Don't miss these key dates for glamour shoots!
Glamour. Every year Sal sees photographers miss key dates. They are not paying attention to their marketing calendar. Guess what’s coming up? Valentine’s day. Sal says it happens every year. Feb 1st comes around and photographers are like, “We should do something for Valentine’s Day.” This is because they start seeing boudoir pictures getting posted. They start seeing other photographers doing it, and then it’s Feb 1st, and it’s too fucking late. You missed it, right?
You’ve got to start planning now. The two money grabs for Fall are going to be families and glamour. You’ve got some opportunity there. It’s getting colder around the United States. You can do this indoors, smaller spaces. So start making a plan to take advantage of that.
Marketing for the holidays
Two huge holidays that are coming up are Christmas and Valentine’s Day. You can run a Black Friday Sale: “Give the gift of love,” “Get naughty,” “For his eyes only,” etc. These are campaign slogans that you can use to market to females. What guy is not going to want that? What girl who’s ready for this isn’t going to want to deliver that? But sometimes they don’t even know it’s an option until you have waited too long. Start planting that seed in Fall for Christmas and for Valentine’s Day. Give them time to get in shape if that’s something they want to aspire to.
Social media marketing for glamour
Facebook ads, they’re hard to do for Glamour because Facebook likes to block everything. Instagram likes to block everything. But there are ways to do it. You just got to pick the right pictures. You want to use these pictures and drive them to your landing page. On that landing page, Sal recommends having stills and slideshows. He would showcase a video of the experience. You can go off and do recognition marketing now, in Fall, to prepare for Christmas and Valentine’s Day.
Glamour vs. boudoir vs. beauty
Then there’s the back and forth, what do you call it? Do you call it glamor, beauty, or boudoir? Sal’s never been shy about it. He is not a fan of “boudoir” as a term. The reason is because of the emotion that the term “boudoir” evokes. He is not talking about the types of images. He is talking about what comes to someone’s head when they think about boudoir. When you think about boudoir, you think about women in lingerie laying on a bed or in a hotel, right? That’s usually the type of work Sal sees. He knows there’s fine art work and all that other stuff, but that’s what comes to his mind. He guarantees you that’s probably what comes to a majority of clients’ minds. Is that what you want? Because now you’ve narrowed your focus to people who are a certain age and have a certain confidence about their body. That’s the next issue that you’re going to face. If that’s your goal to narrow, then go for it. But you know what Sal doesn’t think about when he thinks about boudoir? He doesn’t think about that being a gift for his mother. That grosses him out, right? He doesn’t want to see his mom in lingerie on a bed. Think about that. All of you out there, think about your moms in lingerie. That’s gross, right? Ew. So, what he’d rather do is change the term.
Instead, if you changed this term to beauty, beauty now can encompass 20-year-olds to 80-year-olds. It opens up the range of clients when you use the word beauty to describe it. Beauty could now be lingerie. It could be full nude. It could be a beautiful top, right? Think about it. Sal has talked to a lot of people and reshaped a lot of businesses. And the move to beauty has not hurt any of them. So just keep that in mind.
Sal recommends go after this. There’s a huge opportunity for Christmas and Valentine’s day. You’ve just got to market it right and get ahead.
