When you offer your services in a crowded marketplace, it can be difficult to persuade potential clients that you’re different. How can you prove that you’re the best option when someone’s looking for a school photographer? Upselling your services is vital.
Let’s face it, education professionals don’t have the time to sift through every option and weigh up the pros and cons, so a quick Google search can lead to a whole heap of photographers jostling for their attention. If you can make the choice easier, your lead generation can increase.
Going the extra mile and upselling your services will put your business on a positive footing. A good starting point is getting to grips with what your clients want – how can you add value and what are they interested in purchasing?
Here are 5 tips for upselling your services and making more sales:
Offering Personalized Products
Being able to show your versatility as a photographer is important and offering additional personalized products into your sales pitch can help you clinch a new client. You can get really creative with school photography and think about products that will capture children and parents’ attention – mugs, keyrings, t-shirts.
It’s worth catering your products to specific age groups too. If you’re photographing older children then suggest special items that celebrate certain milestones, such as leavers’ t-shirts or hoodies.
Boosting your sales with extra personalized products can help you to build trust and create an extra source of revenue.
Streamline your Workflow
Invest in technologies to streamline your workflow and professionalise your service. Products such as ID-Shoot allows you to print on-site proof cars with individual. This gives you an edge on your competition.
For larger photographers and labs, using print fulfillment workflow automation like MaxLab does just that. It helps you to streamline your processes and enables you to use the valuable time that you’ll save to find other ways to upsell. You will significantly save on production costs whilst also being able to focus on producing high-quality work.
Features like Face Detect and the tagging and search options allow you to take control of your database, and fulfil print extremely quickly.
Build your Online Presence
Having a decent website and social media presence can become a strong foundation for your business. You need to have a digital place that anchors your work, skills, products and expertise and communicates what’s best about your business.
One of the cheapest and most effective ways to get noticed is to write copy that engages people – craft a solid brand voice that cuts through your website and social media output. Your personality is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.
Combine your brand voice with a slick, seamless website that’s been designed with the user in mind and is built to convert with compelling calls-to-action. When clients find you online and through social channels, your website should impress them.
Search for Opportunities
Build a rapport with your clients and find out if they have any other events going on at their school that they’ve not thought about photographing before. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, so starting a conversation about other opportunities you can help with could open the door to more work.
Don’t settle for the status quo – work on positioning yourself as someone who’s searching for new ways to show the school in a good light. You can even offer to improve a school’s digital strategy and create blog content or email marketing services that provide more visibility through photo updates.
Sports days, proms, guest speakers – there are so many fun, exciting things going on in schools that you can start to develop fruitful partnerships and visit more often than a couple of days every year.
Give Reasons to Pick your Business
It’s all very well having an excellent pitch to potential clients that tells them how great you are, but having demonstrable evidence that clients are pleased with your work is even more persuasive. After working with clients, it’s imperative that you ask them for feedback or testimonials.
Once you have a credible collection of feedback, you can begin to use this in your marketing collaterals. Having statistics and stories that you can use on your website, in your meetings and when networking gives you factual, evidence-based information to give to future clients.
You can give an emotive pitch, but being able to back up your story with stats and testimonials makes your offering even stronger and allows you to upsell by using positive past experiences.
Package your business in a way that confidently communicates how you’re different and can create more value for a client. By doing this, you’ll be able to generate more leads and make more sales.
Professionalise your service and streamline your processes with MaxLab, find more opportunities to work with a school and products to sell them, work on your digital presence and use your past client experiences to show your credentials.
Read more: How to stand out from other School Photographers
