Promoting Your Business

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Don’t Discount, Instead Create Themed Promotions

As we gradually see the recession fade, now is the time to really gear up our advertising and promotional programmes.

Traditionally, studios have tended to use newsletters and mailings to generate business and hopefully to get new clients, and one of the most common themes has been to offer discounts on their base services. But these discounted services really do not work very well for several reasons.

mother and daughter portrait

The first is that unless the mother picking up the mailing is an old client, or already thinking of having a new portrait session, a discount is not a strong enough reason for taking up the offer. When doing a mailing we need to get at least a 3–4% response and discounted services usually get less than 1%.

Second, if the potential client is not familiar with your studio, or not an old client, the discount is not an incentive to call. It is virtually meaningless.

Third, almost every studio that mails to the mother is offering a discount, so why should she call you instead of another no matter how attractive your mailing? She may call any number of your perceived competitors and then it becomes what might be described as a ‘crap shoot’.

Fourth, in a weak economy almost every business is offering discounts, from furniture, automobiles, hardware to home décor and home improvement. Discounts are so much part of the business environment they are an every-moment concept. They mean virtually nothing. Add to this the nonsense of the $1.99 deal that is simply $2, price is not always the deal-closing factor.

Discounts only work when a prospective buyer is actually thinking about your product or service. When we look through the advertising we get in the mail or via email, we mostly think that unless something special is offered that may have been in the back of our minds we simply just browse. It is possible that an existing client has a new portrait in mind so she is more likely to call and see if you have something she is interested in.

So what is more likely to bring your old clients and new ones too?
toddler dressing up
Themes
At Norman Phillips of London Photography studio, established in 1983, we established a strong market across the United States by creating reasons for families to visit the studio, not only by the quality of the photography and service, but by being creative. In other words giving both existing clients and new clients a reason to make an appointment.

But first let’s review why families have portraits made. One is to update the family portrait or to maintain the picture record of the children. Consequently this appointment is made several times in the first two years and then each year until they go to school when, in many cases, the school photographer takes over. But, if we have built a good relationship with the client we should still be creating both family and individual portraits of these clients, and especially the children, regardless of the school photographer.

You note that there is a pattern here and we need to create a reason to break that pattern. This is where a little creativity comes in and, at our studio, we created a series of themes to entice parents to bite on an offer. These themes were planned to generate new business over the period between the special holiday dates that often cause parents to have portraits made; Christmas and Easter (in some markets), Mother's Day and Father's Day, though the latter two can be tweaked to be more effective. The themes need to be distinctly separate from traditional holiday themes.

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