A good friend of mine is starting up a wedding photography service here in Singapore and she said she has good results from using Twitter for lead-generation of her services. About one of every five people who she cold-tweeted became her client. That’s 20% conversion rate, which is a pretty amazing feat.
Interestingly, she got more orders for pre-wedding photo shoots – not the wedding party. The biggest reason looks like the hotel or wedding organizer already has a photographer as part of the wedding package, but most overlooked the pre-wedding photos. That oversight allows her team of photographers and make-up artists to step in and fill the niche,
What she did to market her services in Twitter is to search for keywords like “wedding”, “marry”, “photo”, “pics”, and other keywords related to her business. She also limit the search result to Singapore since that’s where she base her services. When she finds people in Singapore who is looking for a photographer, she contacts them and further communication goes over the phone.
What she did is essentially finding people who cried out for help. They are looking for services that she’s offering and in a “ready to buy” mode. Thus when she contacts them its only a matter of technicalities whether she can get a sale.
You might think that approaching people individually on Twitter is not scalable and a mass-tweet will be more appropriate. Remember that wedding photography is a high-touch business. A typical session involves two photographers, a make up artist, and herself that acts as a coreographer and project manager to oversee the entire activity. You shouldn’t be surprised that she charges a fee equivalent of about two laptop computers for a photo shoot package. Thus it would be far-fetched if people in droves goes to her website and immediately orders a package on the spot. Even if that’s the case, she could be charging twice of what she’s charging now and will have even more budget for that high-touch sales processes.
I wonder if her sales strategy is also applicable to other businesses? That is whether her workflow of finding sales leads via Twitter can be successfully used outside the pre-wedding photography business. I’ve heard of an IP Telephony sales guy – works for either Avaya or Cisco – made a $200k sales this way, but there aren’t many other similar stories. Then again successful salespeople aren’t likely to talk about their strategies for fear of competition.
Have you tried this technique successfully? What’s your story? Can an application help streamline your lead-gen process? Based on my friend’s success story, we’re developing an application to help this workflow of finding sales leads on Twitter. We call this app Resonate. Let us know if you have a specific pain point that we can help solve with the app.