Understanding The Senior Market By Jeff Smith Achievable Wealth

I have a unique perspective of the senior market, being that I contract high schools, as well as marketing/photographing seniors from every high school in my area. Before anyone starts with the “Contracting is Evil Thing” the high schools in my areas were contracted before I was born and no one ask my opinion about changing them, so I have to work within the structure that has been  SENIOR PORTRAIT PHOTO HANDBOOK ON AMAZON.COM

set. I know if contracting were ban, I would do the same number of seniors I currently do or even more.

I think the frustrating part of marketing for photographers is not completely understanding the seniors themselves and the market they make up. As all of us know the senior market has changed dramatically over the years. When I first started to specialize in seniors you could count on getting a certain number of responses with every mailer that was sent out. Today, most photographers admit terrible return rates with many photographers abandoning the mailer campaigns of the past completely.

While the numbers I am going to be talking about will vary by region and state they are a realistic view of the senior market. It is depressing, but fewer seniors today have an interest in senior portraits when compare to even ten years ago. On top of that you have a larger number of students that simply are not graduating or taking alternative classes to achieve a diploma.

To give you an idea of how many senior age people we are talking about, one of our high schools has 700 soon to be “seniors” in the Class Presentation at the end of that class’ junior year. Of those 700 juniors, only 520 have enough credits to be considered a “Senior” the following year. For simplicity let say that you have a high school that has 100 senior listed at the end of their junior year, when the list companies compile their lists for you to start using in April/May/June. Even in the best high schools at least 10-15% of juniors will not actually be seniors. This means that out of 100 seniors you are now down to between 80 and 85 actual seniors. To make the math easy we will use the lower number which probably the most accurate for most high schools.

Then there is the group of seniors that will either do no senior portraits at all or will do just the yearbook only session offered by the contracted studio and purchase nothing. This number is about 25% of the average class, so your 80 actual seniors just became 60 seniors. The next group is the seniors that will just buy their senior portraits at the contracted studio because it is easy and they don’t want to make a second appointment somewhere else. This is around 30% of those remaining 60 seniors. This reduces the actual number of possible seniors you can get into your studio to about 45 out of 100 give or take. This is why direct mail results typically suck! This is why so many photographers get so frustrated about the number of seniors they get from their local market.

One thing we have found that does help increase our response is ordering “Girl Only” lists. Most of the 55 out of 100 seniors that are not going to buy photographs from you, or any other photographer are senior guys. Guys are 4 times more likely to buy portraits from a yearbook only session than girls and of the girls that buy from the yearbooks sessions, over 2/3’s of them schedule a second appointment for less traditional senior portraits.

Marketing to seniors in general isn’t an easy thing. You have to remember yourself at that age. You had the attention span of a gnat. I have been told my photographs have been on a variety of displays, on TV and on the “Before movie ads” that run prior to the upcoming movie trailers before the movie starts and we never did any of them. Seniors saw photographs that impressed them and just associated me with images they liked. This is not to sound big-headed, I am sure that the same has happened to other local photographers when seniors see our displays. One of our theater displays is at the prime theater in the largest shopping area in our city and our studio is on a major road one block away and most senior don’t connect the name on the Display with the name on the studio building as they drive home.

It is said that you need at least 5 to 7 impressions on the average person before your name is recognized and the client will retain enough information to call when there is a need. I think the number for seniors would be more like 10 to 14 times. In all of your advertising you must constantly connect your displays they may have seen with your name and studio location for them to realize just who it is they are impressed with.

This is the same principle as using the “As Seen On TV” on products that may have been seen in an infomercial. It triggers the memory of those potential buyers that might have seen the product before. Our Portraits are on display at”, Our Studio is on the Corner of”, Crabtree High School’s Official Photography Studio” all help the very active, very forgetful seniors associate what they have seen of yours in the past, to you and your studio.

Let’s talk Viral! Viral marketing is now seen as “the way” in marketing to seniors. Facebook seems to be the social media site of choice for photographers marketing to seniors. The quality of seniors on Facebook makes it a viable marketing tool, but the total number of seniors that actually use Facebook is so incredibly low. During yearbook only Session Days our staff asks each senior if they are on Facebook, we will sometimes go an entire day without one senior using Facebook and we will often see up to 50 seniors in one day! If they are on Facebook we take extra poses of them and post one or two of their best images, so anyone on Facebook will quickly let us know.

Another problem with viral marketing is to do effectively it takes time. You can’t tell seniors you are having coffee or at the airport, They REALLY don’t care! Your posts must inform and engage them and most importantly show portraits of them or people they know. The senior market is very specific, they don’t want to see brides or babies, they don’t even want to see seniors they don’t know, they only want to see someone they know and that looks amazing. This means every model you select for a sample session must be on Facebook or they do you no good. You must also select well known people who are on Facebook. Cheerleaders and students in leadership go to camps and programs which are offered to different high schools, so seniors from different high schools becomes friends and extend your reach in displaying their portraits. We just did 5 senior girls, all from different high schools, all on Facebook and although they were selected randomly for a video project we are working on (and will be posting when it is complete) they all were friends and regularly did things together.

Viral marketing works, but you don’t reach all the potential seniors that want senior portraits taken, so it works best when used with other forms of advertising or as a part of your entire marketing plan.

Ambassadors or Studios Models are an old-school way of building a referral plan which has been used forever because, at the very least it provides you with seniors to use on your advertising and on Facebook. Seniors however are smart, a pretty girl that is popular and a cheerleader is approached by many photographers or photographer want’a’be’s about being their model. They all promise her portraits and goodies for being their model, so the young lady accepts all their invitations and shows up in several photographers advertisements.

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If you ask someone to be a model for a sample session or Ambassador type program, they must agree they will only work with your studio. For our Models Program, we take the images early in the year while they are still Juniors and the books, portraits, t-shirts and goodies are given out right after they begin their senior year. This way if we find a model is being less than honest about her modeling for other photographers, she doesn’t receive her rewards from the program.

I think the key to marketing to seniors is to be realistic about the true number of seniors that you even have a chance to photograph and don’t expect one avenue of advertising or marketing to bring you a flood of senior clients. Mailers stopped working effectively because too many photographers relied on mailers exclusively to bring in seniors. Seniors were flooded each week with mailers from every studio in their area and eventually they had little or no impact. I am sure the same thing will eventually happen to Facebook and even theater and mall displays as more and more photographers move their marketing efforts from mailers to other alternative means of advertising.

With seniors you must engage in as many ways to reach them as your marketing budget will allow and always make sure to tie all your advertising and marketing together, along with your name and location so each senior has at least a chance of knowing who’s portraits they are looking at and retaining your name so when the time comes they actually remember you. If all this seems hopeless it’s really not, every market changes in time and you must evolve as it does.