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[Gavin Seim]

Lots of things in this show, including some great business talk in the last half...

http://www.prophotoshow.net/blog/2009/12/12/pro-photo-podcast-64-christmas-2009/

[Tim A]

Hello,

Just listened to the latest episode and was very happy with the last part on marketing and what successful wedding photographers do to market.  I felt like for once I finally got to hear the details and the comment that "your photography is good enough, you need to work on marketing and your brand" was refreshing to hear.  Awesome pictures alone does not a successful professional photographer make.

Thank you for this podcast in general and THIS podcast in specific.  Very informative.


Tim

[dzpics]

Thanks for the feedback Tim.  Glad you were able to get some useful, and hopefully, inspiring info from this episode.  Here's to a successful 2010! 

[Gavin Seim]

Glad it was useful Tim. I know it got me thinking alot.

[D-S Photography]

Another great show, on the note of Tilt Shift Lenses they are very useful for architectural shooting with a normal lens the vertical lines of say a sky scraper converge at the top. With a Tilt Shift it pretty much eliminates this and still gives the perspective of looking up. Precise control of sharpness can create interesting portraits as stated.

On the tablet note, I have been looking at getting one because its something I can carry around in my bag and slide it in and out quickly without having to flip up a screen. This would come in handy for freeing up space on memory cards during a long shot/project, such as a wildlife photo journalism/documentation I will be doing in the early spring. Now my passport external hd will come along too for instant backup.

The marketing portion of the show was very educational. It gave me some great insight on wedding photography marketing. I will have one in Texas this coming year. Showing your work is defiantly a huge deal when attracting new clients. One thing I have been doing recently is giving each client a cd with a slide show on it with their prints. The images on it are watermarked with my info- name, contact #, and such and are not high enough quality to get any good prints from. The way I see it is people love showing off photos of them self, especially if they payed good money for them. It's easy to loan/take a cd to someone to show off and that's free advertisement. So far I have gotten nice results from this. People are always willing to spend money on quality work, even in a poor economy, it is all about presentation. Back in the "great depresion" people spent money on entertainment frequently, photography can be marketed as entertainment in my opinion.

[05_GD7]

i read the show notes before I listened....excited to hear an updated discussion about the GF1 based on what's been said in the forums.

But nothing!!!!  Just EP-2 talk....

That said, the marketing section was awesome.

[Gavin Seim]

Ya we talked a bit more about the GF1 in the last show, but didn't get too deep this time.I just linked them because we were talking about that style camera. Next time we get someone on who has a GF1 we'll get some thoughts in.

[Petemiller]

Wow, fantastic show guys.  Keven is always a great guest.  Please try to get him on more often. I have so many ideas and things I want to do and try after listening. One thing I'm a little confused about is the album credit idea.  He was saying to shoot a wedding for $500 and give the client a $1000 album credit.  And he made it seem like he would charged them for the album credit which I don't understand.  So is he really charging $1500 and giving them $1000 off of the album, so net it's only $500.

For example,

Couple XX books you for a wedding. You charge them $500 with a $1000 album credit.  Your 20 page album is priced at $1000.  So what if the client is happy with a 20 page album even if you present the with a 30-40 page album.  Say a cost of $300 for the album, now your profit is only $500.  Doesn't seem like a good business idea.

Now if your 20 page album is priced at $3,000 then this idea might work.

If anyone would like to clarify Kevin's logic, I would appreciate it.  Hopefully you can understand what I'm trying to present.

Thanks everyone, Happy Holidays.

[D-S Photography]

ok I'll give it a shot on what I understood from that part. $500 for him to shoot + $1,000 album credit, think of the credit like a prepaid credit card- you put money on the card to use towards a purchase. Even though there paying $1,500 upfront its breaking the cost down. If you put two photographer's who when asked, "how much to get you to shoot", one says $1,500 the other says $500 plus a $1,000 album credit. I garunte 99% of the time it will the the $500+$1,000 album credit guy. When the album is being presented and they hold their breath and ask how much for the album and you say $3,000 and they say "that's a bit pricey" that is when the album credit comes in, you simply remind them of the credit, all of the sudden its more affordable. In their eyes the $3,000 one just went down to $2,000. The goal is to be the good guy who wants to help them get more for their money not screw them out of it. But like he stated to do this you cannot take shortcuts, you have to put in work letting the client get to know you.

    Even if they go with the 20 page album for the $1,000 credit, your still making profit. A 20 page may cost them $1,000 but it won't cost you that, profit+cost=price. If a photographer told me 20 pages for $3,000 for my wedding album I'd laugh in his face and tell him no thank you, that's a cost of $150 a page they better be gold plated. 

[Gavin Seim]

That's about right. The concept is incentive's your packages and adding value. The things with $500 + $1000 is more marketing wordplay. I'm usually not into that but it's probably does work.

I should mention DS that I would not laugh at any photographer charging 3k for a book. You need to understand that it's not paper were selling here, it's what we put on it. Photographers often miss that cost of printing has little to do with what we sell. If it does you're probably not making much.

If you wrote a book and a publisher said "we know that rheum of paper only cost five bucks. We'll give you then and a few dollars for ink" Would you bite? Nor should a photographer sell prints for cost if paper

[RAnderson]

I usually design more pages for the book than the couple's package includes, but only charge $10 per page to add. The BIG QUESTION for me is this...

When Kevin designs the additional pages and then tries to charge the couple $100 for each additional page design, what is he actually selling? If we say that he is selling his design work, then that has already been done, and the couple who does not invest in that at that point, costs him all of his design money. If I were a couple looking at his book, I would say that the materials do not cost that much, and to charge an arm and a leg for the design work that he has already done is sort of insulting. That's the part I feel a bit bad about. I have already done the work, so the bridge is sort of already behind me, and therefore not as valuable to me; I tend to throw it in for that reason, and the fact that I do not want to come across as (Now I have you here, and I am going to get a little greedy).

I really want to work through this a bit more.

[Gavin Seim]

Ron I think you're looking at it the wrong way and that's exactly why you're noy up selling. Stop thinking about selling paper and ink. You're not. You're selling your images and your design. I charge about $55 per page right now for a 10x10 (or 110 a spread). $10 is WAY to little for a well designed quality book.

Lets consider a writers analogy to photography. You write a novel. It's finished and ready to go. You visit a publisher who reads and loves it. Then he pulls out his calculator and runs some numbers.

"We'll pay you ten bucks for the rheum of paper and five for the ink. That's fifteen dollars"

"No way," you say. "This took my time and energy to make."

"So what" he might say, "the work is already done. I don't see why I should pay full price when the work is done. It's just paper and ink anyways. I could get this anywhere."

Who should be insulted. You the author, or the publisher because you won't sell your book for fifteen dollars.

Getting the point. Photographers need to stop underselling. We're in a business where the raw materials are not usually the biggest cost, but that does not mean what we do is cheap.

Gav

[D-S Photography]

I should mention DS that I would not laugh at any photographer charging 3k for a book. You need to understand that it's not paper were selling here, it's what we put on it. Photographers often miss that cost of printing has little to do with what we sell.

I completely agree with that Gavin. For a 60 page book yes 3k would be reasonable. My statement was meant to point out that there is a point where ethics come into play with pricing and that photographers should be aware not to get greedy. At 3k for 20 pages that's 150 a page (some may charge that its just an example) . Under pricing hurts the market over pricing can have bad effects as well, driving clients away.

Undercut prices may give the illusion of success but the ultimately drive a business to bankruptcy. For example, you can go to wallmart and get a "decent" package for $100 it takes less than an hour to be out of there. My clients pay allot more. If you want to be viewed as wallmart quality by all means compete with their pricing.
The clients don't complain about my pricing, my shoots are not "studio" they are outdoor portraits and on location shoots. Walmart can't offer that. They won't shoot an authentic winter portrait session, yes I do those too, I have one later today... It will be cold there is a lot of snow and its still snowing. There paying extra and bringing hot chocolate... I hate the cold.

 Budget photographer-- "Hey I made $100 off my last shoot." How much were the prints?, "They got $50 worth!!!" So they payed $150 and you made $100?, "No, they only payed $100 total." And what did you pay for your equipment total?, "Around $6,000" So you pocketed $50 from the shoot?, "Yes" And payed $6,000 for all your stuff?, "Yes" Great, so the shoot cost you $5,950, the good news is you only need 119 more shoots and you can start making a profit.  -- the game is investment and return, a good photographer never stops investing so you need a consistent return. (time is an investment as well). That's why it cost more for a professional than Uncle Joe. 

[RAnderson]

Do you tell your clients that they may want to plan on spending another $1k-$3k after the wedding? If not, then how can we prepare our clients as not to come across as greedy, or shock them too much?
Also, I wanted to insert my post from the podcast, since there are 2 separate discussions going on here...

Personally, I am stuck between two fences based on his ideas. on one hand, I love his idea about having a cheaper entry point to book wedding clients in order to really connect with them, and thus have a greater advantage when up-selling books later on. However, I dont see how a couple who has the mindset to spend $500-$1000 on a wedding photographer, would ever be sold a $100 or more wedding book. I personally am in the $2000-$4000 range, and have had brides tell me that they dont have money to pay $200 for 20 extra pages in the book (ONLY $10 per page). I am really torn about this issue

[D-S Photography]

I apologize I misunderstood your previous post (and ranted a bit). That is a very fair question. You obviously don't want to scare them away with numbers but you don't want to mislead either. I would be as open as possible at the start. The easiest way I see in handling this is to make them aware that there are albums available within the 1k credit but you will have a variety prepared to give them the option of a more personalized album. Allot of the wording has to be addlibed  depending on the clients wants, needs, resources, and personality. I don't believe there is any one universal answer to this, it's more of a get to know the client and figure out what they want from it all. Trial and error can have some hard lessons but they are the best ones learned.