When I was starting out, like most of us I thought that if I could get the people who had heaps of money to come and see me I would get rich, sounds fair enough doesn’t it — that’s how you think it would work so let me tell you this story. He arrived in a Lamboughini, she arrived in a Maserati, and each of the daughters arrived in a BMW.
I almost fell over backwards when I saw that, I thought oh my lord!, I’ve hit the big time … this what I’ve been waiting for, all my Christmases have come at once.
They were a really lovely family, we had a great shoot, loads of laughter and genuine appreciation from them at the photo viewing. I was doing two appointments at the time, one for the shoot and another for the viewing, I did the best edit I had ever done with thoughts of $20k plus from the sale, and they loved the photos.
They spent $800 in total, I was astounded, I was thinking, ‘you’ve gotta be kidding, you turn up in a million dollars worth of vehicles and you only spend $800?’ big lesson learned that, let me tell you. There’s a reason wealthy people are wealthy, they’re cautious with their money.
The wash up was that they asked me how long I kept the photos as they wanted to come back and buy some more later — you know, people have the best intentions but a bird in the hand really is worth two in the bush — I never saw them again.
I’m Mark Lait and I have a lot of experience to share on what makes people tick, if you want to benefit from that experience, jump onto my youtube channel and hit the subscribe button to stay in touch.
That’s okay, they were still lovely people but again, time gets away and people move on to other things. I’ve experienced this more than once but to be fair, I’ve had other wealthy people come in with an open chequebook and buy to their heart’s desire. You know who spends money? it’s the average people, the ones who live in the mortgage belt and have a 9 to 5 job.
Marketing ain’t what it used to be.
Marketing has changed and whereas once we would promote our business at shopping centres and catch the passers-by, who were the people that live in that mortgage belt, nowadays we use Facebook because of it’s fantastic targeting ability and reach the same audience.
It’s a bit different because with Facebook marketing you can you very specific about the kinds of people you want to reach. Shopping centres are more opportunistic, everybody wants to win something so your opportunity is there in either situation, they’ll be walking past your display in a shopping centre and they’ll think ‘why not, maybe I’ll win something’ and there’s a good chance that they’ll fill out an entry form. Facebook, well you can decide where you want your interests to come from, you can decide the age group that you want to visit you, it’s really very specific and this gives you competitive advantage over people who don’t use this kind of marketing.
We’ve found that people in this category spend an average of $3000 and that’s all we want. There’s plenty of stories about photographers making ten and twenty thousand dollar sales all the time but I think that they are just that — stories. Aim for an average of two to three thousand dollar sales, there’s more average buyers around than the ‘top end of town’ buyers, as a matter of fact, you rarely see them but the average buyers are always there, and once you get enough of them, it’s not hard to see the revenue stream increasing.
Next learning is about giving your clients options and why it’s wise to limit them — see you then. If you’re a listener rather than a reader you can also go to our podcast page here — have a great day.