If you’re using Facebook, you’ve seen the “Like” button with the thumb-up icon on the right side of your pages. While the “like” feature used to be for wall comments only, it has become the hottest new marketing trend of the summer.

Facebook can now show your business ads to users who are both in your target market AND are already friends of your business. Or, you can put the FB “Like” icon right on your studio website. When someone clicks it, a new comment appears on their News Feed with a link back to your website or FB page.

Think of it as word-of-mouth combined with social networking. Given the size and growth of Facebook, this one new feature alone could boost your entire marketing effort.

Learn how to implement the “like” button for Facebook. If you’re not using Facebook, this may be a good reason to get started.

Learn how to get the attention of more people and motivate them to contact you NOW!

JDPI will sponsor a series of five free Webinars each Monday at 1pm EST beginning August 9th and running through September 6th. These Webinars will be taught by Kirk Russell from 3Lenses.com, a professional photographer and expert in studio marketing.

If you’re looking for answers and specifics you’ll want to attend one or more of these Webinars:

• Seniors - August 9th
• Sports - August 16th
• Dance and Pre-School - August 23rd
• Families - August 30th
• Weddings - September 6th

Click on any of the dates above to reserve your seat today.

Each 60-minute webinar will teach you the nuts and bolts techniques that work, like how to segment the market with pricing, products, and session types to appeal to a broader group of clients. You’ll learn what you can do right now to get attention and motivate people to have a portrait made. Kirk will also examine some success stories, and even efforts that were not as successful, and WHY.

The goal here is to have you leave with solid information for getting your studio on track into the future and learn powerful rules of marketing that will apply to every studio.

What you will learn

• How to use New Marketing to attract the right clients
• What products and services people want TODAY
• How to price and sell products with higher profits.

As Kirk says, “Misery has enough company. Dare to be successful.” If you are ready to turbocharge your marketing efforts, this series of Webinars will work for you.

Kirk Russell, 3Lenses.com

The photographic industry is in the midst of a serious growth crisis. Even before the housing crisis, recession, and market crash, studios were booking fewer appointments, and clients seemed to be more price-sensitive.

Old-school solutions such as advertising more promotions or new flavor-of-the-month fads such as displaying images on boutique, graphic-enhanced web site and brochures, or using pretty delivery boxes won’t attract people who find most of today’s portrait studios outdated, unresponsive, and over-priced.

There is a parallel between today’s photo industry and the current housing market and auto industry. Luckily, we can learn from them and consequently avoid a similar fate.

Here’s the comparisons:

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A decade ago, getting your name and phone number in front of customers was simple. You put one ad in the yellow pages and one in the local newspaper.

Those days are over.

Today, over 80% of your customers will look for you online before they call. In order to make sure they can find you, below is a checklist of places your business needs to be registered so customers can find you online.

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Recently I read two articles about companies and their brands. One is building their brand, while the other seems to be throwing a great brand away.

Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) workers are using Dawn brand dish soap to clean oil off animals on the gulf coast. Dawn responded by creating a huge branding tie-in that resulted in increased sales as well as cash donations of over $400,000 to the cleanup effort.

The National Pork Producers have announced plans to drop the universally known tag-line “the other white meat” that has become synonymous with pork over the last twenty-three years. The VP of marketing was quoted as saying it was great at first, but now “it doesn’t help sales.”

Both these examples made me think of the importance of our brand to our customers. While an “offer” or an advertisement can create sales, a good brand can build your business.

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I was talking to a client the other day about websites. He typed “wedding photographer” in Google, clicked the mouse, and turned to me.

“I want to be at the top of the first page in Google,” he said. “How do I get there?”

Most of us assume that the top spot on Google is the best position for your website, and that everything else is second-best. The reality is that the top spot is rarely the right place for your business: it will cost too much to get there, and like the game “king of the hill” you won’t stay on top for long.

Instead of focusing on the #1 spot, if you can be in the “top 10″ for your selected keywords, you’ll get just as many customers off the Internet, and you’ll save lots of money too.

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Facebook lets you buy ads that show on the right side of a user’s main page in Facebook. They don’t cost much, and are easy to target to specific audiences. For example, you could create an ad that targets only 20-30 year old women in your zip code.

If you’ve considering buying ads on Facebook, you may be interested in a recent study by the Nielsen Group. They looked at ads by 70 different companies and discovered that ads that include social advocacy are 2-4 times more likely to be clicked on, recalled or to lead toward a purchase.

What does this mean to you?

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MyDigitalProductsOnline.com is an “unbranded” website hosted by JD that displays all the press-printed graphic layouts available in ROES. Use it to quickly view all our card styles on a single page:

• Graduations, Weddings, Holidays, Baby Announcements
• Dozens of horizontal and vertical Slimline card styles
• Folding cards with optional sentiments
• Always adding more

Since JD is never mentioned anywhere on the site, you can show the website to your customers at your studio when selecting card styles. You could even call a client and have them pick a card style while you’re talking on the phone!

If you use ROES, bookmark MyDigitalProductsOnline.com and check back often. New card designs are constantly being added.

The challenge of social media (blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc.) is that at first glance it seems like a free and relatively easy way to connect to potential customers, but as Jim Smith at yChange.com explains:

If as a small business you are trying to use social media to get the word out to your customers and prospects about how great your product/service is then you are frankly wasting your time walking down a blind alley. If however, you are using social media to listen to your customer and learn what his/her problem or pain is and what value your business can bring to the table then you are on the right path.

Social media today is for listening. It is not a mike or a megaphone to be used to drown the customer out.

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Robbin Stieff at LunaMetrics wrote an interesting article that lists the 8 Worst SEO Mistakes companies make when they redesign their website.

For photographers and studios, “The Flash Problem” is the worst. Here’s why:

1. Photographers are visually stimulated, so it makes sense they would be drawn to great looking websites based on photography. People who design websites for photographers know this, so they frequently replace keyword-rich sites that Google likes with gorgeous flash-based sites that Google will ignore.
2. Google depends on plain vanilla text inside your website to tell it what your website is about. A Flash website has almost no text on the homepage - it is designed to load and play the Flash “movie”. Learn why adding a description tag or some keywords doesn’t solve the problem.
3. Some flash-based sites only have a single URL — the homepage. When you click on a different page on the site, you are taken to a different part of the Flash movie. These pages are hidden from search engines, users can’t bookmark them, link to them, or share them on Facebook.

How to solve the problem

Create a text-based website, then include a window with Flash inside. This gives you the stunning photography you need, but still allows text on the homepage. That’s what we did on the JDPI homepage.