Marketing wisdom gained from trial and error
Chicago Boudoir has been in existence for just over 2 years now and I’ve definitely grown and learned a lot in that timeframe. I started the business with knowledge and experience in photography and also with specific experience in boudoir. I’ve had some great mentors! However, many things that work well in my business have been learned the hard way, after making mistakes.
I’m grateful to have learned from early missteps and to have not made any mistakes so serious that they derailed my business. However, these lessons weren’t just learned, they were EARNED. I’ll list a few here so that you can learn the easy way:
Podcast advertising. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I’ve bought things that I’ve learned about on podcasts. I love the recommendations that I get. So I assumed that lots of people just like me make buying decisions while listening to podcasts. I can’t definitely confirm that one way or the other, just that I got absolutely zero customers from my podcast efforts. My business is greatly about geography—90% of my clients are from the Chicago area, so I didn’t want to pay for podcast ads outside my territory. I used Podbean to manage that. It had a decent interface and was not hard to figure out—it just wasn’t a fit for my business. One thing that went very well was finding a voice-over artist for my ad for less that $100 on Fiverr. Here’s a podcast ad that I created:
Pursuit of influencers. Getting your product in the hands of influencers is Marketing 101. I didn’t have any illusions that I could afford Victoria’s Secret models to endorse my photography. I also wasn’t going to get Oprah or Michelle Obama to want anything to do with boudoir. So I began reaching out to prominent Chicago social media influencers (bloggers, instagrammers) to trade a free shoot for social media shout outs. This was a bit of a mixed bag. It was a lot of work to get any to respond and then get them into the studio. Several booked a shoot and then never showed up. It’s surprisingly hard to give away free services! In most cases the best thing they did was leave a nice review. In a few cases they gave me a lot of backlinks and told their friends. Special thanks to one influencer in particular, who went above and beyond:
Major Discounts. First, I love all my clients and really enjoy working with a very diverse group of clients. Let me just say that clients who pay full price or a small discount for their shoot are inevitably much happier with their shoot that those who take a major discount. It has nothing to do with how I shoot, the end product is just as good on a discounted shoot as it is with a full price shoot. However, in almost every instance where I have offered a major discount I have clients complaining, showing up late, cancelling with short notice and making outlandish requests. There is clearly some psychological factor at play that I don’t fully understand, but the price that clients pay does seem to reflect the value they place on the experience. I will continue to offer occasional specials, I just make sure it’s not a frequent tactic.