How do we ever truly stand out from our competition?

In his program “Photozagging“, Kirk Russell makes the statement, ““When everyone else is zigging, zag.” What he’s really talking about is standing out – differentiating yourself – from your competition. While Kirk offers concrete examples to help photographers differentiate themselves, it also helps to have a way to think about differentiation as a process. This gives you the tools you need to stand out – not just next month or next year – but in five or ten years.

Youngme Moon, a professor at Harvard Business School, thinks about this problem a lot, and has even written a book about it. After looking at dozens of businesses, she has come up with 3 kinds of differentiation that makes any business stand out from their competition.

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To be effective, your business needs a consistent marketing presence both offline and online. It needs to use print and digital marketing tools. It needs both advertising (paid) and publicity (free).

It’s the marketing mix that gets and keeps your company message in front of your target audience. It works to establish your brand.

So what are the 9 pieces?

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I love Kodak’s Endura metallic paper. With the right image, it creates the look of a back lit print that takes regular and HD photography to a new art form.

I love the fact that it’s only been around for the last three years (primarily on the east and west coasts) so it still has a great “wow” factor.

I love the fact that you can order a standard-sized enlargement and have it mounted (up to 40″), or you can make a custom-sized panorama metallic print (how about 30×72″!) using the drop box catalog in ROES, frame it, and offer it to your clients as a wall portrait that will take their breath away.

We see metallic prints every day at the lab, and have found that images with metallic or satin backgrounds, images with metallic or glossy objects, images with bright primary colors and high contrast images bring out the best in this paper.

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I’ve been thinking about pricing wedding photography lately.

The gurus say that your pricing should be derived from your costs: after factoring in fixed and variable costs, your salary and profit margin, you should be able to calculate what to charge for every print.

On paper, they are right. If you can’t make your margin, you need to either raise your prices, cut your costs or change professions.

But in a recent article in the PPA Magazine entitled “The Psychology of Pricing in a Down Economy“, Kalen Henderson writes that her recipe for pricing was different. She said she picked her wedding package prices by asking potential clients what they expected to pay. This isn’t the same as cutting your prices. You still have to make money. The trick is to build packages that are profitable at price points potential customers are willing to pay.

A little time spent Googling “wedding photographer prices” and filtering results less than a year old gives some interesting insights:

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"JDLAB.COM"

QR codes are an easy (and fun) way to get smartphone users to access a page on your website or to collect emails for your marketing newsletters. Here’s what you need to know about QR codes, and how they can help market your studio.

What Are QR Codes?

QR stands for “quick response”. They are a special type of square bar code made of squares of black on a white background. In the same way that a regular barcode stores numbers, a QR code is designed to store text like a website address or an email address. In order to read a QR code, you need a smartphone (like an Android or an iPhone) and free software downloaded to the phone. You take a photo of the printed QR code with the smartphone, the software reads the code, and the phone’s browser is directed to a website or email address.

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If you haven’t noticed yet, next to every Google search result is a little button with a “+1″ inside.

This is a preview of a new social networking service called Google+ that started in July. It is designed to compete with the Facebook and the ”Like” button. The folks at Google don’t want to miss out on the social networking bandwagon the way Microsoft was slow to embrace the Internet and web browsers (remember when Netscape Navigator was king?).

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Would you walk up to someone at a party and say that your latest product is now available for $149.95 for a limited time only? Not only would that person walk away, but so would everyone else who overheard you.

In the same way, writing how much your product or services cost in a Facebook post isn’t a good idea. Facebook isn’t about talking at someone, it is best when it builds a conversation with others.

So instead of leading with an offer, try sharing about photography, then ask people to provide feedback and participate. This bridges the distance between you and your clients, and gets them involved with your brand. Ultimately new-found fans will promote you without being asked because they feel included. The fact that you asked and listened goes a long way.

Here are some examples of not-ok, better and best Facebook posts:

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The client is across the table, the proofs have been looked over, and it’s time to discover whether you’ll be making a $1,000 dollar or a $2,000 dollar sale.

No matter how good (or bad) you are at closing, here are 3 timeless tactics every salesperson knows. Keep them in mind and you’ll have bigger average sales.

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I’m a lousy photographer. I buy a new camera every couple of years, I read books about lighting and the “rule of thirds”, and I constantly look for examples of great photography. Heck, I even paid retail for Photoshop. Yet most of my images still look like tourist snapshots.

I’m just like some of your customers.

So how do you get us in your studio? How about teaching us to be better photographers?

You don’t have to give away all your secrets, or create competitors. But you can teach folks like me a few basics so we will take better snaps on vacation. And while you’re at it, create some buzz for your studio.

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To maximize Facebook marketing, businesses should target the friends of their fans, according to a recent study by Comscore and Facebook.

The free white paper, “The Power of Like” explores the relationship between a business, its fans, and the fan’s friends. By focusing on friends, a business can achieve a much larger circle of views than by focusing on fans alone.

For example, Starbucks has 23 million fans, yet Comscore found that those fans had 670 million friends. By focusing on friends of fans, Starbucks was able to multiply the reach of their message by 30 times.

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