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Marketing for the Established Studio

So let's go into more of an established studio right as we get a little bit more experience and that's in that four, five, six year mark our feeder under us now we've made it over that hump where fifty five percent of all businesses fail right? And then that first I think it was less than five years fifty five percent of businesses are gonna fail once we start made a pass at home but his celebration time but we should also keep reinvesting in growing the bat brand I want to see two page spreads and magazines not half pages they don't work so be single pages two pages where you can have ported I mean there's been some magazines I've been in where a single page is ten thousand dollars so you can't afford in a magazine like that to put a two page spread together okay? We're not a monster company and so but I still want you looking there I want you sending monthly direct mail pieces so when you're in season whether it's seniors, families, babies I'm talking about that freight timeframe fro...

m like april uh april, may, june, july, august, september october that a direct mail piece should be going out at least once a month if not twice because you consented direct mail piece one goes out it's talking about seniors another one goes out to a different mailing list it's talking about families it's talking about babies and so you khun definitely market to multiple groups right you can build your list maybe you got a toy store display going on and you're collecting names that could be another direct mail piece and so I got to keep this engine moving the referral program which is what ours is today we give away for every referral of a new wedding not of a high school senior or anything like that we give away a free sixteen by twenty four campus so we've upped what we're giving away right sixteen by twenty four campus regards of way to get it from is typically about ah hundred dollars for a good quality one not a cheap one yeah who and a half three years ago and they have like a baby now our other stuff to you I guess given a campus of anything or is it just the wedding like if you have if you shot their big portrait ce would you give him I would like to get the campus from whatever this whatever okay yeah right don't play those games giving whatever they want they gave you the referral you made money off the referral if they want to get it from a recent shoot let him get it from a recent shoot I've told this story before I had a bride she gave us six referrals all her bridesmaids and cousins ended up booking us so she got six campuses I don't care where should get him from. She just had a baby. So if she wants to do it off new shoots that she's coming in for and doesn't buy anything and just comes in and gets one sixteen by twenty four campus, I'm gonna do it for because ultimately she gave me a lot of business when you know what a wedding's worth to our studio, uh, wine for high end clients. So we absolutely deliver wine to our clients. I know you guys, do you've? You've adopted that as well. We ordered from a company in napa valley. Silverado winery it's one of our favorite places. So, I mean, find your wine. You want to give your client a meaningful gift, you don't have to do it from there, but that's where we do it from because we like their wine, we send it. We can't. So here's the challenge we were talking about this yesterday off line you can't give away or you can't ship wine consumer to consumer ups will actually flag it. They won't let you package, but it can go from a business or a winery to someone. So just weird state laws, things like that, so just we ordered from them. On they put a private message in there and that's what we're sending to our high end clients whether it's from a big purchase or they locked into our black label or top end and added video were constantly giving them gifts uh just to say thank you I mean who doesn't love getting something in the mail is a thank you gift right no matter how small it could just be a card everybody loves getting that that level of appreciation ah how about hand delivering christmas gifts? This is an interesting concept this is something we do as well so for our christmas gifts we take some of my travel pictures we will actually print them on our paper mat them wrap them no frame they can get their own frame wrapped them and then our top ten wedding clients and our top ten senior family whatever a portrait clients are going to get these hand delivered around the holidays is a way of saying thank you and so that's a again very inexpensive, personalized, meaningful message and when you show up there dropping off a gift like that it's not something they expected at all and you don't like it since you guys dio obviously right if we were doing if we do ah in a scenario where one of our clients is maybe out in new york then we would probably send a bottle of wine or you know harry and david baskets something like that but for anybody local we're going to try and deliver this or we could wrap it up like I did have a client that was in california that was a big fan of our travel work and so what I did for that person was we did everything wrapped it all up and then shipped it off to him azad thank you it doesn't have the same impact is when you personally drop it off but it's still a nice uh a nice touch bridal kids I don't have any here to show but every wedding we put together our own bridal kits so any wedding that books with us as a personal touch we have just a very nice packet and in that packet it's got needle and thread ah shout whites ah hair spray a little thing in hairspray all travel size hairspray deodorant mints bobby pins anything my bride could need that day is in this little kid it's called the salvador cicada bridal survival kit and so was soon as I walk into the bride's room I walk up to her I give her a hug I tell her she looks beautiful today I said hey this is for you today and what I'm doing is as soon as I walk in the room she's surrounded by all her bridesmaids right because that's what they're doing in there and I say this is for you today it's a little survival kit, and then I flip it over because it's in a clear package I said, this has got everything you're going to need today in case there's any emergencies, so just make sure you keep it with your package and all the girls like, oh, my god, that's so cool, right? So that's, the kind of stuff you want to do again, next level stuff, it doesn't cost a lot of money that packet when taylor's on, we can ask her, you know, where we get that stuff from some of its online, some of its target, like you go to target that a little travel section to get the little deodorant all that stuff. But that packet probably cost us less than ten box toe to put together and give to them. But again, it's that next level of service, if you wanna do bridal shows, I want to see you get double booth, right? No more single boots. We've gotta dominate. We've got to make a statement, make the extra investment, get a second booth. It says to the world you are here, you are riel and you've got budget that other photographers don't which what perception's reality must mean you're successful if you've got a double booth, okay, so spend the money consider sponsoring events bridal shows something we're doing today so we are sponsoring a bridal show I will be sure since we've been talking about it so much over the last two days I'll be sure to take pictures off the set ups and I'll post them the facebook so you can see but this is something new for us but I think it's going to have a huge impact what about sponsoring like girls night out if your glamour boudoir what about sponsoring a girls night out okay whether it's for the the salon or girlfriend something like that get ten girls together wine, champagne, cheese whatever you want to do have a little girl's night out and do some boudoir glamour shoots for him it's gonna be they're just gonna have a blast right now you're sponsoring these events think about it though what else could you bring in there? You can bring little jewelry little purse lady or makeup lady and so now it just becomes this little uh event how about offering? I'm not gonna talk about the scholarship yet how about doing same day slide shows so at your weddings, right? I've talked about this in the past doing a slideshow that night off the wedding and so take there's so many of you after I talked about this in the wedding boot camp that went off and did this and loved every minute of it and your clients did get a projector. Okay, you can get an absent projector, it's about five or six hundred bucks. You get a screen to sixty inch collapsible screen from maps and you set it up in the middle of the dance floor. Not off to the side. No one's going to go look at it. Not on a little laptop. That's. Ridiculous doesn't make sense. You want to have maximum impact now, before dances begin, you set this up, everybody's dancing, everybody's having or before everybody dances. I'm sorry and gets out there having a good time. You set this up, you pull a chair out for the bride and groom, you're showing them this stuff on then everybody's going crazy. Lights come down, djs playing music. You show about seventy five to one hundred images on their edited. So I'm doing them in light room. Really down and dirty. But it will blow people away. It costs you nothing and it's again. Free marketing and advertising for your business. This is all hustle stuff assed forest timing. How do I do it? Yeah. It's it's. Funny. I've had people come shadow us and work weddings with us. And they first of all, if you ever work a wedding with me, don't expect to eat. Um my team believe it or not internally and they're probably watching now they actually enjoy working weddings with taylor more than they do with me right? Taylor always manages to find time for a coffee break a little bit of lawn tried me where grind grind, grind, grind the whole the whole time so what ends up happening is you once you get to the reception okay that's kind of my first break of the day for the most part and as soon as I get there I opened up my laptop I shoot raw plus j peg I'd start downloading all the small j pegs and then I go sharks start shooting reception details then once it's finished downloading I imported in the light room and I let it start rendering and I keep helping this is where having a second shooter is very, very important you have to have faith that your second shooter can shoot details and make them look the way they need to look now I do I have faith right? Elisa's my second shooter, she knows what I'm looking for and we're in total sync with each other so as she's shooting details looking for candid shots, people cocktail hour I'm building the slide show I'm typically going through about fifteen hundred to two thousand images at that point in time and I'm just sliding through looking for those images right think about it bridal prep groom prep ceremony creatives you're looking through four parts of the day and all I'm looking to get is about twenty to twenty five images from each part of the day so I'm just thumbing through I know what I took that day it's all coming off my camera and I'm looking for the right one boom grab it edit right I use my presets on to the next one on to the next one and it will typically take me about thirty five to forty five minutes to show case to get those images when everybody else is eating and then once it's right between dinner and deserve so because you want dinner down and then we put the chairs out on the dance floor we get champaign for the bridegroom and we say to them the deejay will announce everybody today we're going to show pictures or pull a chair up gatherround were to show pictures that were taken today by salvador cincotti photography and all of a sudden everybody gathers around and it's just huge free publicity for you and your business so you've got to do it thousand dollars scholarship thousand dollars scholarship before you move on from that matt grendel design when doing the slide show do you have your logo on the screen? Hell yeah yeah have you learned nothing I assumed? But random and logo everywhere do when it ends the last slide up is my logo salvador cicada and we intentionally leave it up there right so when that last slide comes up in light room I hit the keyboard and it pauses it and I just leave that and I walk around they give my bride a hug I give my groom a hug I'm talking to them for a few minutes I leave that up just so it burns and everyone's brain right it's the south's and caught a show and that's what I want at that wedding and we go at that moment we go from being just fifty photographers to being rock stars and that's how I want our clients to see it I want them to see us this artist I want them to see us as a next level where they start going well we read suzy's wedding and they didn't do anything like that right so that's what I'm looking for them to do and if they can start doing that suddenly we justify the price increase um we've been doing the same day slide shows and it's been insane like the response the response we get back to that awesome just blows them away are you doing it the way we taught you to do it screen projector no not with that yet but um depending on how big the venue is where hat will bring like a forty inch tv hd mic cable for a laptop on a table that's awesome though you get to that point where you pause the event this way because what happens is when you pause that event and the reason I want you to do that is because it's the reaction that brings it all together the reaction of the bridegroom and the parents who are crying who are seeing this day unfold that's what sells the event right cause now susie who's in the audience is watching oh my god look at right that's the kind of stuff you want happening that just drives a valuable but when you have it off to the side what ends up happening is is people are watching their kind of half paying attention you're still going to get some good publicity out of it but it's not gonna be the same impact so take it to the next level and do so you're already they're building this side show is the hardest part of the screen is easy the collapsible screen from absent is up and down in less than ten seconds it's not complicated at all eh? So let me jump to this one thousand dollars scholarship for our high school seniors if you have an ambassador program it doesn't even have to be for just your seniors it could be for your glamour thatyou're doing anything that you've got ambassadors run a contest to motivate and promote your ambassadors for this year are number one ambassador is going to win a thousand dollars scholarship so for our high school seniors number one ambassador will get a thousand scholarship to college, any college they want wherever they go on to college hey, we're not paying for their tuition, but it will help with a semester or two of books and mom's appreciate that you could do the same thing for, you know, your your mom, ambassadors, you could do the same thing for your glamour ambassadors, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a thousand dollars cash. It could be a thousand hours in products, services, things like that. So these are the kind of things you want to be looking to go after, and when we talk about advertising, look at how our advertising has changed, and so these are the kind of things that we have we have done with our appetite. So this is a single page ad one image, right? When I showed you that half page out here, there was multiple images in it. I don't know where we lost that, but the half page ad had multiple images in it, so if we can cut to this not quite as impactful with the images that are, they're not necessarily representing my style. It was a little bit of trying to make everybody happy show a little bit of everything, and now in our advertising, when you see this we're not trying to make anybody happy. We're trying to showcase what we're all about, really simple on on copy photography that leaves nothing to the imagination, chicago, new york, worldwide, our logo and our phone number and that's it. And so those that's where we're at with our marketing is real clean, it's, real simple and there's no mistake, if you're hiring us, the person who looks at this ad and decides to go to my website and decides to call us is not the person who's looking to take those church pictures standing at the altar holding their flowers traditionally that's not who's going to call me the person who's going to call me is looking for that one of a kind, our peace for their home. So let's talk about some cost effective marketing tools that you can implement today. I don't care if you're a beginner, intermediate, advance there's absolutely no reason you're not using these tools, so an emoto and sticky albums are two very cost effective tools that are out there on the market today on I think without them, we might not have made the push the way we have into the social media aspect, so these guys got to figured out their annual subscription, so you're not paying each time you use it. That's what makes it cost effective? So for us, almost every event gets an an emotive slideshow, and when they get that animal to sideshow, I'm not paying every time it goes through. So I just pay one time. I'm probably paying, like, at this point, fifty dollars are, you know, fifty cents or a dollar per slideshow. I mean, literally every senior that comes through our studio is getting a slideshow produced from an emoto, and so we use it for almost every event our studio it's built into the packages. So anna moto's yes, we have it on our allah card meant what I told you. You have to have it on your ala carte menu to justify value allah card. We sell it for two, ninety nine. Hey, if you want to come into our studio and just buy a slideshow, you can do it, but you're going to pay three hundred dollars for it. Why? Because I can't have somebody come into my studio. I do all this work for me and they say, yeah, just give me the sideshow and don't buy any pictures, so we can't have that happen, so we price it artificially high, full ten, eighty hd, so this is new from them in the last few months. They've gone to fulton ten eighty where they used to be just seven twenty so now they're ten, eighty so this is the quality coming out of this stuff is amazing and it's really cool because I've been working with them right if you go to an emoto if you're if you're not using it you definitely need to get on it but we are now working with them to create our own templates you know when you go to an emoto and you select what template and tempo you want we're working with them to create a template that matches our brand our style's a little bit more gritty little bit more edgy and so look for that to come out in the next few months but I got it I'm gonna play in an emotive slideshow for you here next just to kind of show you what a wedding day slide show might look like is all you see of my imagery a lot of the time is the edgier stuff and a lot of people don't realize we still take photographs all day we still take the normal picture so enjoy for a second no way with you way be the one makes you happy wait I want to live a day with you I just want to be the one who makes you happy having way thousands something I need you to wait no way you just want to be the one makes you happy wait thousand it's all safe something I need you to wait no way scrapers their way so the cool part about that is I wanted to show you you love thank you. Um you saw a wedding beginning in and that slide show that you saw is the slide show that we showed at the night of the event so those are all based off small j pegs right? This didn't go for outsourcing everything you saw there was completed on the day of the event. I didn't have time to make sure I select the perfect expression the perfect composition it's about getting it done getting it out there because you saw the day is just a medley of traditional shots at the altar posing for the camera mixed in with my dramatic work mixed in with candid moments right? This is what a normal wedding looks for looks like for so I was happy to be able to share that with you because too often people look at my work and I think that's the only image I take no, I do the traditional stuff too, but I don't show it on my website because that's not the client I'm looking for it doesn't mean I don't take that image, it just means that's not who I want and I want you to think about one other thing think about the impact that this is gonna have showing this on a wedding day to everybody there is going to blow people away. So an emoto has put together a deal you will not see anywhere else, so if you're going to use an emoto, now is the time there's no reason to procrastinate you goto animo dot com slash sal it's seventy five dollars off for one year. You will not see that read advertised anyplace else. I promise you it's only valid through august fifth. Jules, you have a question? Are you doing an emoto now or you're doing it through light room if we so if we can't get access or we don't have time to get to the internet were doing it through light room if we have time and we want to put some cool transitions to it, we'll do with the random moto, but no matter what we do, whether we use light room around moto the minute I get home, okay? And I'm downloading images, I create that an emotive slideshow and then that's what gets embedded on my block so that's, the animal side shows getting created no matter what it's just about whether I can do it at the event or do it when I get home, but because I'm already downloading images and they've already been added it. Right, because of the way we're working on that now they're small j pegs I get that uploaded from light room bright light room has a plug in or an emoto as a plug in right from light room so I can hit one button and uploads it right tio an emoto so very, very powerful to let me get through one more thing before we go to break I know I'm running a few minutes late sticky albums is that other tool? So sticky albums this is mobile app these air mobile app, right? This is a new product, right? For the most part, we're talking about product it's, about a year year and a half old it's all about your iphone android device. We're finding more and more clients are wanting this it's easy access, right? They don't have to be connected to the internet. That's the one thing I love about sticky adams's when I send this to my clients, they download it wants they can't print from these images. The images are embedded in the app on dh, so now they have access to fifteen, twenty, thirty images. You don't have to give them all their images in the app that they can share, and so it's got features built in so that you can see right there they have the ability to share, so they had one button and they can share this their album via facebook they can email to their mom, they can email to their friends or family that can tweet it out and that's what you want, you want this ability for cost effective grassroots marketing to happen. The price point on these things is just it's just ridiculous not to have this in your toolbox. You have the ability to add music it's easy to use, we use it for our seniors, families, babies, all our clients, we're using this stuff and so sticky arms as well go too sticky arms dot com if you haven't heard of them, I just I don't know what rocky been under lately, but they are doing some cool stuff fifty five dollars off your annual membership and so you're going to get there also giving you two free months, one hundred sixty nine dollars for fourteen months do the math on your cost per month there's no reason for you not to sign up for this, and they've got a limited discount as well, so make sure you use code sal and you'll be able to take advantage of that again. There's no reason for you guys not to have these two very, very cost effective tools in your toolbox, and I promise you you will blow your clients away with both of them