Growing With New Products and a New Target Audience

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by Skip Cohen

​It's Marketing Monday, rolling in right after a holiday weekend. It's a great time to consider ways to grow your business, notably by expanding to new products and a new target audience.

While wandering through the SCU archives, the artwork above came to light. It's a powerful statement and excellent advice for any entrepreneur.

As I thought about how many photographers need to diversify and expand their target audience, I thought back to ideas that came out of the pandemic. Back then, I shared a post about JP Elario doing Facetime portraits for clients as he worked through a small part of the challenge with physical distancing. In contrast, Steven Gotz's idea of converting family portraits to coloring book pages for young children provides an easy way to keep in touch with clients while utilizing archived images from your files.
 
Well, here's another one and the need is still enormous - outdoor seating at restaurants!

One ingredient to bring back business following the pandemic was outdoor seating, but most restaurants, especially those that didn't offer table service outside, needed help in the decorating department. Well, it's summertime, and the pandemic is in the past, but the need is even greater today! 

It's a perfect application for Bay Photo's Performance EXT Metal prints. I wrote about my own experience many years ago.

The original EXT Metal print on the right, was physically damaged by a contractor working on the house. However, it was reprinted, and the image has been outdoors for at least five years. While under a microscope, there may be some deterioration; there's nothing visible to the naked eye. It's been outside the entire time, exposed to the sun, heat, and rain of South Florida.

The two smaller images have also been outside for approximately the same time, and with even less shelter from the elements. They's just as beautiful today as when they were hung, and have only been brought in during hurricanes!

Two Additional Markets to Consider

Restaurants: With or without outdoor seating, the demand for food photography has never been higher. It may have started with the pandemic, but it has continued to grow with the Internet and online marketing. Additionally, carry-out ordering remains a popular option. Check out any of your favorite restaurants, and most often, you'll find a massive need for better photography.

Consumer Marketing: Take the idea of outdoor prints one step further, and instead of thinking outside the box, let's think like there's no box. Just about every client you've photographed over the years has a back porch or patio, some area outside their home or apartment. Let's encourage people to appreciate artwork outside their own homes. 

Here's an opportunity to offer something different and exciting to your existing audience. Let's start to plant a few marketing seeds with a new audience. The concept is also ideal for creating engaging content for your blog. So, from restaurants needing a more substantial presence outdoors to photography for their websites to helping clients bring photography to a new location in their home - most of you are sitting on an untapped market.

You're the only one who can plant the seed for new ideas with your target audience...but you also need to follow through and take action. You need to be an innovator!

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"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things." 
Theodore Levit