Quick Marketing Tip: Establishing Your Marketing Advantage
Whether your business has operated for many years or is just starting up, the place that it occupies in the market is based on how well you have positioned the business through your marketing activities and the word-of-mouth reputation generated by your clients. Achieving a favorable market position begins with a general understanding of your competition’s strengths and weaknesses, where you stand in the market today, and three key elements that will form the basis of your market-positioning efforts:
- Your artistic style
- Your product focus
- Your approach to hospitality branding
Assessing your Competition
For each product line that you offer begin by determining how important competition is in that specific market segment. Several key questions to answer are:
- Who are your competitors?
- Do your competitors do a good job of marketing?
- Given the competition, is this a market that you can dominate?
- If you cannot dominate the market, how do you wish to compete?
It is easier to dominate a market when there is little or no competition or if existing competition is not doing a good job of marketing. However, if your market includes one or more good photographers who do a competent job of marketing, then you must decide on the best method of competition to engage in based on the market position you wish to achieve and the time and money you are willing to spend.
Defining Your Place in the Market
Self-assessment is vital in creating a successful marketing plan, but for most business owners self-assessment is very difficult. Just as in life, we rarely see ourselves as others do, and we often underestimate our strengths and hold ourselves back because of our self-perceived weaknesses. Nonetheless, it is vital to identify and understand your business strengths and weaknesses. If necessary, invite several clients or friends to help you look at your business objectively, making sure that you do so in a way that prevents them from telling you what they think you want to hear.
Once your strengths and weaknesses are enumerated, make a list of them, then write sentences or bullet points that turn your strengths and weaknesses into selling features. These selling features will become key elements of your marketing plan, and ultimately they will be used for copywriting. You might expect that strengths would easier to develop as selling features than weaknesses, but it might not be as hard as you think to create great copy from a weakness turned into a strength. Following are some examples of both:
Strength: Excellent posing and lighting skills.
Selling feature: We make you look great!
Strength: Great reputation.
Selling feature: We are proud that our business has grown through the referral of satisfied clients.
Strength: Ability to make people feel at ease.
Selling feature: You’ll love the relaxed, homey environment of our studio. We guarantee that you’ll feel at ease in front of our camera.
Weakness: We don’t have an easy-to-find retail location.
Selling feature: Our picturesque environment offers countless settings for relaxed portraiture.
Weakness: We are brand new to the market.
Selling feature: We’re not your grandma’s portrait studio!
Weakness: No one knows us.
Selling feature: Have you heard the buzz about Smithville’s hip new portrait studio?
Defining Your Artistic Style
It is easier for consumers to recognize photography when it has an identifiable artistic style. Style is often the reason why buyers are attracted to a given art form, and that includes photography. A style usually does not develop overnight, and sometimes it’s not easy for a photographer to describe his or her style so that it can be put into words for marketing purposes. A good place to start the process is to select a collection of your favorite images, or those that clients admire, doing so by product line. Look at those images and begin jotting down words or phrases that describe what you see. If you hit a roadblock, ask clients or friends to help you complete this task. Here’s an example of the process based on the following pet portrait images created by Persnickety Pet Portraits, a division of Countryhouse Studios in Annville, Pennsylvania.
Words and phrases:
- painterly
- heartwarming
- pleasing as wall portraiture
- well composed
- well-regulated, dimensional lighting
- backgrounds and settings appropriate for the pet
Next, turn these words and phrases into sentence form to describe your artistic style, as is done below in portraying the style of the Persnickety Pet Portrait images shown on the previous page. We approach pet portraiture in the same artful manner by which we photograph people: selecting settings, compositional elements and lighting that are appropriate for the subjects being portrayed in order to achieve dimensional art pieces that serve as heartwarming decorative focal points for the home.
The Purpose of Defining Your Product Focus
As important as style is in attracting consumers, you have nothing to sell to them until you create products for them to purchase. One way to look at the difference between style and product focus is this: Style is your wings. Products are your landing gear! Your style can attract attention, but it takes products to get your style into the hands of clients in the form of something they can identify as useful or desirable. Many brilliantly artistic photographers fail in business because they don’t understand this important principle. A good way to assure that your product line has an appropriate product focus is to begin by writing down your key products categories, indicating how those products are used. Following is an example of this exercise for Persnickety Pet Portrait products:
- Individual portraits or collections of portraits that serve as decorative focal points for the home
- Composites that serve as decorative wall accents
- Black-and-white fine-art panels available in variety of sizes and framing options, including canvas wraps
- “Fun Week” specialty sessions and products for wall display and calendar collections
- Virtual paintings for featured wall decor
- Specialty products and accessories to carry, wear, mail and display
You will find that a similar listing for your major product lines will serve as a helpful reminder when performing numerous marketing tasks ranging from creating studio displays to preparing content for marketing materials.
The Professional Photographer's Guide to Marketing Success
by Ann K. Monteith.
Categorized In: quick marketing tips
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