Delilah Digital is 37 years old, married, with two children who are in school. She has a BA degree in Humanities. Her husband is a product manager at Clorox. Delilah has always been interested in photography, but recently took her interest to the next level. Along with thousands of other tech-savvy peers, Delilah recognized the business opportunity that advances in digital photography coupled with the increasing bandwidth available on the internet provided to somebody in her situation.
Delilah purchased a $1500 prosumer digital single-lens reflex camera with a couple of nice lenses, a new computer with Photoshop CS3, and set up shop as a photography studio. She turned to BluDomain for an inexpensive, easy-to-maintain, but very appealing web site. She took pictures at weddings for a few of her friends just to get some practice; now she is doing some senior portraits and weddings along with the occasional family photograph. She is hopeful that the coming Christmas season will bring lots of family business.
Her prices are about 2/3 of the studio that has been in town since she was in middle school. She has enough business to keep herself busy about half the time, but would like to do even more.
While she has primarily relied on word-of-mouth for her marketing, she knows that she needs to be more professional about getting the word out. She recently bought a yellow pages ad, and last summer spent about $1200 on a direct mailing to Seniors.
That’s the good news. The rest of the story is that she is completely overwhelmed by the unanticipated complexity of this brave new world of digital photography. She recognizes that she could spend the rest of her life studying Photoshop and still not learn everything. She has resorted to lurching after various highly-acclaimed plug-ins to try and bring her quality up and the complexity of the workflow down.
She has also learned that the automatic mode on her camera isn’t the setting that the photographer who has been in town since middle school uses when he takes pictures. There are so many variables that have to be accounted for every time you push the shutter – composition, lighting, posing – and did you remember all the right settings for white balance and exposure compensation and ISO and on and on and on.
She is also feeling guilty about the rate of money that is going out compared to the rate of money that is coming in. She is spending not just on cameras and lenses, but on software and lighting and meters and tripods and training and magazines and books.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Chapter 10, Buyer Persona, Part I
I developed a table in word for my two buyer personii. I can't figure out how to cut it and paste it so I am hoping to be able to attach a pdf file as a picture. We'll see shortly, won't we.
It didn't. being a clever photographer, I opened the pdf file in Photoshop and saved it as a jpeg. Let's see if that works.
Chapter 10: Initial Musing on Buyer Persona
Buyer Persona
How should I segment? Let me count the ways . . .
It seems like there is a natural division between old studios and new.
Old studios have been around for a while, usually have their roots in the film days, have a larger existing client base, disdain the new studios, and are reluctant to change.
New studios are a lot like me. Someone bought a digital camera and decided they wanted to make money with it and discovered that it ain’t as easy as it looks.
Hmmm. There may be a size or volume distinction, but that would generally mirror old and new distinction – the new studios are generally staffless, while the older studios tend to have several employees, for example.
I don’t know that geography is a major distinguishing factor. A small studio in Tennessee is dealing with many of the same issues as a small studio in Oregon.
I could do a Nikon vs Canon persona, but that wouldn’t serve too well. That’s a story for another entrepreneur. Maybe I will just start with the two personas.
How should I segment? Let me count the ways . . .
It seems like there is a natural division between old studios and new.
Old studios have been around for a while, usually have their roots in the film days, have a larger existing client base, disdain the new studios, and are reluctant to change.
New studios are a lot like me. Someone bought a digital camera and decided they wanted to make money with it and discovered that it ain’t as easy as it looks.
Hmmm. There may be a size or volume distinction, but that would generally mirror old and new distinction – the new studios are generally staffless, while the older studios tend to have several employees, for example.
I don’t know that geography is a major distinguishing factor. A small studio in Tennessee is dealing with many of the same issues as a small studio in Oregon.
I could do a Nikon vs Canon persona, but that wouldn’t serve too well. That’s a story for another entrepreneur. Maybe I will just start with the two personas.
Chapter 10, Organization Goals: Take Two
So now that I’ve spilled my guts on that topic, and re-read the first part of Chapter 10, let me back up and articulate some of my organization goals. Since I am the entire organization, it is kind of hard to separate these from the processes and products whirling around in my mind.
- I want to make enough money at this so that my wife only has to teach five more years, and so that we can pay off our mortgage and debts and accumulate $2 million towards a retirement and security fund. That means I only have to extract $450 from each of the 6,000 studios on my magic list over the next five years. Although I doubt that is the metric I will end up using, it does make it a little more tangible.
- This is kind of like developing curriculum for the classroom. It’s difficult to know where to start because you can see so many connections. What I am referring to hear is my business plan. I mean, one of the goals (duh! I just wrote it down) of the organization is to make money. But I don’t have a business plan. I don’t intend to make a million bucks next month, but I do want to start somewhere. But how can you develop a business plan and decide how you are going to start making money without identifying a product or a service that you are going to offer for sale? Maybe it’s time to move on to the next step before I get too wrapped around some axle.
- I want to be at the very leading edge of consultancies that provide internet-based marketing services to small-studio photographers. I am the expert on all this stuff so they don’t have to be.
- I want to be recognized as the thought leader on this subject within the photography industry. I want to speak at trade shows and write articles for magazines and be asked questions by industry analysts.
- I want to automate and refine my processes to the max. I want to take advantage of the geographic spread – a studio in Red-Bluff California can be running exactly the same copy as a studio in Crown Point Indiana, and none of the consumers will ever know (I will not hide this from my clients). To wit, if I write one great ad it can be used all over the place.
There. Those feel a little more like organization goals. An umbrella and litmus test for my activities. I should be able to stop and ask myself at any point of any day if what I am doing is taking me closer to or further away from those objectives.
Chapter 10, Part One: Organization Goals; False Start
Here’s what I’m thinking. There are a lot of small-studio photographers out there who don’t know the first thing about marketing on the internet. I know the first two things, so that’s a good enough head start. Basically what I want to do is help small-studio photographers all over the United States develop web-based marketing campaigns.
I see three or four major vehicles for doing this. All of them are based on the content-driven philosophy of David Scott.
- Google AdWords and Facebook Ads
- Blogs that double as landing pages
- Permission-based e-mail campaigns
- Facebook and MySpace Profiles and viral marketing
But those are products, aren’t they. Let me just think out loud for a while and then get things in the right format and order. Because I have a keen sense that each of these near-products solves major problems for studio owners.
Here are some more things that are on my mind:
- I want to manage campaigns. I think a piece of value that I can add is from a mass of accumulated data. In other words, because I am doing this for small studios all over the country, I can amass more data about which keywords work, which ad text works, and I will have more experience and information at hand than a small studio would in order to maximize click-through rates.
The principle or critical success factor that derives from this is that I have to develop the processes and disciplines to systematically analyze that data - I want to write ads. I want to develop an evolving and continuously improving library of ads for photographers in a variety of categories from senior portraits to weddings to family photographers so that I can provide successful ad copy to my clients.
- I want to optimize landing pages. I want to develop the best landing pages in the photography universe – landing pages that create business for my clients.
- I want to go viral. I want to help my clients develop a following on Facebook and MySpace that will drive business to their studio. I want to do this by creating and optimizing their profiles and managing their fan recruiting and, to an extent, correspondence.
This will involve a major philosophical shift for some people about protecting electronic imagery. - I want to develop an evolving and continuously improving library of articles for small-studio photographers that become the fodder for their permission-based e-mail marketing efforts.In all this, I am talking about content more than appearance. I do not want to get involved in web-site design. I also do not want to get involved in search-engine optimization.
Alas, these are still products, aren't they.
Exploring The New Rules of Marketing and PR
This is actually a cross between an e-mail and a blog. I recently read David M. Scott's book, "New Rules of Marketing and PR." I am starting a one-horse (me being the horse) business to offer internet marketing services to small photography studios. The purpose of this blog is to share my musings and experiences as an explorer surveying these waters -- marketing, internet marketing, viral marketing -- for the first time.
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