In the world of digital photography, many people who in the old days of film would have hired a professional photographer are now taking their own photos. This is true for commercial work, weddings & portraits. Pretty much every type of professional photography has been impacted by the digital age, perhaps with the exception of fashion.

And it’s not just the photography either; people are doing their own editing too. With many new computers coming with Photoshop Elements (or an equivalent) pre installed, the demand for our professional services is likely to continue to decline over the coming years.

The forums are full of photographers moaning about people taking their own pictures or getting “uncle Bob” to shoot their wedding. The other common complaint is that even when they do hire a pro, more and more people just seem to want a disk of files and copyright release, so they can do what they want with them.

Some “old school” photographers are resisting supplying files which I think is a “bury your head in the sand” attitude. The issue is not going to go away, in fact it will “get worse” in my opinion. This is a sweeping generalisation of course, there are still a great many people who value our skills and are prepared to pay good money for them.

But as we emerge from this recession one thing seems to be very clear; times have changed. Spending habits have changed permanently because this recession was quite different from any other, in the fact that one of the hardest hit market sectors was banking. In fact many people put the blame for the recent recession squarely on the shoulders of the banks.

Usually in a recession banks make massive profits as the general public & businesses alike, borrow money to get them through tough times. This time around getting a loan was much more difficult, as the banks strived to reduce the amount of money they had out on loan.

So as professional photographers we face a triple attack on our profits:

1. Less demand due to people taking their own pictures
2. Less demand due to those who do want to hire us having financial worries
3. More competition in the market because of the digital “safety net”

So what are you going to do about it?

I have a very simple suggestion for you; innovate. I once read somewhere that one definition of insanity was to keep doing the same things over and over and expecting to get different results. 

Innovation is one of the three foundation keys to being successful in business. Everyone is enticed by the newest, the latest and the greatest. High key photography was the innovation that has kept studios up and down the country busy for the past 5 years or so. Now there is nothing innovative about high key, it has been popular before and no doubt will be again, but high key had one new facet this time around, people couldn’t emulate the same effect at home with their compact cameras.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that low key will probably be “the next big thing”. Again there is nothing new about low key, it’s been done before and is becoming the style choice of a fair few studios. And again it is a style not easily created at home with a point and shoot digital camera.

Apart from your shooting style what else can you be innovative with? Product is a pretty easy one for us to stay ahead of the “Uncle Bob’s” of this world, both in regard to wedding albums and wall portraits. If you are selling something people can’t get from Ikea, acrylic being a typical example, they will want to buy it. There are of course many more examples, and you should also find out what your local competitors are offering so you can be different from them also.

But before you rush off and change your high key samples to something else, and go searching for the latest wedding albums, there is a third type of innovation that is just as important if not more so, innovative marketing.

My suggestion? Stop advertising!

That’s right stop all of your advertising, unless of course you KNOW it is generating good profits, which hardly any of it does. Yellow pages, local newspapers, wedding magazines, directory listings (except the free ones), stop the lot.

 Chances are you’ll not notice much if any of a drop off in business. Most advertising does not work so all you’ll be doing is cutting costs. Now don’t just sit on the money you’ve saved, or spend it on the latest offering from your favourite camera manufacturer, find people to give it to. You want something back in return of course so it is more a payment than a gift.

The philosophy here is to stop paying for advertising and start paying for results.

At the time of writing this article, there is a discussion going on in the wedding photographers group on LinkedIn.com about online directories and are they worth paying for. If you are anything like me, you get contacted by a new wedding directory every week, claiming to be the latest and greatest.

Advertising is about the only industry left on earth that does not offer any form of guarantee and/or risk reversal. A guarantee is where you get your money back if it does not do what it says on the tin, and risk reversal is where you get a free trial or a free sample before you hand over any money. Imagine what a bride and groom would say to you if you didn’t get any decent pictures at their wedding, and your attitude was “sorry but we can’t guarantee what happens on a wedding day”.

Now printed ads such as Yellow Pages or a wedding magazine have a certain amount of cost associated with running an ad, the ink and paper etc, but an online ad costs nothing other than the persons time, and most ads are placed automatically by software scripts so there is no cost at all. So next time you get an email or a phone call, tell them you want a free trial for a month to see how well it works. Be aware that there is nothing stopping the site owner clicking on your ad a few times a day to make it look good.

Of course if it does work you’ll want to buy an ad, but most likely you’ll not even get a single enquiry. One such online directory Guides For Brides, who have free ads running under their paid for listings, contacted me a few days ago claiming their site gets 80,000 unique visitors per month. That is nearly a million visitors per year! Not bad considering less than 250,000 people get married in the UK each year.

I have a free listing with them which had brought 8 visitors to my website this year, and no enquiries. They tried to sell me a £97 ad and then a £47 one, and used the old “your competitors have just renewed their ads so if you don’t mind them getting all the work” line on me.

I asked for a one month free trial of one the paid for ads to see how much difference it would make, but they refused. I asked if they were prepared to guarantee I’d get some return on my investment. You can imagine the response I’m sure, although in fairness they did say they would give me an extra 3 months free if I got no leads from it. They became a bit vague about if I still got nothing after the extra three months.

No guarantee & no risk reversal, so would they like to be paid on results? With 80,000 visitors per month, some of them must be local to me and looking for a photographer surely? So instead of paying £97 for an ad, how about I pay them £97 for every booking I get through them? In this case I’d expect not, because people selling advertising usually have no idea how effective it is; they just know they get a bit of commission every time they sell an ad.

This is what I mean by paying for results. Forget advertising, it’s a lottery at best, and a very expensive lottery in many cases. Decide how much you are prepared to pay to get a client for all the types of photography that you do, and contact people, businesses and organisations who could supply you with potential clients.

For example, if your average profit from a family portrait session is £200, I’d expect you would be quite happy to pay someone £25 for every booking they sent your way, right?

So who can you think of that is already dealing with your potential customers?

Getting traffic to a website for most photographers either involves a great deal of time, a fair amount of money or a combination of the two.

Search engine optimisation can take a greal deal of your time if you do it yourself, and can cost a small fortune if you pay someone to do it for you. This also applies to most other forms of online marketing, they either cost money or take time.

So after all that time, money and effort getting visitors, what are you doing to keep them? Less than 1% of an average websites visitors take any action (either buying something or making an enquiry). Sound familier?

So what can you do to change that? You have 2 options.

Option one is to tinker with your site and test the changes you make to see if they increase or decrease your response rate. You’ll need to wait until you’ve had about 1000 visitors after each change to work out if your averages have improved. How long will it take you to get 1000 visitors to your website?

Option two is to give something away for free in exchange for an email address. Ask yourself which is easier, selling something or giving something away for free? It’s a no brainer, and the results are instant. I’ve had months where over 30% of my website visitors have given me their contact details. Now a 30% response rate is quite exceptional, but getting 10% is very common.

Wouldn’t you like to get the email address of 10% of your websites visitors?

Putting this marketing concept in action can take a little effort up-front. You have to have something to give away (something your visitors will want) & a means to deliver it, and you have to have a system to capture the contact details and deliver them to you.  Amnd once you have those details, what do you do with them?

Before you decide this marketing concept is not for you, there is some good news. I have designed and built a completely automated system to do all this for you. Check it out here

 http://www.photographymarketing.co.uk/autoresponder.htm

What is the most important number in your business?

Here are 10 examples of the type of numbers I mean:

1. Average order value
2. Average cost of acquiring a new client
3. The number of weddings you shoot per year
4. Lifetime value of a client
5. Average ROI (return on investment)
6. Number of visitors to your website
7. Number of people who only take your free print
8. Cost of your cheapest wedding package
9. Cost of your highest wedding package
10. Your enquiry to customer conversion ratio

There are of course many more. The most important number is how much profit you make, but that is not a number you can affect directly. There are 5 ways in which you can increse profits, which in no particular order are:

1. Cut fixed costs
2. Increase prices
3. Cut overheads
4. Get rid of under-performing staff
5. Do more work

And there are many ways to affect the above numbers, such as trying to get your album suppliers to give you a discount to lower your overheads. You could ask your landlord to lower your rent, or get a better deal on your insurance to reduce fixed costs. Send out more direct mail to try to get more business.

Photographers very often try to work on a few numbers all at once, such as trying to cut their marketing costs, trying to increase the average order value,  trying to increase their conversion ratio on enquiries, trying to get their website to rank better on google etc etc. I could go on but I think you get the idea.

The problem with this theory is that humans can only focus their attention on one thing at any one time. And if you half-heartedly try to do lots of things, you very often have little or no impact on the bottom line.

In every business there is one number that is much more important than any other. The actual number will differ from business to business, but if you can find out what yours is, you can start to make a real difference to your bottom line. To help you figure out what yours might be, here’s a few pointers:

If you own a studio and do nothing other than studio portraits, your most important number is likely to be the number of sessions you do. As long as you know your average order value, the lifetime value of a client & your average cost of new client acquisition, you can work out your average profit per session. As long as that shows a net profit, the best way to earn more money is to do more sessions.

I say best because it is not necessarily the easiest. The easiest is always to put prices up, but that will almost always affect your other numbers. Higher prices can mean less orders, a different average order value, a change in client retention ratios etc etc. Shooting more sessions should not affect any of those numbers, as long as you can maintain your service level.

If you are a work from home wedding photographer and do nothing else, your most important number is likely to be average profit per wedding. If you are already doing 50 weddings per year, getting more bookings can be tough. But if you can increase your average profit per wedding by just £100, you can make an extra £5k. If your average order value is £1000 or more, then increasing your package prices by £100 will have little or no impact on your conversion ratio.

If you are an event photographer and do nothing else, your number is likely to be the average order value. You have no substantial control over how many of the people at any given event will buy from you, so the most impact you can have on your business is to try to increase how much each person spends when they do buy from you. Your fixed costs are set (petrol, staff, equipment) and will not change no matter what your sell. Your working costs per unit (prints, mounts, bags) are very low, so anything that you can do to encourage people to buy more than one print will have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. A simple “buy 2 get one free” offer can increase your profits at any given event by up to 70%

If your business is more general and you do different types of work, your “one” number may be harder to pin point, but it will still be there. Once you know what yours is, forget everything else for 3 months and work on improving that number, I promise you’ll love the results.

I was recently at a shoot with 17 other photographers. I thought it would be a great idea while I was there to get some info on how well their businesses had done over the last 12 months. With regard to the wedding market, results were pretty much the same for everyone. They had all suffered a drop off in wedding bookings somewhere between 20 - 40 percent.

When I asked them what they thought the reasons for this were I got the following answers:

The Recession
Too many new photographers entering the market
Less couples getting married
Weekend warriors shooting weddings for £xxx

As they were giving me their reasons I realised that they all blamed someone or something else for the situation. But on further inspection this would not prove to be the case. There are always new people setting themselves up as wedding photographers; always have been, always will be. There have been less people getting married year on year since the early 1970s and there will always be someone prepared to under cut your prices. Which leaves the recession.

Ok, there has been a recession for the past 12 - 15 months which we are now emerging from, and it will take another 12 months or so for people to spend with more confidence. So what? What are you going to do about it? Or any of the other excuses you tell yourself? Are you going to sell up and go home? Are you going to move out the way & give the newcomer an easier run of things? Are you going to decide “nobody is getting married anymore” and stop shooting weddings?

I asked a couple of these photographers what actions they had taken to try and change things. I got all sorts of different answers but not one single one gave me the answer I was hoping for. Their problem was not what they thought it was and it was not caused by what they thought caused it. The world does not owe any of them a living, and neither does it owe you one.

Most marketing is like fishing, certainly when it comes to wedding photography at least. Imagine you are sat on the banks of a lake and the fish in that lake are the general public.

There are 100,000 fish in the lake at any given time so you and the other two fishermen (existing competition) can usually tempt enough of the right type of fish (brides) to take your bait (book you). But if the balance changes and less fish are biting (the recession/less people getting married), or more fishermen turn up (new competitors), or the fish are tiny and you have to throw them back (expecting you to charge £xxx like the weekenders do),  what are your options?

If you carry on as normal you will surely end up with less fish, right? So unless you want to starve it is common sense that you have to react to these changes, and there is lots of things that you can do….

Change your bait (try a new product or marketing strategy)
Use an extra rod (add an new marketing strategy)
Fish in more than 1 lake (market to a bigger area)
Buy cheaper bait or use less (cut your marketing costs)

All of the photographers I spoke to had either cut back on their costs, (including their marketing) done nothing. No surprise then that they had such as big drop off in the number of weddings booked.

There are still 1000s of couples getting married every year, all you have to do is grab your share. If in 2007 your marketing generated 40 wedding bookings, that same marketing in 2009 probably only generated 30 or so. Increasing your marketing is what is needed. Here is a simple equation:

Lets say you get 30% of your business from doing 3 wedding fayres, 30% from the 3 venues where you have an album on show, 20% from the internet and most of the rest from past customer referrals.

Doing 1 more wedding fayre & finding one more venue to get an album in will all but fill in the gaps in your diary. Add a little extra time & money spent on online marketing into the mix, and you’ll be back to your normal booking level. Yes it has cost you more money to get the work in than it did in 2007, but that is just the way it is, get over it.

Charging The Perfect Price

If you’ve been in business for less than two years I can guarantee that you are  not charging the perfect price for your photography, and most photographers who’ve been in business for more than two years are probably not charging the perfect price either.

You may have been different, but many photographers set their prices by using one of the following 2 models:

Model A
1. Find out what your competitors are charging.
2. Decide where you want your customers to view you, are you low-priced, middle-of-the-road or high end?
3. You set your prices according to the results you find.

Model B:
1. Find out your competitors prices
2. Work out what the average is.
3. You set your price just slightly below the average.

This is what is known as price positioning, and to a certain extent it does serve a purpose. But what it also means is you base your own prices on where you see yourself positioned in relation to what your competitors are doing.

This is a huge fundamental mistake! Why? Because around 85% of people don’t buy on price alone. Yes there are a small number of people who are always looking for the cheapest price, but most people will pay a little extra if they think it is better value.

So if people are not buying on price, what are their buying decisions based on? These figures may surprise you, but a recent study revealed the following:

Fifth in order of importance was price
Fourth was customer service
Third was value for money
Second was quality of products
And top, even more important than value for money and quality, was trust. People want to feel that they can trust the people that they do business with.

Getting back to the issue at hand, the only way you can find the perfect price for your photography is to test. For portrait photographers this is dead easy. Make up a new price list putting up prices by 10%. Over the next 20 to 30 sessions see which price list makes you the most money. Use your original price list for half of your clients and use the new price list for the other half.

Forget your average order value, that figure is irrelevant for this test, for this test you need to know which price list is going to make you the most profit. At the higher price list (subject to your profit margin) your order value can be down about 16% and you’ll still make more money.

Once you have enough sales to make a comparison you can then use Which ever price list makes the most profit as your regular price list. If it is the higher price list (which it usually is) you might want to run the test again.

If you are reading this and thinking “I can’t just put my prices up by 10% for no reason”, well yes you can. And if you are thinking your sales will drop, you are most likely wrong. I was recently chatting with a client who owns a busy portrait studio. In the past he had not charged session fees for his “Baby’s First Year Plan”. Getting a bit fed up of working for nothing he decided to start charging a session fee of £9.95.

The good news was two fold. There was no drop off in bookings and his no-show and cancelation rate dropped, so he decided to put the price up to £19.95.

Again, no drop off in bookings so after a couple of months he raised the price to £29.95. Again, no drop off in the take up rate. He recently increased the price to £39.95 and has still not experienced any drop off in bookings. What he was doing for free he now earns over £30k per year for, and that is just session fees, not print sales.