Kirk Russell has created a new studio promotion designed to increase sales, create a database of potential new clients, and increase client awareness of your studio.

According to Kirk, “This is a tested cross-promotion that works. It produced over $10,000 in sales for the photographer, a list of potential clients to market to well into the first quarter of the year, and the other business said it was the most effective campaign they had ever done.”

Download the promotion here.

Included are the instructions, example artwork, forms and templates you’ll need to implement the promotion.

This promotion is available for free for JD clients. You must create a (free) 3Lenses account to verify you are a current customer in order to download the promotion.

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’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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Your competition is Disneyworld, a new couch, or a swimming pool.

That’s because in most folk’s minds, professional photography isn’t a need – it is a luxury. After the rent is paid and there’s food in the fridge, if someone has extra money left over, they tend spend it on things that make them happy.

While “happiness” is impossible to define, marketers have figured out that consumers try to achieve happiness by spending money on luxuries that offer status or experiences. Athletes promote $200 tennis shoes and celebrities promote stylish clothing lines so you can look like them. Vacation destinations show smiling families doing exciting things together.

So if professional photography is a luxury good, successful marketing should promise your customer status, a great experience, or both.

How do you do that?

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Kirk Russell has released a new marketing service called “PhotoZagging” that helps pro photographers energize their business and marketing plan.

According to Kirk, the PhotoZagging program offers specific branding, marketing and pricing tools that will set the pro apart from their competition. “It helps increase awareness for a photography business, makes it clear as to why people should pay premium prices, and makes them more attractive,” he says.

Or as Kirk puts it, “When everyone else is zigging, zag.”

JD Photo Imaging partnered with Kirk Russell because we believed that marketing was the #1 issue facing the professional photographer today. Kirk is an expert at marketing a pro photo studio, and we both agree on what it takes for a pro photographer to compete in today’s marketplace.

If your studio sales aren’t where you want them to be, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the PhotoZagging program.

Your customer has just spent several hundreds of dollars with you and the photos are delivered. You have their email and home address on your mailing lists. So how do you make sure they will come back to your studio in the next year, or better yet, many times over the next decade?

Send them a hand-written card (with hand written addresses, message, and a first-class stamp on the envelope).

As consumers, we’ve become desensitized to the clutter of hundreds of advertising messages each day. Unless you’re a brilliant marketer, you only have a small chance to design an ad that most folks will notice.

In this age of email, junk mail and Facebook, hand-written cards cut through the clutter instantly.

Think about it. When was the last time you threw away a hand-written envelope addressed to you without opening it?

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I know a professional photographer who has a side business many photographers ignore. She does professional head shots. Now I’m sure you are thinking “I can do head shots too,” but are you getting any business?

Here’s how she does it.

The client pre-sets an appointment with the studio, comes in, has 3-4 shots taken, and picks the best pose off a monitor with the photographer. Within a few minutes, an assistant color corrects and emails the image to the client. The entire process takes less than half an hour, and costs $50 cash, check or Visa for each image selected. No prints. No billing.

Could this work for you? Every professional needs a current head shot, but most don’t have one.

Why not?
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“We Have Great Customer Service.” If your business is like mine, you not only strive for great customer service, but you believe it is one of the reasons customers should want to do business with you.

The problem is, “great customer service” is what our customers should say about us, not what we say about ourselves. Once we say it, bragging about customer service loses its meaning. That’s bad.

Here are two ways to promote your customer service without saying it:

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