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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Kodak has a new service on their website that matches up consumers with professional photographers.

If you are a JD customer, I’d encourage you to sign up for this service. The hot link from the Kodak website to your website’s home page will push you higher on Google, and you might get a new client too!

I’ve never liked banks. I keep my savings in a credit union. But on the advice of a friend, about a year ago I opened a free checking account at the local bank. I was waited on by Bob, a helpful young man with an easy smile who asked about my business, where I lived, and told me a bit about his young family. By the end of the meeting, I not only had a new checking account, but a new friend in the banking business.

Every few months I’d get a quick email from Bob, asking about business, and asking if there was anything I needed. No pressure – just a reminder I still had a friendly banker.

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Google gives “credit” for high quality one-way links to your website from other websites, especially ones that have photo content. Here are 4 ways you can take advantage of this to help market your studio.

1. If you are a member of any groups or associations that have an online membership directory, make sure you put a hot link to your website – not just your studio name -  in your membership information so folks can click on it to visit your website.

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It isn’t very pretty, but 50 million folks visit Craigslist.org every month, and chances are that one of them could be a bride looking for a photographer.  Are you advertising on craigslist?

The advantages of advertising on craigslist are: it is free, it only takes a few minutes to post an ad, it has lots of visitors, you can include your best images and you can direct potential customers to your studio with a hot link.

The disadvantages are that on craigslist you have to “re-upload” your ad every 3-4 days, and that the site tends to bring you clients who are price shopping.

If you have a low-cost starter package you use to attract brides, and if you’re good at up-selling potential customers from the starter package, you should consider advertising  on craigslist. If you don’t like to talk to price-shopping brides, or if up-selling isn’t your forte, you won’t want to be on craigslist.

Even if you’re not a wedding photographer, you could still try craigslist.org for holiday portrait sales, or virtually any other kind of marketing.

Here are some tips:

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