Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi all

Just wondering if anyone has ideas on how to market a new service to a market we`re unsure of, in terms of demand for our service?

What we do is take old photos (eg, wedding, holidays, family) people have lying around and organise it into personalized designer albums. We`re targeting busy women who don`t have time to organize their photos, but do appreciate designer photo albums. Our service produces these albums with a minimum of time and effort on their part.

There are scrapbooking services out there, but they are relatively expensive and full-blown scrapbooks take a fair bit of time to prepare for. Snapfish can organise your photos into albums, but they`re mainly for digital pics and there`s not that crafty feel with hand made albums (like scrapbooking).

Any ideas on getting the word out effectively without breaking the bank?

Thanks,
acedesigns

just thinking about how to get it out there in the market. if this is going to be in your local area, maybe you know someone that will host a party for you - if not, have a party yourself and invite as many people
as you can.
have some samples of the finished product to show. home parties are successful because they`re fun, a girl`s night out and people like to spend money for things they want esp something like personalized photo albums that they dont have the time to do themselves. other than that you could try listing (for free) on craigs.com (just select your state).
that is very very popular also. last thing is to put an ad in the local paper.
if it was me i would go with the party thing first. i used to make wedding accessories years ago and everyone loved what i made. all you need are a few satisfied customers and then its word of mouth.
let me know what you think. :)
jo in nj


-------------------------

Jo
NJ

Do you only deal with old photos or are you in the market to layout new photos for people as well?  If so, you may want to visit  local bridal shops, explain your service, and see if they will let you leave some brochures with samples and information.  Perhaps even create a few real "mock-up" examples with your contact information creatively displayed right in front of the album.  This will put the product right in the hands of potential customers (and especially with weddings, indulgence is the common theme!)

I completely agree with Jo that if you start getting some of these albums out there...word of mouth could keep you very busy.

-------------------------

Brian Cleveland,
Web Producer,
StartupNation

Here`s a few more ideas:

Local sports groups, likes those at the parks and rec, or even the local public school could be interested in memory books. Since your albums would be made by hand, and not in mass quanity like a school yearbook, each album could be crafted to emphasise an individual. Such as Jr`s first up at bat on the peewee league, etc. but also still have pictures and pages that are common to the whole team.

The same idea could be applied to ballet studios, girls and boys scouts, etc.

You probably already have pre-defined packages made up. I would create some flyers and distribute them to your target audiences. Offer a discount for multiple books. Three families. Five families. Ten families. You could find yourself quite busy!

Also, don`t sell yourself short on just limiting this to photos that are already printed and sitting in someone`s shoe box. Many moms and dads have digital cameras these days. And it is true, they could go to Snapfish or some other online service, but as you said, they are kind of bland. You could still offer to accept digital photographs, and have them printed to photo paper locally. You could even find a local processor that can offer you specialty papers or special finishes. Mom and dad can finally get those digital images printed, and placed in one of your fine hand crafted albums!

Don`t forget to set up and promote your website

Scott

Hi all

Its acedesigns here. I`m having problems logging in at home so I`ve had to create another profile...

Thanks heaps for all your fantastic responses and suggestions.

Jo - thanks for the party suggestion. Initially, we thought at parties people like to impulse buy, but I guess the main thing is getting across the idea and how it operates so they will be comfortable when they do want to put in an order. We could even start one-on-one with friends and then if they`re comfortable, ask them to get others involved. Or maybe doubling up with some other related party plan.

Brian - We are definately thinking of approaching some related organizations in the area eg restaurants, travel agencies, schools, and as you suggested bridal shops. Since these albums are handmade and time consuming, we have to be selective where we leave "actual" samples. But I`m sure it`d make a huge visual impact.

Scotty - thanks for all your ideas and tips. We do personalize the albums with the customers titles and journaling (text), but we have a number of standard designs we will be using throughout all the albums with different colors depending on the theme. This streamlines our production process and hopefully means scaling up the volume will be simpler down the track. We do accept digital photos. Though we thought with all these big players out there doing memory books, we wanted to focus on the key difference being that we can work with existing photos.

Thanks again for all your great suggestions. I got a fantastic surprise when I got home with all these great posts.

Andrew

Hey ace -

I think the party idea is interesting as well, but rather than diving directly into parties (which are usually focused on actually selling the product), you may want to organize a group together for a focus group (no sales efforts, purely market research). 

If it`s an unproven market, you can glean quite a bit about what kind of reception you might face by putting examples and prototypes in front of people in your target market, and soliciting their objective opinions of all aspects of your marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion).

-------------------------

chuck fuller

Thanks Chuck. Great suggestion. Never thought of doing a focus group especially for a low volume, home made (at this stage) product like ours. We just thought of putting it out there and seeing if it picks up traction or not. And because we`ve set an open for business date, I know a focus group will probably come back with useful suggestions which may delay the launch. But better to get it right now than annoying real customers with an inferior product.

We`re going through that issue now with our draft website. Some of our friends are reviewing it and they are a bit confused on what to actually do. So it looks like we may need to do a mini-overhaul of the site. Better to do it now than lose potential customers later right?

Chuck, any suggestions on how to do a focus group on the cheap? Maybe asking friends, or friends of friends who fit the target market and then giving them a gift for attending?

Hey ac - that`s a great way to approach the focus group; recruit the friends and family, and maybe even ask them to invite people who match up with your criteria.  Offering something for attendance is definitely a winner, and if it`s related to your product, all the better.  It sounds like you`ve already been doing informal market research, talking to people about the product, which I`d expect.  The focus group (for lack of a better word) just focuses those efforts on some specific questions, and having a group together, feeding off each other`s impressions and opinions, can help you pull out some really useful information.

So if you`re just pulling together folks for a get together (centering it around food, etc. is always a good bet, and there`s obviously ways to do that for cheap), it`s not going to be a very big expense.  Beyond that, your only other cost should be some materials to make it easy to gather the feedback - costs there would be some of your time to come up with a formalized worksheet to record answers to questions and gather opinions.  You want that to be standardized so that you can easily pull together all of the feedback at the end.

On your first point, might I suggest putting your draft website up for review by the community here?  That`s what it`s all about, leveraging this great group we`re putting together to help make everyone more successful, so I`m sure we could give you some good feedback.


-------------------------

chuck fuller

Thanks for your comments Chuck.

I`m just tweaking the site at the moment, so I might put it up and out there for comment (oohhh) when that`s done.

Would it be possible to market your business to an area maternity hospital? Your service sounds PERFECT for new mothers - they have lots of pictures and very little time. Maybe you could leave brochures at some OB/GYN offices? What about leaving brochures at local day care centers? Working moms would probably be a good target market for you.

-------------------------

Karen Scharf, Small Business Marketing Consultant