Being your own boss and running a successful photo booth business is a great way to earn extra income and create a profitable business that generates money for you year after year.
While photo booths have been around for a long time, in recent years they have become increasingly popular, and super easy to set up. Especially with high powered laptop computers and high resolution digital cameras, the technology has made it so you can have a working photo booth up and running for relatively low cost.
But building a reputable company and brand isn’t as easy as connecting your camera to a computer or tablet, it takes work, time, energy, and yes, even a little money to build and promote your growing business.
Whether you’re brand new to the boothing world and dipping your toes into the photo booth industry, or you’re a tried and true industry veteran who can tell the exposure and shutter settings of a photo just by looking at it… these photo booth marketing tips will surely help you supercharge your marketing.
1. Social Media Marketing Audit
Optimize your Social Media Profiles
Social media is the new internet. Everything happens online and this is where most people spend hours every day catching up with friends, family, and colleagues. Current social media platforms make it easier than ever to connect with your customer base and generate engagement and excitement for your brand.
Go through this quick social media marketing audit to make sure that your company profiles on every social network are set up properly to best showcase what it is that you do and who you serve.
Your photo booth business should have at least a profile if not an active presence on the following social networks:
- Linked In
- YouTube
Each social media profile name or handle should be the same, or as close to the same as possible. Your profile name should reflect your brand, and NOT try to be optimized for keywords.
Good Example Handle: “SillyHatPhotoBoothCo”
Bad Example Handle: “Best-photo-booth-ny”
Profile Picture: Make sure that your profile picture is the same on every social network. You want your brand to be consistent.
Advertising your photo booth on social media
Use all of the tools that the top social networks provide for advertising to get the most out of promoting your photo booth business.
Laser focus your target audiences based on region. For example, on Facebook, you can restrict your ads to show within a 20 mile radius of your place of business, so you are only paying for ads to people who can actually use your services.
You can run ads for special promotions to generate sales, or run ads to provide education and content on why it is important for your customers to have a photo booth at their event.
You can even target your ads to people who are recently engaged if you market your photo booth to weddings.
2. Optimize Your Website
Photo Booth SEO Checklist
When it comes to optimizing your website for SEO, there is a checklist of things to make sure you have on your photo booth business website.
Your website is one of the most important things you can have, as it is the virtual storefront that your customers will use to interact with you.
Be sure your website is hosted on a good CMS (content management system) like WordPress which provides many SEO optimizations by default.
Make sure every page on your site has your photo booth keywords in the <title> and <h1> tags on the page. Be sure to use your target keywords in your meta descriptions as well as that is what shows up in the Google search.
Sign up for an account with Ahrefs or SEMRush to get a complete SEO audit of your site.
Backlink building strategy for your website
Blogging is a great way to build and create content on your website, and a great backlink building strategy for photo booth companies is to network with other vendors at the events that you work.
Photographers will often blog their clients events, and if you reach out to the photographer at the wedding, they very likely will include a link to your website as the photo booth vendor on their blog post.
Reach out to venues in your area and ask if you can have your website listed on their website under the preferred vendor section. This is another great way to network and connect with local vendors as well as building good seo backlinks for your photo booth rental company.
Finally, include links to your website in your photo booth galleries. As you do events and create online galleries on Smug Mug, or Pixieset, each of those galleries is a page that can have a backlink to your websit.
3. Networking & Exposure Events
Another great way to market and promote your new photo booth business is by networking and working free (or reduced fee) exposure events.
Connect with a networking group like BNI and start to get to know other business owners in your area. Businesses have company or holiday parties that need photo booths.
Also reach out and network with other vendors in the wedding industry. Take a wedding planner or photographer out to lunch, and get to know them.
Selectively donating your services to an event is also a great way to generate business. Don’t just give your services away to anyone though.
Donating a free photo booth to a venue’s holiday party as a “thank you” for referring many clients to you throughout the year is a great way to build those networking relationships.
If you are looking for more ways to network and connect, check out Facebook for local business meetings, or consider joining NACE or ILEA.
4. Email Marketing
Email Marketing for Photo Booths is NOT Dead!
Many people claim (falsely) that email marketing is dead, but it is not!
Email marketing is still by far one of the best ways to market and promote your photo booth rental service.
The key to email marketing is to keep your emails relevant and engaging to your list.
Follow standard practices, and when someone unsubscribes, honor it and remove them from your list.
Building an email list
The first step to building an email list is to start collecting and keeping all of your contacts in one place. This is typically done inside a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) database, but you can also use a specific email marketing platform like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp.
When someone fills out a request form on your website, put them onto your email list as a lead.
Be sure to set up an autoresponder that will automatically reply back to them with your packages and pricing.
You can send out a monthly or weekly email newsletter to everyone on your list (leads and customers alike).
You can send out promotional emails to your customers offering them opportunities to upgrade and add on new services like a premium backdrop or props.
When you work a photo booth event, and the guests enter their email addresses and phone numbers to share the photos with others, you can put them onto a separate email list called “guests”, and send them an email autoresponder sequence giving them an opportunity to opt-in for a birthday club or other discount that you offer.
5. Communication
Ultimately, growing your company comes down to communication. How you connect on a human to human basis with your prospects, leads, and customers.
How you communicate early on gives them a feel for your customer service skills and what it might be like for them to book your photo booth.
Staying in good communication once they booked will give your customers confidence and excite them. You want your customers to be looking forward to having you at their event.
And finally, good communication after the event is critical to generating great reviews and testimonials that will drive more people to finding out about your services and hopefully booking you.
Under Promise, and Over Deliver
Be sure that when you are selling your photo booth services, that you are under promising and over delivering to your customers. This is one of the key things to providing stellar customer service.
When you over-deliver the value, and your customer gets way more than they paid for, you will have a loyal, raving fan for life.
