Ten years ago, Milwaukee photographer Joy Vertz was running Shoot the Moon Photography from her home. Within her first year of business, she moved into a studio and a year after that, she opened the doors to her second studio. Today, Joy’s studios employ ten people and book 700-800 sessions each year. In addition to running a thriving business, she is known for being a inspiring mentor and for her expertise on running a profitable business.
Joy attributes her rapid growth and continued success in part to offering outstanding customer service and understanding the value of her time. She knows to the penny what it costs each hour that her studio is open and understands that to be profitable, she has to make careful decisions about how she spends her time.
“I spend my time shooting and marketing. The other things, packaging, selling, editing…are done by other people so I can focus on things that
help me grow my business.”
According to Joy, getting clients in the door isn’t hard once you figure out who your target market is.
“You won’t be the best fit for everyone so you need to focus your efforts on
your “dream client”.”
Joy uses a number of marketing techniques and has a great referral program but she says the key to her success is:
“Treat clients amazing.
Word of mouth is the best way to get people in the door….As photographers, we need to make it easy for people to talk about us.”
Joy loves how easy StickyAlbums makes it for her clients to talk about her business. It’s not unusual for clients to share them with people they know at soccer games and school functions and she’s booking more sessions because of it! Additionally, by using StickyAlbums as a bonus to encourage higher sales and as an incentive to sign up for her senior rep program, they also improve her bottom line.
To hear more marketing tips, including tips for email marketing and some advice especially for those who are not as busy as they’d like to be, watch this video with StickyAlbums founder Nate Grahek and Joy.
We’re excited to share Joy’s upcoming Video Series, “3 Weeks to Pricing Perfection”. If at least one of these problems might be all too familiar in your world:
- Pricing to get clients in the door, but feeling overworked for no gain
- Pricing to get better profits, but still worrying that customers won’t come in
- Feeling like you’re guessing all the time instead of making confident decisions for good reasons
- Wanting to just get back to photography – it’s why this business was started, after all!
Help is on the way! Run, don’t walk to register for this awesome free resource.
