Creative Marketing with an Image Box

by Skip Cohen

From prints to albums to image boxes, there are so many different ways to help you market your skillset. But for many of you, image boxes represent an entirely new direction, especially as a marketing tool. Here are three ideas targeting different types of clients: 

• Newlyweds: Statistics are very high that most brides and grooms within the 20-30 age group will start a family within six years of their wedding.* Why not include some blank mattes in the image box together with the images you're presenting? Each blank matte holds a certificate for an upcoming milestone event in the couple's life. For example, an anniversary sitting, followed by the first baby's arrival, a new home, etc. Be creative, think about those special moments in a couple's new life together, and create exciting offers to bring them back into your world. (* flowingdata.com)  
• Family and Children: Children's photography is perfect for an image box marketing program. Parents of a new baby receive some of the photographs in an image box together with a few additional blank mattes, again for all of the very special firsts in a baby's life. From first birthday to first haircut to first major holiday - the list goes on and on. Younger children should be included in "first day of school" portraits, first puppy,  Halloween portraits, holiday sittings, etc. 
• Third-Party Gifts: I mentioned third-party promotions in my post yesterday. It's a concept I first heard about from my buddy Doug Box. As the photographer, you identify a business person in your community to work with. For example, through third-party promoting, a photographer would give an insurance agent certificates, which they could give to special clients for a free portrait sitting. It's a gift from the agent to their clients. The brilliance of a program like this is the photographer is insulated from pricing erosion and looking like they're discounting their work. An image box could also be an ideal gift from a real estate office each time they sold a house to a new family - again, the list goes on and on. The box would be filled with blank mattes and promotions for various images of milestone events in the future.

WHCC

Bay Photo Lab

GraphiStudio

McKenna

Image boxes come in all shapes and sizes, and you've got the creativity to develop promotional programs that are just as diverse. Click on any of the four well-respected companies above to help give you more ideas. There are hundreds of others. So, if you don't see anything you like here, call your lab or album company and find out what they offer. 

The key is to be different and make your promotional offers unique from what your competitors are doing. As my buddy Terry Clark said several years ago:

"Look at what everybody else is going and then do something different!"