Here’s a radical idea that might be a better way of spending your advertising dollars. It has worked wonders for my company: Cancel your weakest magazine ad and use those advertising dollars to take the top 15 catering directors and facility managers to lunch. Pick out 15 reception facilities that you would like to photograph on a regular basis. Contact the facility managers and invite them and their team to your studio for a catered lunch. Have a limo pick them up and bring them to you. Chose the limo company you use wisely. Find the most expensive wedding magazine in your area and see which limo companies are advertising there. Explain to the manager of the company you are hiring them to pick up catering directors from wedding facilities the limo company more than likely already services. The limo company just might give you a discount on their service.

When the facility manager arrives at your place of business, make sure to have everything looking as nice as it can so the manager understands this is what people will see should they decide to refer their clients to you. When your guests arrive, send out your assistant to pick up the food. During this time, you show your guests what you have to offer. Show them everything that you would show a prospective client. When the food arrives, you eat and tell wedding stories. When everyone is done eating, hand your guests a stack of 8x10s you have taken of their facility. Invite them to use these images as tools to help book events.

Establishing long lasting personal relationships with facility managers that can refer your services to their clients is much more powerful than purchasing a magazine ad which will some day expire.

An Alternate Idea To Magazine Advertising is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum

You must be able to calculate the efficiency of your advertising efforts. When wedding photographers say their advertising is working, they generally just know that they are receiving calls and booking weddings. You must know more than this.

You must know if your marketing is efficient or not. The best way to give yourself the answer to this question is through the use of statistics. As a business owner that wants to succeed, you have a responsibility to track the statistics of your business. Through marketing you begin to attract individuals to your business. These individuals are inquiries, and you must ask each inquiry one basic question in order to create the statistics you need:

How did you hear about us?

Keep track of the following after your initial contact with your inquiry:

1. How many of your inquiries did you convert into consultations?
2. How many of these consultations did you convert into paying customers?
3. How many of your paying customers have you converted into repeat customers?

The answers to these questions will show you where you are the least efficient. If you see that you are only converting 10% of the inquiries you receive into consultations and 90% of the consultations you have are converted into paying customers, you know you must change the language used when answering your phone or replying to people inquiring about your services via email.

Tracking each and every inquiry will also tell you where your paid advertising is failing or succeeding. You do not need to focus on the ads that are doing the best until you have addressed the ones that are doing the worst.

You should be able to find out the “cost per lead” for each of the ads you have purchased. For example, if you paid $1000 for an ad somewhere and you received 10 phone calls from that ad, your cost per lead is $100. Think of it this way, when that phone rings, you are spending $100.

Being able to find your cost per lead for each of your paid ads is essential to becoming more efficient. This information will allow you to make educated decisions when the contracts for your ads expire. You will know which ads to keep and which to drop. You may decide to change the language in one ad to see if you can create different results. You may decide to take the money from one ad and use it to increase the size of another ad that is working better. If you do not have a system in place allowing you to track your cost per lead, you are just shooting in the dark, wasting your money and time. That is inefficient.

This next point is important. If you do decide to change an element in your weakest advertisement, make sure you only change one thing at a time. In the long run, this will give you clearer understanding as to whether or not the changes you have made are working. If you change too much all at once, you have no idea what specific alteration created the change, good or bad, and it will be harder for you to repeat the action in the future.

Become Efficient By Tracking Your Results is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum

Do you find yourself overwhelmed with ideas and thoughts about how to market, promote, organize, run, or otherwise manage your business?  Have you struggled to find a way to keep track of your thoughts or creative ideas because you forget about them?  If so, you may be a lot like me, and I’d like to share how I handle my overactive stream of consciousness thinking.

Several years ago, I was walking through an office store and I noticed that whiteboards were on sale.  At the time, I was a full-time student and saw the value of having my own whiteboard to work on while during homework and such.

So, fast forward a few years.  We move into our new studio last year and in December I decided to bring out the ‘ol whiteboard.  I cannot say enough about how much that little action of hanging a whiteboard has provided for us.

Here’s how I work it:
So, I’ll be sitting in my office working on something when I get an idea. Or, let’s say I’ve got something business related troubling me.  Or, I’m looking for a new idea for this years bridal shows.   I start by writing the subject of the exploration at the top of the whiteboard: whether it be a topic, or a question.  I then proceed to dump everything in my head onto that board.  I pace. I talk to myself. I write stuff on the board.  I have a 36″ x 48″ whiteboard to fill… so what do I do when it fills? Well, I take a picture of it.

One important note on the way my system works:  I never erase anything from the whiteboard until its been photographed. Including ideas that have been discounted.  I’ll indicate with an “x” or a strikethrough that its not a good idea. But, when I go back to review what we have discussed I want to be able to see the good ideas & the bad ones.  I have a visual memory of our discussion.

On my computer, I have a folder labeled “whiteboard” where I keep the pictures of our whiteboard sessions organized by date and subject. I have pulled them up and reviewed them several times, whenever a topic or discussion was rehashed.  Or, if I needed to simply reference something we had explored.

In the photograph I’ve included, the topic was: “What to we have & how are we using it?”  In other words, I wanted to explore how we were promoting our business,  where we could do better, and what was missing.  You can see that it is very stream of consciousness writing.  I scribble as I think.  Some of the things we use regularly, some we deemed to be ineffective.

All in all, the best thing about having a whiteboard is being able to explore concepts and new ideas from beginning to end and having a way to document them.  I call it “Whiteboard Marketing” because some of our greatest and most successful marketing ideas have been products of whiteboard thought sessions. It has saved us thousands in costly marketing errors and created thousands in the ability to see an idea all the way through.  I would encourage everyone to go forth and scribble!

Whiteboard Marketing is a post from: The Pro Photo Business Forum