Marketing

How to get new customers and how to keep your existing customers

What's Wrong With Photographers?

Over the weekend, I was reading a local weekly newspaper with a wedding 2 page special. Contrarily to expectations, there was plenty of text but there were also big ads. One ad was a quarter page and four other ads. The five ads added up to a whole page, the text added up to the other page.

  • One ad for a photographer (top left)
  • One ad for a wedding music
  • Three ads for three catering companies

Photographer:

Who's Your Customer?

Seth Godin is an empire by himself. He has published a dozen books, created a few companies and has one of the most influential blog on the Internet http://sethgodin.typepad.com/. In November 2012, he actually raised a fantastic issue, “Four questions worth answering”

  • Who is your next customer? (Conceptually, not specifically.

Business Cards

Getting a business card is an important step. A business card makes you a legitimate “whatever.” As photographers, we are visual people but very of us are designers and even less of us are good designers.

There are a few alternatives:

  1. Hire a designer. My first time, I did exactly that. She was a friend of a friend and in the end I was not happy with her design. Good designers are just as hard to find as good photographers.
  2. Buy or get a template. Some are free but, they usually cost between a couple of dollars and the fifty dollar range.

The End of Facebook

It's not the end of Facebook, but it's the end of Facebook marketing for photographers.

By now, everybody must have heard about the financial problems at Facebook. On 18-May-2012, Facebook became a public company and started trading with the opening price of $42.05 per share on the first trade. Today, 16-Oct-2012, the share price is now: $19.48. That's a 53.6% price drop in just 6 month or in real terms 35 billion dollars lost.

SmugMug and the Kerfuffle

The Friday night of the Labour Day weekend, I received the following email:

Subject: New Pro Account Pricing

For the first time in 7 years, we're raising the price of SmugMug Pro subscriptions, something we tried hard not to do.

We know $100/year is a lot and personally, if I were asked to pay more for a service, I'd want to hear from the person responsible for the decision. That's me, so I placed my dSLR on a tripod, and looked it right in the lens, imagining it was you. I tried to offer a peek inside SmugMug and our thinking: …

Nikon Marketing Screwup

Every month, I buy PDN, Photo District News, the photo magazine. I do not subscribe to it, the subscription is more expensive than buying it at the newsstand. PDN is a magazine directed toward the professional photographers and is a must-read for anybody/everybody that wants to keep current with the business, the marketing of photography and the commercial photography trends. Every issue has big ads from both Canon and Nikon.

In the May 2012 issue, Nikon USA did a double truck spread, that's a two facing pages, about a wedding photographer, Doug Gordon, on page 42 and page 43. Two large photographs, and two smaller ones. Excellent photos (they'd better be), great inspiration…

His go-to cameras: the Nikon D3x and the Nikon D3s…

Then Nikon USA goes on explaining the D3X and the D3s… engineered for professionals…

There's only one problem with the ad, it's a small photograph, 3 inch by 2 inch, of Doug Gordon, the photographer, taking photos with a Canon camera (that looks like a Canon 5DMk2) and a Canon 70-200L f/2.8.

Turn Practically into a Pro

If you don't have a point-and-shoot, get one. They are inexpensive and can turn even the most photographically impaired into practically a pro. The one drawback is that point-and-shoot cameras, while great for “scenery”, are not well designed for photographing objects closer than about four feet.
…
While you probably won't be pressed into capturing a quickly unfolding event, it's still a good idea to take a number of shots just to be sure to get a good one…
…
Apply the rule of thirds when composing subjects and/or objects for the camera.

Your Opinion: Which Photograph Do You Prefer?

Thank you to everybody that gave their opinion. The results and more importantly the analysis of the votes is at: http://www.foto-biz.com/Photos/Your-opinion-interesting-follow-up

uoy knahT

Which photograph do you prefer? This will be for a mail-in to construction companies.

Photograph A

Case Tractor CE/50% grey background

or Photograph B

Case Tractor CE/dim background

Which version do you prefer?

Which photograph do you prefer?

Photograph A
69% (25 votes)
Photograph B
31% (11 votes)
Total votes: 36

Thank you. For comments, you can use the Contact Me form.

  • Did you know that Case is the second largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment and the third largest manufacturer of construction equipment? Maybe you know that.
  • But did you know that Case is part of the FIAT empire? Yes, the Italian car manufacturer of the FIAT 500, of Ferrari or Lancia fame.

The Pinterest Controversy

The new hottest Internet photo related social website: Pinterest with 1½ million people per day. People create a “Pin Board” and post their own photos or other people's photos that they like and want to share with their friends. Now get ready, we must all scream “Copyright Infringement!”

After the big cry of copyright infringement, now what? The problem is who will sue? Who has the deep pockets to pay for lawyers for years to come? Nobody is really willing to sink millions of dollars.

It Will Be Good Exposure

I just had another request of:

It will be good exposure

Basically they want free work.

  1. My standard policy is usually yes, if you are also working for free.
  2. My standard policy is usually yes, if it is a cause that I really believe into.
  3. My standard policy is always asking for credit...

And that got me thinking (these days, I need something to provoke into thinking.) What if we change the parameters just slightly:

"It will be good exposure" but the request comes from a huge for profit organization like CNN, NBC, BBC... with a 3 minutes interview.

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