Welcome to the Hair of the Dog podcast. I'm Nicole Begley and this is episode number 16, a Marketing Trifecta Win. Stay tuned!

Welcome to the Hair of the Dog podcast. If you're a pet photographer, ready to make more money and start living a life by your design, you've come to the right place. And now your host, pet photographer, travel addict, chocolate martini connoisseur, Nicole Begley.

Hi everybody. Nicole here from Hair of the Dog. Thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. I am so happy that you're here. We're going to be diving into really my most favorite marketing promotion of all time. I'm gonna break it down for you and give you the nitty gritty so you can do this in your business as well. But first I want to take a minute to let you guys know about the Hair of the Dog Academy. If you've been around, you've probably heard a little bit about that if you've been around the pet photography world a little bit, and the Hair of the Dog Academy is a membership site that I created. Gosh, it's been a year now. Took all of my flagship courses, put them into this Academy, added a dash of support with laser coaching office hours, added a pinch of guest instructors with some of the best, pet photographers in the industry and it is a fantastic community and an incredible resource and guess what? The doors are open right now, but they're only open for a few more days. So I would love for you to join us over there in the Academy. If you go to Hair of the Dog academy.com/academy you can check out all the details. One important thing to note is that, it's something I've been thinking about for, Oh my gosh, I don't know, two years and I finally got it all done and I'm so excited and happy with how it turned out. New in the Academy....I need a drum roll. It's probably not very good. You probably couldn't hear it. But anyway. Imagine a drum roll. We now have marketing templates in the Academy that are free for Academy members. Yearly members get them all as soon as they join. Monthly members will get a new template each month. We have from simple business cards to full-on 20 page inquiry guide, session-preparation guides, product guides, digital file education for your clients, art care cards. Oh my gosh. So many things. And there's even more to be developed and it's going to be amazing. They are beautiful. They are designed in Photoshop so you can customize the fonts and the colors and the styles, the...Oh, the other thing—the copy is in there. So you don't have to guess about, well what do I put in a session preparation guide. Oh no. All the copy's there. And guess what? It also went to a professional copywriter. So it's not just me doing the copy. I started it out and the amazing Kim, my copywriter, went through and made it fantastic. So it's looking good. Your clients are gonna love it. Um, so definitely check it out. Check out the Academy. I would love to see you there. Remember, it's only open for a few more days and it is quite possibly the best value in the photography industry, not just the pet photography industry. So promise me you'll check it out. All right. But in the meantime, let's jump back over to what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about my favorite marketing, um, not solution, I guess solution. My favorite marketing strategy, that's the word I was looking for. A charitable marketing. So what is charitable marketing? When I say charitable marketing, a lot of people assume I'm talking about silent auctions, which I do love some silent auctions here and there, but that's not what we're talking about today. Charitable marketing is a different animal. It's when you partner with a rescue or a charity to help them raise money while attracting new clients to your business. And I should say, new clients that spend what your session average is, not just new clients spending, you know, just a little bit of money here and there. We're attracting great new clients to our business. So I said it's so like trifecta win because there's three amazing things that happen when you start doing charitable marketing. Number one, you're going to get goodwill towards your business because say you're partnering with a rescue and then that rescue is promoting you to all of their followers. Well, their followers love the rescue. And so therefore now that you're helping that rescue, they love you. So that goodwill carries over to your brand and to your brand awareness. Number two, it's a great avenue for getting PR. So it's a great way to get some news because advertising really doesn't work. So to pay for an ad in a magazine is usually money thrown down the drain. But if you had an article written about you in that magazine, that is incredible marketing mojo. So it's a great avenue for getting PR. It's actually like a quadruple benefit because the other benefit is you're going to be raising money for the charity that you're partnering with. That's always a good thing. And you're making new clients for your business, getting new sales for your business, bringing in cash. So all good things. And the timing has never been better for doing a charitable marketing promotion because a lot of these charities, especially the smaller ones, you know, maybe they don't have as many fundraising opportunities as they did. Uh, when I'm recording this right now, it is start date, the end of may 2020, where COVID 19 is still out there, but the things are starting to open up a little bit. So a lot of different rescues and a lot of different charities maybe weren't able to do their normal fundraising for the spring. Maybe they haven't been getting as many donations from their supporters because they're not sure about their job security or they haven't been able to be working. So now it's a great time to help them raise some money, and also fill up your books as you're able to start to return to work. So what do we have to do? How does this work? So the first thing we're going to want to do is we want to plan our promotion. Now here's an option. It's your first fork in the road of your charitable marketing plan. You can add a partner business if you want. It's not required. But if you're planning on working with a for-profit business, it's usually a good idea to make that decision a little bit earlier in the planning stages. Now there's some pros and cons. The pros, a partner business can be a great location to hold your sessions. If you want to do studio sessions and you don't have a studio, they can also promote your fundraiser to their client base and having additional businesses involved increases the PR value of the promotion. Now for the partner, they're going to be getting extra people into their place of business. Maybe if you're holding it at a doggy daycare, it's for their clients. So it's a great thing they're offering to their clients or if it's at a dog boutique or bakery, people are coming in, they're probably going to purchase some things while they're in there. If it's something like a brewery, they're going to come in, they're going to sit there, have a drink or a um, some food and while they get their dogs' pictures taken. So those are the good pros there. The cons might just be really that there's extra people involved. So sometimes it is a bit more challenging to make quick decisions or changes just because you have more parties involved and you do want to make sure that there is a benefit for that partner business, which I just talked about, some of those. So if you want to use a business, a partner business, by choosing them first, it can be a great way to open the door up to which charity you want to work with. Maybe they have a charity they already have a great relationship that you would like to work with as well, and they bring that relationship to the table and it's even easier to work with that charity. So I like to do, if I'm having a partner business involved, it's nice to kind of have that discussion with them about the charity. But you can also choose your charity first. There aren't any rules here. I'm just sharing what has worked best for me in the past. Okay, so plus or minus adding a partner business, not required, can do it if you want. One thing you do. What I definitely do when planning your promotion is choose the charity that you want to work with. So this is super fun. You get to choose who you want to help. Now a lot of times people see this and they think, Oh man, I've got to work with a larger charity. The smaller ones just don't have as many people on their lists. They won't fill up my special fundraiser. Well, that's hogwash. You can definitely work with larger charities, but I have found in my past experience that the smaller rescues or smaller charities are amazing because they are just, they're just all in. They might have a smaller audience, but their audience is often way more engaged and they're usually willing to go all in on your promotion because your potential donation makes a bigger difference to their bottom line than it does to a huge nonprofit that has a much larger budget and a long list of funding options. So don't overlook those smaller charities. Now, if you do want work with a larger charity, that's not a bad idea. I'm not saying don't work with larger charities. You certainly can, but I've found it's pretty important to have an existing relationship with those organizations so that they're more likely to promote you and more likely to really come to the table and help promote this fundraiser. All right, next up, we need to plan our offer details, so what do we want to offer? Again, this promotion can look how ever you wish. There is no right or wrong, but I do have a few tips on coming up with an offer that converts—an offer that people see and say, heck yeah, I'm jumping in. This is what I want. Number one, you want to keep the offer simple. Don't add lots of options. Don't make it confusing. Just keep it simple and straightforward. Number two, you want to bring the value, offer something better than if they were just to go to your website and contact you. Remember, we're adding value. We're not just discounting our prices. We're not just going on sale. We're adding value. Number three, you want to add some urgency. This offer should have a date that the offer expires or there's only a limited number available. They don't need to hold their session by the expiration date, but they need to book by then. And just a little PS. You want to make it really clear to them that they can hold their session any time or up to a certain date, but they just need to book by the expiration date. So many people get confused about that. Every time I do a promotion like this, somebody that's like, Oh man, I really want to do this, but I can't have the session before, you know, before next Tuesday. And to which I say, well yeah, I'm not shooting your session before next Tuesday. Um, so people just don't understand that. So you just have to be really careful how you word that and just make sure you tell them anywhere you're promoting it that you have to book by this date, but we could hold our session anytime in 2020 or any time until the fall. You know, whatever box you want to put that in, just let them know. All right, so for some offer suggestions, um, I have two suggestions. Really depending on if you have a reservation retainer that converts into a product credit or if you have a session fee. Really you just want to make it a little bit better than what you had before. So you can do that in a couple of different ways. You can make the session fee or reservation retainer less and have a product credit, or like for instance, the reservation retainer, maybe you double it. So if it's$299 reservation retainer, maybe with the special offer it's a$600 product credit and then that also comes with a$50 donation to the charity that you make. You could also lower that reservation retainer and keep your normal product credit. So a$99 reservation retainer with a$300 product credit and a$50 donation to the charity. Or maybe you do a$99 reservation retainer with a$99 product credit and a$50 donation to a charity. It really doesn't matter. Whatever feels right to you. I will say I want to caution you before you do option one. What's your doubling a big reservation retainer and giving away, you know,$300 for more of product. I want you to make sure that your prices are profitable. You want to have a cost of goods sold that is less than 25% and you want to have a good idea what your clients usually buy, what your average sale is, have a fairly repeatable average sale so that you know that your pre-session education is working so that way that you know that these sessions will be profitable even with that bigger discount built in. Now for photographers with a session fee, you can have that session fee include a product credit for you know, the special offer. You could have a discounted session fee with still a product credit or you can just have a discounted session fee with a donation to the charity. Really whatever feels right to you. Write down a couple of different options. Sleep on it, look at it the next day, and kind of feel what, see what feels right to you. And you can go with that. The moral of the story is you can make those numbers, whatever you want, just to make sure it's a better deal than what you usually offer. Alright, so we have our offer, we have our charity, we have a partner business, maybe. Now it's time to promote our event. So with this you're going to chat with the charity, you're going to chat with your partner business and find out how they want to promote the event. Of course, it's great to come to the table with some different ideas from social media, email campaigns. Um, if they have a newsletter, they can mention it in their newsletter. If they have an event, you can put a swag bag, little marketing piece in it. You can do marketing pieces in adoption kits or a press release. Oftentimes with the press release, the charity has a PR person. They have somebody that goes out to the press regularly. So you can write this PR, this press release, and then you can give it to them to review and edit and send out from their business, which has a better chance of getting picked up if you haven't yet made the connections with the local press in your area. So that's a great benefit of working with a charity. But whatever you want to do or whatever plan you move forward with, you want to make sure that you make it easy for your partner business and/or your charity to promote the event. So you want to create the social media captions. You want to create the different images, you want to share with them. an email campaign. Basically you want to write all the copy, have all the images, do all the hard work so that they can just say, Oh, great copy, paste, share. Then they're way more likely to be sharing your things because you've made it so easy for them. So definitely keep that in mind. Okay, last but not least, it's time to book our clients. So now we've been promoting the event. Hopefully we have some inquiries coming in. One mistake I see a lot of pet photographers making in this type of situation is they're trying to make every inquiry a booking. And quite frankly, that's just never a good idea unless you're um, more of a high-volume, low-cost photographer. If you're a low volume, high cost where people are going to be spending 1000 1500, 2000 or more dollars, most likely every inquiry that comes in is not going to be the right fit for this promotion. So if you're doing full sessions and you want to reach session averages that are on par with your regular averages, it is critical. I'll say this again, it is CRITICAL that you bring your inquiries through the same process as your regular sessions. This will mean that some people will choose not to participate it and that is okay. You remember, we don't want to book every single person for our full sessions. If that's happening, you should definitely be raising your prices. So this is another important little caveat for the booking process and that is please, please, please make sure that all inquiries, booking, payments, date selections are done through your business. Do not allow the charity to schedule book or educate your potential clients is this often results in miscommunications and then they also don't pre-qualify your client. So it's really, really important that you manage all of those details so that your client is set up for the most successful experience and you're also set up for the most successful experience with your client as well. All right, last but not least is time to start taking some payments. So we have clients that want to book and how do we manage payment? Well for me, I have them pay me directly and they go through that process, again, just like any other session booking. They do not make donations to the charity themselves. I have them just essentially book a session fee and it includes these extra things and then at the end of the promotion period, I see how many clients are booked. So I've figured out how much money I'm going to donate to the charity and I write one check to the charity. Um, it's all in as well for taxes, I then charge sales tax on my session fees just as I normally would for any regular sessions. So from the client's point of view, it's treated exactly like a regular session. For my accounting point of view, it's treated just like a regular session.. The only difference is I'm going to make a donation at the end of the process to the charity out of my business for whatever amount that we needed, depending on how many people booked the promotion. And it just works really well. There's definitely other ways to do it. This is how I do it and it works really, really well for me. So I hope you enjoyed this. If you have any questions about charitable marketing, I would love to chat with you about them. I would love to answer them for you. You can join us in the big Hair of the Dog podcast community Facebook group. If you go to hair of the dog academy.com/fb group, it'll take you to that group and you can ask any questions in there. Just go ahead and tag me in the group and I'll be sure to answer your questions. We'd love to have you in there. We also um, talk about charitable marketing a bit in the Academy and remember those marketing templates I talked about. Well, we're going to be adding some of the charitable marketing templates into the Academy as well as one of the templates so that you can take those, plop in your logo, plop in the charities logo, add your images and um, off you go to the races to promote your new charitable marketing experience. Thanks so much for joining me everybody. Until next week. Have a good one. Talk to you soon

Thanks for listening to this episode of Hair of the Dog podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review and while you're there, don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. One last thing. If you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our [email protected]. Thanks for being a part of this pet photography community.