Senior Portrait Buzz Marketing Techniques

Believe it or not, there are several ways to get priceless buzz marketing for your senior portrait photography studio. If you have spent any amount of time reading up on marketing, you know that you can't beat word of mouth advertising. So how do you get great word of mouth advertising from high school seniors? Mainly, by putting them to work for you!

Spending time building a relationship with schools, yearbook editors, and students is something that needs to be done yearly. If done effectively these buzz marketing techniques will give you countless amounts of word of mouth advertising that not only go directly to your target market, but come from them as well!

Senior Portrait Marketing - Working with the School

Building up a relationship with schools can be a hard thing to do. Sometimes it is as simple as doing a little charity work. Other times, you have to continually give a away prints, time, and services. It usually work out in the end though, the school tends to give you free advertising at events and give you credit for any of your work hanging in the school. The more work you have in the school, the more popular your name will become with the seniors at the school.

Another great way to get your foot in the door at a high school is to work with the newspaper and yearbook staff. Contact the newspaper teacher about teaching some basic photography skills to the class photographers. You could come in every few weeks and teach some different skills. You could also go to a few of the schools sporting events and offer the year book editor some of your photographs. Yearbook and news paper editors are always looking for quality photos to use.

Working with the seniors and the school will help make you more popular with the seniors and in turn make you popular with their parents.

Senior Portrait Marketing - Putting the Seniors to Work

One of the best marketing maneuvers any senior portrait photographer can do is to start a senior ambassador program. A senior ambassador program usually recruits high school juniors and/pr seniors to market them in school in exchange for free senior portraits.

Senior ambassador programs generally work by offering a the student a discount for each senior they refer to your photography studio. You can create custom cards for the ambassador to hand out at school. This way they can get credit for each senior they refer. You can also ask clients who referred them to your studio.

Another option is to just give away a senior portrait sitting, this way you have seniors walking around school showing your photographs to other seniors. Could you really ask for better advertising?

This is a great marketing idea for so many reasons. The obvious is the worth of mouth marketing. Your senior ambassador will have a much greater impact on high school seniors than any amount of marketing materials you can publish.

Using this program you can reach a much wider area of high schools for very little money. For the cost of prints and your time, you can have the best word of mouth advertising going directly to your target market. The cost of giving away three or four senior portrait sittings is pennies compared to how much it will bring you in return.

Senior Portrait Marketing - Hire an Appretence

High school students who are interested in photography are always looking for a mentor. Spend some time planning an apprentice program for your photography studio. This quality time with the student will build up your buzz marketing at the school.

Your apprentice is sure to take their work to school to show off. They will then be asked about where they did this, who taught them, and slues of other questions. All of which will bring up your photography studios name up over and over.

If you are worried about your apprentice "stealing" some of your potential clients, offer to let him shoot some. Your apprentice will love the idea of getting paid photograph his friends.

Come up with a deal that allows your apprentice to share in the profits of seniors he brings in and shoots. If your apprentice is allowed to shoot seniors, they are sure to spread the word about working for your photography studio even