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.

Tags: marketing in tough times

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.