Great Success! Win A Dozen New Customers In 2 Hours
April 30th, 2008 by Tim Solley
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.
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April 30th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I’ve really been looking to get my name out into the community and recently learned about a 4th of July festival that is looking for children’s activities and is allowing businesses to set up and sponsor the booths. I am really considering doing it and this article just gave me the little push I needed. Thanks!
May 1st, 2008 at 8:11 am
Getting involved with the local community seems to be a great way to build business. My own experiences echo yours; volunteering to photograph recent a park fundraiser and ski club banquet have generated a lot of traffic and a few potential leads.
May 1st, 2008 at 11:09 am
Devan, go for it! A few tips that made our day successful:
1. Don’t be a wallflower behind your table. Stand out in front of your booth, brochures/rack cards/whatever in hand. When you see a target customer walk by, walk over and snag ‘em rather than waiting for them to come to you….or walk right on by.
2. Get your samples in order and make them look good. We even got a couple of those acrylic displays where you slide a paper (or a print in our case) into it and it stands up. Once of them even holds some 4×8″ rack cards that we had printed up at VistaPrint.
3. Got a logo? Get a banner made. We had a 3′x4′ vinyl banner made at alwayssign.com for $18 with free shipping. Local print shops quoted about $130 for the same banner. I just uploaded a giant JPG and the banner was here a few days later.
4. Run a show special that customers can get a package deal at a discount if they book at the show. This gives them a sense of urgency and they book a session. Otherwise they’ll forget about you after the show.
5. Sales tip: Ask questions, don’t just tell them about your products. Help them find the need to get photographs taken. Then, ask for their business and book the session. Finish up with something like “So, should we go ahead and schedule a session?” Don’t just leave it with “Have a look around our samples and let me know if you have any questions.” Ask for their business, and you’ll be surprised how many people will respond with a “yes” if you simply ask.
Matthew, doing community gigs is a great way to get your name out there. I once took the photos for a Habitat For Humanity unveiling of several new houses. Not only did I get my name out there, it turned out to be a really fun day, I made some new friends, and I got to feel good about helping out a really worthy charity.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:34 am
Great idea Tim, and rather practical too.
Curious, what kinda pictures did you put up in your stall? Im actually curious to see what your stall looked like? Got pictures?
Hope youre enjoying the mountains… its bloody hot down here in the planes :O)
May 2nd, 2008 at 11:08 am
Rooshad,
You know, I actually brought a camera with us to get a shot of the booth, but ended up so busy talking to prospective clients that I never had time to take a picture! I can describe it though:
1. The canopy. We got an “EZ Up” canopy from Sam’s Club. You can see them here: http://www.ezup.com. Ours is white. You can leave it open, or it comes with 4 zip on sides to enclose it.
2. The table and chairs. We just got a simple 6 foot folding table from Sam’s. We also picked up a four pack of those metal folding chairs from Sam’s.
3. The banner. As in my earlier comment, we got a 3×4 foot banner made online of our logo. It stands out nicely and attracted attention without being tacky. I think in the future we’ll have a couple more made for the booth. We’ll include photos on some. We taped the banner to our table so that it hung down.
4. The materials. Since we’re primarily family photogs, our samples have photos of families and kids on them. Here are the samples we had with us that day:
1 10×10 press printed book from White House Custom Colour. whcc.com
1 8×8 iMount Deluxe book from Art Leather artleather.com
1 5×5 iMount Deluxe book
1 8×10 canvas gallery wrap from White House
1 mVue folio from Art Leather
When opened up and displayed on the table, these samples took up most of the display.
5. Extras. I bought an 11×14″ acrylic sign holder with brochure pocket at OfficeMax for about $6. I had a 11×14 print made (Photoshopped it to leave room for the pocket). You can see an example here: http://www.displays2go.com/product.asp?ID=456. I also got a 5×7 holder to print the show special. We also put a clipboard with a bunch of blank lines and encouraged EVERYONE to put some contact information so that we could gather a list of potential clients. We ended up with around 50 names on that list.
Now, we have bigger plans for future events. There is a face painting company that always comes to these kids events. I’d like to work with those guys to send people to them and them send people to us. The idea is, we’ll put up the two walls and back to our booth. We’ll bring some lighting gear (just small flashes for portability) and set up a little photo area in the back of the booth. Kids can go and get their faces painted and then come to us where we’ll take some fun photos. After the show they can go to our web site and see the photos. Samples are a great way to sell, but samples OF THE ACTUAL CLIENT will go over much better. Mom and dad see the face painting photos, and hopefully they give us a call to schedule a full session.
As for the weather, it’s snowing today.
I love it.