[MJB DIGITAL]

When my marketing strategy has the funds to hit, I want to hit hard. So, I'm wondering if anyone has a nice marketing quirk.

What media do you see have the most return i.e. magazine ad, t.v. commercial, website(probably the best of all)

I have a folder in my office/living room called 'marketing brainstorming'......and I always try to suppliment that folder.

8)

[George Lama]

You need to look at your market and go from there.

I live in a small town, but can easily gravitate to the big cities that surround us. We are not doing anything to market our services there yet. we just don't have the man-power hours to do it, that simple.

Even so, because of word-of-mouth I've done weddings in the big city too.

We stick to newspaper ads once in a while, promotion in the windows of businesses in downtown, and offering customers free prints if they refer us to someone and they book a contract. We also attend local shows whenever possible.

[Kerrowdown]

The best return for me, has always been word of mouth, also it gets me in the right place at the right time.

[SA Photo]

I try to mainly do event photography, mostly car and bike shows. Being there and being part of the show works best for me.

[Eigengrau]

I have relied mainly on website and word-of-mouth, although there's one idea my wife and I have implemented in our business that I am pretty happy with...

We host all the images from each wedding in an online, password protected gallery, then we take a preemptive picture of the bride and groom to-be, and then hand out a card to each guest with a picture of the bride and groom and the information to access the online gallery.

This means a couple of things -
Nobody has to pass around the proof book. Grandma and Grandpa can access the prints directly, and order them as they please from the website.
The bride and groom get nice little handouts for their guests, which everybody seems to like.
We essentially give everybody at the wedding a business card that they have a reason to hang on to, along with a reason to visit our website.
Each person gets an opportunity to purchase prints, which provides additional revenue for us.

Overall, I'd say the prints purchased as a direct result of this pay for the site, and then the additional folks who remember our info to refer their friends is just gravy.

[bwield]

I have relied mainly on website and word-of-mouth, although there's one idea my wife and I have implemented in our business that I am pretty happy with...

We host all the images from each wedding in an online, password protected gallery, then we take a preemptive picture of the bride and groom to-be, and then hand out a card to each guest with a picture of the bride and groom and the information to access the online gallery.

This means a couple of things -
Nobody has to pass around the proof book. Grandma and Grandpa can access the prints directly, and order them as they please from the website.
The bride and groom get nice little handouts for their guests, which everybody seems to like.
We essentially give everybody at the wedding a business card that they have a reason to hang on to, along with a reason to visit our website.
Each person gets an opportunity to purchase prints, which provides additional revenue for us.

Overall, I'd say the prints purchased as a direct result of this pay for the site, and then the additional folks who remember our info to refer their friends is just gravy.

That's a very nice idea, lower cost but probability of high return

[jezza323]

I have relied mainly on website and word-of-mouth, although there's one idea my wife and I have implemented in our business that I am pretty happy with...

We host all the images from each wedding in an online, password protected gallery, then we take a preemptive picture of the bride and groom to-be, and then hand out a card to each guest with a picture of the bride and groom and the information to access the online gallery.

This means a couple of things -
Nobody has to pass around the proof book. Grandma and Grandpa can access the prints directly, and order them as they please from the website.
The bride and groom get nice little handouts for their guests, which everybody seems to like.
We essentially give everybody at the wedding a business card that they have a reason to hang on to, along with a reason to visit our website.
Each person gets an opportunity to purchase prints, which provides additional revenue for us.

Overall, I'd say the prints purchased as a direct result of this pay for the site, and then the additional folks who remember our info to refer their friends is just gravy.

that is a fantastic idea - well done for coming up with that one

[bretti_kivi]

I like that - I'd be very interested to hear the technicalities of how it's been done, too...

I'm interested in marketing with another service - pay a fee, get the car, driver and
'tog - two different people, but one place.

Bret

[Eigengrau]

Thanks for the props - if you are looking at doing any kind of event photography, I can't recommend this system highly enough. Feedback has been unanimously positive from our customers.

The other bonus I didn't mention - the site we pay for handles all the orders/sales tax and everything for us, so we don't even need to worry about it - not having sales tax at all makes accounting much simpler. They handle everything and then cut us a check monthly. We're using shutterfly, but I know there are a number of sites out there doing it.

We link guests to this page, Storybook Photography, Northern Colorado, from which they can find their event. Feel free to poke around and check it out if you'd like.

My only complaint is that I'd like it if it was branded with our business name throughout the process, but similar services I've seen that offer that functionality are drastically more expensive.