Expanding Your Portfolio: An Experiment in Marketing Ideas
Introduction
If any of you are like me you know that it's not easy to grow your portfolio to a respectable level where people see it and immediately want to book with you without any hesitation. When I was just starting out, I focused primarily on couple portraitures. I loved taking pictures of happy couples and their experiences going through life together. My favorite part was when I would be changing my lens or adjusting my camera settings and I would look up and just see the happy couple goofing around and having fun. So like any good photography I quickly snapped as many candid photos as I could. Usually these photos turned out to be some of the best of the entire photoshoot! After a while though I realized I wanted a change, it wasn’t that I did not love taking photos of the happy couples, but I wanted a new challenge. I found this challenge in family photography. The only issue with this is that my portfolio was loaded with a ton of couple photos but barely any families. I knew I had to change that if I was to start booking families for photoshoots.
At first, I didn’t know how to approach this seemingly huge problem. When I was working with couples I generated a lot of my business through family members, friends, and word of mouth. I knew this would not work with families since, if you have a family I'm sure you will agree, life is hectic. It's not easy to set aside time to look for a photographer as well as money can be tight at other times. So I wanted to find some way of taking the stress out of the booking process as well as a way to save families some money.
My Idea
My first idea stems from trying to generate scarcity in order to drive people to book. Here is an example, let's say your business has 3 packages you offer, package A, B, and, C. Package 'A' being the cheapest and package 'C' being the most expensive. Now to create scarcity we can remove package 'A' since it’s the cheapest package and doesn't really offer a lot of diversity in options. We can also remove package 'C' since it is the most expensive and it will most likely have to many options for someone who wants a simple, stress free photoshoot. This leaves us with package 'B'. Now to increase the scarcity we are going to take package 'B' and cut the price. I know what you're thinking, "why would you cut the price of the package, aren't you going to lose money?". Well yes and no, we are only going to cut the price for one client. Let's say package 'B' costs $250 and we want to create scarcity so we cut it by 50% and only offer to the first person to book with me. I have now generated buzz because people are going to want to take advantage of the 50% off and I will get several more inquiries from families who are looking for deals.
Here's the Fun Part!
We have now generated one client for your portfolio. But we can do better! Using the same example, after we get the first client booked at 50% off we can now offer another package to the next person to book at 40% off, then the third person at 30% off, and so on until we get back up to our original price. At this point, we have now added about five new clients to our contact lists and five new photoshoots to our portfolios.
Conclusion
This, of course, is all hypothetical. I wanted to experiment with different marketing ideas as well as to try and find new clients through different means. This blog post is a start of what I hope will be a series of posts following my experimentation with marketing and trying to generate new clients.
I would appreciate any feedback you all want to give!
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