Price, Quality or Value for Money

Thank you to everyone who answered my 3 questions yesterday on my little survey. Here’s the responses from the first question.

What is more important to your clients?

Price 18%
Quality 34%
Value for Money 48%

Keeping in mind this is from your perspective which may be different to what is important to your clients but it’s interesting to see what you thought was important to your clients.

48% saying that Value for Money was the most important. This is actually great as it’s something that can be easily addressed. 

Discounting sucks!

You can only go so far when you’re talking about discounting. We’ve seen it happen in our industry with the price of 6×4″ photo prints! Big boys doing them for 9c etc.

For you though as a photographer you wont stay in business long if you are trying to be the cheapest photographer in town. You’ll end up working like an animal for about $3/hour. Try paying your mortgage or rent on that one!

But, you need to work out a price for your services that is fair so you’re making a profit (some money). It’s not a crime to make a profit.

Infact it’s a crime to NOT make a profit. You’re not good to anyone if you’re losing money all the time working for free. Don’t feel guilty charging a fair price for your products & services.

Now that you’ve hopefully worked out a good price.

Add Value Don’t Discount!

Work on adding some extra value to that NOT discounting just add extra value.

What does that mean? Some examples of adding value could be

• Extra Prints, Canvas etc
• Print or Canvas Voucher
• Photo books (next size up for free) great way to add a bonus if you have a limited time special e.g. Buy now and get this free upgrade
• A Gift Certificate,
• A Gift Certificate to their Next Photo Shoot etc. etc. (you get the idea)

sit down and brain storm, I’m sure you’ll come up with a stack of different ways you can add value. They don’t have to ‘cost’ you alot but ideally will have a high perceived value to your client.

Anyway, that’s just some thoughts on that.

Feel free to leave a comment below particularly if you would like to share ANY ideas for Photographers to “ADD VALUE” without Discounting that would be AWESOME!!!