If you’re a Borat fan, you caught on to my title immediately.

Since moving to Colorado on New Years day, we’ve been busy doing lots of things that don’t involve our portrait business. For the most part, these activities have names like “hiking” and “snowshoeing”.

But a few weeks back we decided it was time to get back on the bandwagon and get our business moving again. But now that we’ve moved to another state, all of our referrals are toast. Since it’s much harder to win new customers than to cultivate existing ones, we knew we had our work cut out for us.

Then an idea struck. We had never done any trade shows/home shows/festivals before. It just so happened that a children’s festival would be coming up soon, and vendor booths would be part of the festival. We plunked down our $25 entry fee, bought a $150 awning at Sams Club, a table and chairs, had a banner printed, and put together some materials and displays for the booth. The total cost for our booth was around $300.

The festival lasted four hours, but the bulk of our activity took place during the last two hours. During that time we booked 12 sessions and had commitments for about a half dozen others. It’s safe to say our investment for the booth was paid for that day.

We found that there was a huge advantage to being exposed to so many families. All of our samples were there laid out for prospective customers to see. We even ran a show special that included a session and several prints at a discount, if they booked their session that day.

Having a booth at a festival was easily the most effective method we’ve yet tried for drumming up new business. Have any of you dear readers tried this sales tactic? Did it work? Drop a comment and let us all know your experiences.