One of the most obvious scenarios for repeat business is from the ‘growing family.’ Once a client has bought from you before, it’s TEN times easier to sell to them the next time. When couples come to us for their wedding photography they usually do an engagement shoot which helps to make them familiar with us as a company and themselves being photographed. Cos let’s face it, some of us might go years without being photographed at a casual event, let alone a fancy professional shoot with a makeover in a studio!

After that, most wedding couples do move on to have children, and surprisingly quickly at that! So now that they’ve had their engagement and wedding photos with us, they know our prices, our work and how great we were with them on their wedding day. They feel comfortable and familiar with us. If a family comes to us with their first-born, they usually fall in love and buy everything – a collage for the wall, an album and heaps of prints to gift to family and friends.

When the second child comes along, they return to you because of a wonderful little thing called ‘fairness,’ and then have to get the same package they bought for their first child, with a few extras thrown in. Of course, now they’ll need photos of their two beautiful kids together! Each time it snowballs – imagine then the sale for the third child!

By planting the seed early, you could be capturing a family’s engagement, wedding, first-born, anniversary or just their growing family – pets included!

This is a brief from Julian’s marketing book ‘Portraits.’