How important are online reviews? According to online marketing research, 6 out of 10 potential clients look for online reviews of your studio before contacting you, and 8 out of 10 consider those reviews critical to making a purchase.

This means that even if potential clients know your name, 48% won’t consider contacting you without reading positive online reviews.

While that number should scare you, the solution is easier than you realize. Here’s how: (more…)

We’ve been talking about lagniappes for years, so I was surprised to read a new book by Stan Phelps (What’s your Purple Goldfish?) about them. Here’s what Drew McLellan writes in the forward:

True lagniappe can’t be faked or forced. We banter the word authentic around too much these days. But for lagniappe to work, it must be just that — real and offered without expectation of anything in return.

In other words – you do it because you want to, not because it’s in a marketing plan document or because your ROI calculator told you it would generate a 42.36% return. (And no…there’s no such thing as an ROI calculator!)

This is absolutely true.

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Although we constantly talk about social media marketing (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) , it pays to remember that their are many other marketing tools available for your studio. One of the most powerful is the cross-promotion.

Cross-promotions are low-cost techniques for getting your name in front of potential customers by promoting with other businesses. The classic example is putting a stack of gift certificates for bridal photography in a bridal store.

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If you’re looking to connect with potential clients under 40, your marketing channels are more limited than ever before.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, asked people where they get their local information. They then divided the participants based on both age and medium (newspaper, Internet, TV, etc).

The results indicate that for local businesses like photographic studios, consumers 18-39 depend on the Internet and word of mouth to choose where to spend their money.

While these results are not surprising, it is further proof that TV, radio, yellow page and newspaper advertising has become less useful for reaching your potential clients.

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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“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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Handling online customer complaints immediately pays off.

That was the conclusion of a recent Harris Survey, which found that responding to customer complaints posted online was more beneficial than ignoring them.

When customer complaints were immediately answered online and dealt with, here’s what the original complainer did:

• 33% turned around and posted a positive review
• 34% deleted their original negative review

For years, marketing companies have reported that up to 80% of potential customers research your business online before calling. This means that if someone complains about you online, potential customers will likely read it before they call. Unanswered online complaints will result in fewer customer calls, and will impact your bottom line.

How do you know if past customers are talking about you online? The easy solution is to set up a Google Alert to notify you if your studio name is mentioned on the Internet. Have the alert come to your inbox, and act on it immediately. Create several alerts for different variations on your name and your studio name.

Bottom line: respond to online complaints immediately. If you do, you have a 67% chance of turning them around. If you do nothing, you will have a negative comment online about your studio that will live forever.

If you deal with customers, eventually you will have an unhappy one. You go through the normal steps common to all customer service issues: you listen without interruption, you empathize, you apologize, you take responsibility, and then you agree on a solution.

But after your customer leaves, you still have an unhappy customer.

The best customer service folks add another step to this formula that makes the difference between good and great service. They imagine the inconvenience the problem has caused the customer, and make sure that inconvenience is solved too.

Here’s an example.

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Why is branding important? When folks don’t know anything else about two similar products (like two 5×7″ prints) they will use price to decide between them. Without branding, the lowest price wins.

If you don’t want to compete on price, you have to compete on brand.

A brand is more than just a logo. BNET defines branding as:

“a means of distinguishing one firm’s products or services from another’s and of creating and maintaining an image that encourages confidence in the quality and performance of that firm’s products or services.”

Jon Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing offers an even simpler definition:

“Branding is the art of becoming knowable, likeable and trustable.”

It makes sense. All of us would rather do business with someone we know, like and trust – even if it costs a few dollars more. That is how you want your customers to feel too.

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Customers who are referred to your business by their friends – word of mouth advertising – are more profitable over time than customers who found you through traditional marketing.

Intuitively, it makes sense: word-of-mouth is simple, virtually free, and it brings you great clients.

Now researchers have taken the time to study the monetary value of word of mouth (WOM) . They found that the average value of a referred customer is at least 16% higher than that of a non-referred customer.

Which raises the question, should you pay your customers (or your employees!) to refer you to their friends?

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