While you’re stuck at home and not able to create new work, it’s hard to think of ways to keep earning a living. If photography is your only source of income, you might be panicking right about now and wondering whether your business is going to survive the pandemic.
But there are a number of ways that you can continue to make a living during this time, creating new content without ever having to leave your home. One of these is to take your old sessions and upsell them to your clients in a whole new way. Excited to earn some extra money? Read on for how!
Decide on a theme
The first thing that you need to do is to decide on a theme for your new marketing plan. This will be dependent on what kind of photography you do – a wedding photographer will need to take a different approach to a children’s photographer, for example! We’re going to pepper this guide with examples based on a family photographer, but you can adapt them to your own needs – just think about the kind of work you do and what your clients like.
You could go for something seasonal which is very related to the current time – such as a spring shoot, a summer shoot, or a connection to a particular upcoming holiday. Easter would have been a perfect example, so we’ll take that as our example theme – and remember, you can use this next year even if the lockdown is already just a memory!
A good way to decide on your theme can be to look at Summerana’s existing overlays and editing packages. These will be available for you to use while you’re putting your new packages together, so why not pick a package and base your theme around that? For example, a family photograph might be transformed by the addition of cute and cuddly Easter animals, like bunnies, through our overlays!
Create your marketing materials
Just like any news session or product, you need to have marketing materials on hand to push this upsell. Start with an existing shoot – it can be something you’ve used as a session example before, if you want, or a favourite item from your portfolio. A lot of photographers like to shoot family, friends, or loyal clients at lower prices to create session examples, so if you have some of these lying around, they would be the perfect choice.
Put the images from the session into Photoshop and start adding your chosen overlays and edits into the frame. There are guides on how to use each of our individual packages, so you can see how to get those bunnies looking like they are a real part of the picture by creating a composite! Here are a few placement ideas if you’re making everything cute and fluffy:
- Use a picture that makes it look like the child is holding, petting, stroke, or leaning down to look at the bunny. If you already have an image of them holding something different, this is a perfect way to insert the overlay and have it look natural!
- Make the bunnies giant and funny, or tiny and cute, in comparison to your models
- Turn the photo into a magical wonderland by editing the background as well: use our WinterizeMe collection to paint fall colours to winter, add snow, and make it a frozen festivity; add falling flower petals; warm everything up with the ColorFall collection and create swirls of leaves caught on the wind; make it look like the moment was capturing in an April shower of rain – the sky is the limit!
Whatever changes you make, just make sure that they create a fun and magical end result that your clients will want to treasure. Make them jealous of the family in the pictures that got to have such a great shoot!
Market to your clients
Remember, this upsell has to go to clients you’ve already shot with in the past, so targeting them is going to be very easy. If you have a mailing list, you can go ahead and send out an email to any client you’ve worked with in the past to let them know about your new offer.
Make sure that your copy is positive and you emphasise the possibilities for the images. Don’t moan on about not being able to work right now – make it about the client and the new, fun images they could be enjoying. Tell them this is a safe way to capture new family memories and bring a smile to faces of relatives who can’t see them in person right now.
You’ll want to offer digital downloads as well as print or photobook options – convert your normal packages, perhaps with a slightly lower fee because of the fact that you aren’t taking new images.
After the email has gone out, be sure to share the same images along with brief copy explaining the offer to all your social media pages, and share them on your website as well. Having a one-click button for clients to order new edits of their images would be really helpful in terms of easily converting sales!
Finally, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest advertisements are certainly to be considered if you want to get the word out there a bit more!
Make the sales
If you have a few stragglers who don’t yet want to commit, keep moving that message out there. Set a period of time in which you are offering the deal so that it feels limited and exclusive, and you can also remind people when it’s about to expire. If you do get good sales out of it, you can roll right into offering a new upsell session on a different theme afterwards!
Take the opportunity to keep some money rolling in while you’re on lockdown. Doing these edits from home and getting some extra cash will help keep you afloat, and give your days some much-needed purpose and structure!