Pricing… you can’t be a professional photographer for very long without becoming embroiled in the subject of how to price your work (well, you could, I suppose, but you would never make any money). Then there is the question of, not only what prices to charge, but also how to make your clients aware of your price list without them either running away or thinking you are trying to pressure-sell them.
Price Lists! Get ‘em Here!
In the time that I’ve been working as a professional photographer, I’ve personally tried different methods of communicating my prices to clients and potential clients, with varying degrees of success. These include the usual suspects…
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Take a closer look at the question above and see if you can spot one of selling’s most amazing secrets. I hear this question a lot from my prospects during my sales presentations when they are unsure of the investment needed for a portrait of wedding collection. One of the biggest keys to earning a great living from your photography is locked up inside that little question. Until recently, I might have missed it myself, but when you know it’s there, you really can’t miss it!
Did you find it yet? If you did, then you should be congratulated on your perception. If not, here’s the answer: It’s actually two questions all rolled up into one. Even the people who ask me the question are usually unaware that they’re in fact asking about two distinctly different things. The two questions contained inside are:
- What is the price?
- What is the cost?
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Stock photography, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to an industry that licenses images for specified uses. Agencies (or individual photographers) act rather like a library, where photographs can essentially be checked out for a fee depending on the type of use. Like a library book, there’s no limit to the number of times a photograph can be used, providing the photographer with a potentially lucrative income from their portfolio.
We’ve all seen stock photography, whether we realize it or not – in magazine articles, print ads, brochures, on web sites. Stock photographs are almost everywhere, and professional photographers have made a good living off the business of producing stock for many years.
But, like other areas of the photography industry, the business of stock photography has undergone a major upheaval over the last few years or so, especially so since the introduction of digital photography…
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Pricing our photography services and products causes us more headaches than trying to read in the dark. It sometimes feels as though we’re in the dark, too. To do it properly actually takes a lot of effort, much trial and error, and a degree of personal detachment.
Don’t Lower Your Prices:
Imagine how hard it would be to sell something so expensive that you had to convince not only your client, but yourself too, that it’s worth the asking price. This is the problem a lot of photographers feel they are faced with – and many of them respond by reducing their prices unnecessarily, to a level they themselves might feel more comfortable with.
But why does this happen?
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One of the biggest mistakes made by photographers new to the business (myself included) is to literally give their work away for little or no profit. People new to the business often mistakenly believe that to become successful they need to compete only on price. I was once naïve enough myself to think that if I could penetrate the market by offering cheaper products than the competition, I could gain ground and then raise my prices once my name became better known. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the best way to go.
Buy A Porsche Today – 50% Off:
The world economy might be in complete turmoil at the moment, with the news full of doom and gloom, and it’s true that some people are spending less because of it, but that has little to do with the actual prices of things. A Porsche is still an expensive buy, as is a Rolex watch (a real one, that is). Can you imagine how the consumer’s view of these items would change if they were suddenly available at a half or a quarter of the original price? People would be suspicious of them, lose faith in the brand, and consider them a bad investment.
A Porsche car or a Rolex watch is viewed by some as a highly valued status symbol; with its value being quite separate to price. The value lies in what it gives to the person purchasing it, the price being what the purchaser is willing to pay to own the item.
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One of the problems with being a wedding photographer is that we have to wait for the client to come to us, like some creature that uses ambush techniques to catch its prey. Unlike with families, it’s next to impossible to identify a true target market for weddings and mail postcards to them – there simply is no means I’m aware of to access that particular demographic and obtain a mailing list.
Sometimes, the wait can be very long and frustrating and the silence of the phone during that time can be deafening. We’re proud of the quality of our work and feel that it should sell itself as soon as anyone lays eyes on it, right? So, we sit by the phone, willing it to ring, or check our email 500 times a day in the hope that someone, anyone, will email us with an enquiry. Sound familiar?
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What do we do when the telephone finally rings and we find someone on the other end that’s possibly interested in hiring us to photograph their wedding? The scenario probably goes something like this: We excitedly describe our wonderful photography, our packages and prices, and then get really excited when they say they’ll think it over and call us back, right?
All very good, except for one big problem – How many of those prospects actually do call back and hire us for their wedding?
Not very many, that’s for sure. But why is that? We’re left wondering why they bothered to call us in the first place! We surely feel let down that they lied and never called back. You don’t need me to tell you just how very frustrating this can be.
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