For Photographers

Message Tailoring

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When marketing their photography services, professional photographers must recognize that business clients have different needs from retail customers.

For retail customers, those who purchase family portraits or wedding photos, the images themselves are the final product. But for business clients, photos serve as tools to achieve broader objectives, primarily to drive company revenue.

Retail customers make purchasing decisions based on a mix of emotions, whereas business clients are typically driven by one overriding emotion: fear. Fear of making a bad decision, fear of losing money, or fear of damaging their reputation in front of superiors.

For small businesses, where photographers interact directly with the owner, the goal is generally to help increase sales. In larger companies, the priorities can be more complex. While sales growth remains important, it may not always be the primary reason for hiring a photographer. For example, photos might be needed for public relations, communications, or brand positioning.
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Making Contact

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My web site offers three ways for prospective customers to contact me: telephone number, e-mail address, and a contact form.

I thought that most people would use the e-mail link. My assumption was that people would prefer and trust their own e-mail software more than a basic web-page contact form.

Over the past three years, 5% of potential customers used the telephone number, 30% used the e-mail address and 65% used the contact form.

Forms can capture not only the person’s name and e-mail address but also any other information you might need. However asking too many questions risks turning a simple contact form into an interrogation and frighten customers away.

Contact forms are easy to implement. Web hosts usually include CGI-based e-mail forms. Blog software either has contact forms built-in or there’s a free plugin available. There are a few third-party-hosted form services.

Contact forms do attract spammers and there are ways to minimize this nuisance. But any spam that does come through a contact form is far outweighed by the benefits of having such a form on your web site. I mention this because I’ve noticed that many photographers’ web sites don’t have a contact form.

 

Don’t Get Comfortable

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If a photographer is comfortable with the prices they charge, then their pricing is too low.

A photographer should never set their prices based on what they would pay because the photographer is not the customer. Pricing should be determined by the value to the customer, not value to the photographer.

A customer’s willingness to pay hinges on their perception of value. Their perception is always different than the photographer’s.

The photographer sets the price and the customer sets the value.

If a customer decides that the value is equal or greater than the price, then they’ll invest in the photography services. For commercial and corporate photography, value is determined by the usage of the photography and the intended outcome of that usage.

Of course, to justify their prices, a photographer must always make sure their work creates value for the customer.

Once a professional photographer understands this concept, they’ll be comfortable with uncomfortable prices.

 

Changes to Canadian Copyright Law

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A few days ago, Bill C-11, the Copyright Modernization Act, received Royal Assent. This means that Canadian photographers will be treated the same as all other Canadian creators and they will finally have similar rights to photographers in most other countries.

The new law is not yet in force but for photographers, here’s a quick look at some of the changes to the Copyright Act.

[Update: Much of the new law became law on November 7, 2012.]

Author and Copyright Owner

Section 10 has been repealed. This section used to say that the person who owned the film or memory card was the Author of the pictures. Now the photographer is the Author. Only the Author has Moral Rights.
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Air Ball

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Ranaan Katz, a minority co-owner of the NBA’s Miami Heat, filed a lawsuit last year against a blogger who was critical of Katz’ commercial real estate business.

Two weeks ago, Katz filed a copyright infringement suit against the same blogger for publishing an unflattering picture of him. The photo was apparently taken while Katz was standing courtside at a Miami Heat game. He’s also suing Google for refusing to remove the photo from the Web.

Katz is claiming that he owns the copyright to the picture without offering any proof.
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Bottom Of The Ninth

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Some photo assignments can be challenging in one way or another. But a professional photographer should welcome such assignments as an opportunity to build customer trust and enhance the photographer’s reputation.

Any photographer can show up, shoot a few business portraits, and deliver photos a few days later. However the photographer didn’t really prove anything to the customer except that the photographer was competent.

But if. . .
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Spray and Pray

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On a sports photography forum, photographers were discussing the best ways to handle the thousands of pictures they each shoot during a game.

On a wedding photographers forum, one person said he usually shoots over 3,000 pictures per wedding. Another said he often does 5,000 pictures.
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