzz” and is guaranteed to be seen by potential customers.
• Let your passion lead you. If you have a passion on a subject, figure out how to tie it to your business. For example, if you love animals, offer to photograph abandoned pets for your local animal shelter. Then take portrait-quality photographs of the animals for use online. Let the shelter sell the limited edition prints as a fundraiser. Not only will your work be seen by potential customers, but a portion of it can be written off as a charitable contribution.
• Watch for new trends. Even if you aren’t ready to invent the latest trend in photography, you can still attach yourself to the latest trends offered by photographers in larger metro markets. This means reading online blogs, subscribing to photography magazines, and watching for new trends. When a new trend comes along, don’t wait to see if it works for somebody else before you’re willing to try it. Here’s a tip: if you can take a class on a new technique, chances are that your competitors started offering it last year. The buzz is over.

It is not enough to hold an event that has viral marketing potential. You need to publicize before and after the event, attach your name to it, and encourage others to talk about it. Even then, not every viral marketing strategy will be successful. But consider this: one great viral marketing idea can make your reputation as a photographer for years to come.

Karen Ohngren at Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article entitled, “Cheap ways to motivate your team.” She interviews several small business owners and professionals who have studied the most effective ways to motivate employees. The article argues that recognition of a job well done is usually a more powerful motivator than a bigger paycheck.

How can this work for you?

If you’ve got a graphics artist or retoucher who is worth more than you can afford to pay them, consider giving them signature credit on a photo album or on sample artwork shown at your studio or on your website. If you have a receptionist or bookkeeper who needs recognition, let them manage an important client. It will show that you (the boss) trust them and value the contribution they make to your business.

During tough economic times, it’s easy to get discouraged by poor sales. Below is the sixth of ten specific things you can do starting today that will give your business the boost it needs to survive:

Click here if you missed part 1 , part 2, part 3, part 4 or part 5

Free up time for marketing by outsourcing. When sales are down, it is tempting to cut expenses by letting people go, then taking over their jobs. It’s the old “I can save money if I do it myself!” mentality.

However, working “at” your business instead of “on” your business is an easy way to kill your business.

Every minute you do not spend shooting or selling should be spent marketing your studio: building your e-mail list, e-mail newsletters, press releases, etc.

If you need to lay off staff, hire outside experts to do the same work on a per-job basis. From album design to retouching to bookkeeping, virtually every service you offer can be outsourced on a per-job basis (you can even offer it back to your old staff on a contract basis!).

For example, you could shoot a wedding, pick your favorite images, and send them to JD. We can retouch and color correct the images, create a custom album layout, send you the album page proofs, make any final changes, and drop-ship the completed album to your customer. The lab cost will be more than offset by the decrease in time and labor expenses.

Then, once you’ve freed up your time, get back to marketing.

Slideroll is a photo slideshow maker that you can use to create slide shows with your photos. It lets you publish your slideshows on the internet, put them on your website, MySpace or YouTube, or e-mail them to clients. Click here to check out the Slideshow Creator demo. It’s kind of fun.

Think of all those Ken Burns documentaries he does for PBS. Yeah, it looks just like that.

What I like is that with Slideroll Videomaker, you can turn your slideshows into flash videos that you can easily post on your website. What a great way to add some visual interest to an old website for a minimal expense.

Did I mention it was free? I haven’t figured out is how they offer this kind of stuff for free yet, but it’s pretty cool that someone does.

Wall groupings can be as profitable as large prints

As families begin to downsize into smaller homes or apartments, you may hear a new objection when selling large canvas wraps: “I love that image, but I don’t have anywhere to hang it.” Fortunately, with a little advanced planning you can offer your customers a modern alternative that looks great in any size room, and that you can retail for almost the same amount as one large print.

The trick is to visualize an image as a banner. Banners are the horizontal advertising images at the top of many web sites. To make them, web designers slice a 7:1 horizontal strip out of a larger 4:5 or 5:7 ratio image (see red box in the example). You can use this same idea to easily create a series of 3 or more images from a single one.

In this example, I started with a 4×5 ratio landscape image in ROES, selected an 8×10” portrait canvas wrap from the Gallery Wraps Prints catalog, dropped in the image, and zoomed in until their was enough image remaining on both sides to fill a left and right 8×10” print.

After ordering the center image, I selected the 8×10” canvas wrap again, dropped in the same image, and repeated the process for the left and right side prints. By playing with the zoom, I made sure that the “wrap” on the center image did not include the boat on the left. The canvas wrap crop lines in ROES made it easy, and the entire process took me less than 5 minutes.

Here’s a tip: if you are setting up a shot with a great background, use a tripod, have the subjects step out of the frame and shoot the background again, or you can slightly rotate your camera and shoot to the left and right. Then you have even more room to adjust the images. Just keep the zoom level the same in ROES so that the prints match.

Obviously, not all images can be used this way. For example, you should never cut the subject or a group of people in half using this technique. In addition, you need enough pixels in the original image to let you zoom while maintaining image quality.

However, offering an alternative to a large canvas wrap print can be the perfect solution to the objection, “I don’t have anywhere to hang it.” With a wall grouping, now they will.

If you have employees, you are not only a photographer and a small business person but a manager of people. Unfortunately, all the photographic classes you took didn’t prepare you to motivate them. Motivated employees mean more productive employees, and that means lower labor costs. So here’s a suggestion I’ve found that is guaranteed to work every time.

I call it “catch your employees doing something right.” The concept is simple: instead of waiting until an employee makes a mistake and correcting them, give them specific praise when they do something right. It is important that the praise be specific so that the employee will know exactly what they did that pleased you, and that they should do again in the future.

Let me give you an example.

I have two equally-skilled employees that I train on Monday to lay out an album. My conversation for the week with the first employee goes like this:

Monday – Training
Tuesday – “Great job laying out the pictures. All the edges are even just like I asked.”
Wednesday – “I’m impressed by your selection of consistent borders. It is exactly the way I would have done it.”
Thursday – “This album isn’t up to our standards. The edges are not even and the borders are not consistent. I’ll stay late and finish it myself.”
Friday – “The edges and borders are perfect. Keep up this level of work, and pretty soon I won’t need to review your work anymore.”

My conversation for the week with the second employee goes like this:

Monday – Training
Tuesday – Nothing
Wednesday – Nothing
Thursday – “Your edges and borders are all wrong. Do it again like I showed you Monday.”
Friday – Nothing

I can absolutely guarantee you that by the following Monday, the first employee will be more motivated and more productive. They may even offer to stay late and fix Thursday’s album on their own time. Wouldn’t you?

The interesting thing about this technique is that you can almost make it a game. Walk into your studio tomorrow and announce to everyone that you are implementing a new policy of “catching each other doing something right,” and that not only will you be doing it, but that everyone else should do it too. You’ll see some smiles, occasionally some goofy grins, but by the end of the day you’ll have more motivated employees.

During tough economic times, it’s easy to get discouraged by poor sales. Below is the fifth of ten specific things you can do starting today that will give your business the boost it needs to survive:

Click here if you missed part 1 , part 2, part 3 or part 4

Networking is the art of considering every person you meet a potential customer. It is a powerful tool used by every successful salesperson.

Consider this: almost every person you meet today will hire a wedding photographer, a senior photographer, a family photographer or a portrait photographer at some point in their lives. Why shouldn’t that photographer be you?

Only by putting your business card in their hands can you be sure a potential customer will think of you first.

Unfortunately, networking has a bad reputation. Most people think of the brother-in-law who corners them at every family gathering and tries to sell them life insurance. But professionals know that networking is based around always having a business card in your pocket, and giving one to every new person you meet. If they are interested, they will ask you about photography…no sales are required.

Where should you go to network? Imagine where your perfect customer likes to be. People who have the money to spend on portraiture in a bad economy aren’t sitting around the house. Instead you‘ve got to be seen and noticed in places your customers will be: local charity events, grand openings, or live theatre for example.

Speaking of getting noticed, if you haven’t updated your wardrobe lately, now is the time to invest in a stylish jacket, haircut, glasses, etc. If you’re not sure what to wear, clip out a few photos of photographers from a magazine you like and take them to the store as a guide.

When you look great, you’ll feel great, and people will remember you. When it comes to networking, that’s all you need.