“They grow up so fast!” How many times have we heard that phrase? It’s spoken so often when we contemplate a child leaving one stage of development and entering the next. These stages are relatively short. Infancy: 0-12 months, toddler: 1-3 years old, childhood: 3-10 years old. All of a sudden they reach the ripe old age of 12 and you wonder where the time has gone.
My oldest is 12 (almost 13, yikes!) so I have experienced first-hand how “time flies” and the video below got me thinking about how quickly these stages pass. It highlights how important it is to document these stages; to capture the priceless images of a child’s journey from infancy to young adulthood. We all know how important our memories are, but none of us has that much space in our mental hard drive.
As you create and generate marketing pieces I think it’s important to stress to clients and prospects that they need to rely on professional documentation of their child at regular intervals. Whether monthly (nice during infancy), quarterly or semi-annually, parents should get into a schedule of appointments with a professional photographer to capture lasting images before the moment passes them by. They should approach this with the same discipline used when making appointments with their pediatrician.
I was thinking of other “Calls to Action” that might help frame the investment opportunity for the client or prospect. Create a schedule or booklet that prompts the parents to have the child’s portrait taken at scheduled intervals. Provide some type of marketing incentive on the 3rd or 4th session and possibly a canvas wrap or slideshow at the 6th or 7th session. You could also present them with a frame that has an age slot for each image, giving them greater incentive to get the family back into the studio.
Although this is a bit of a tangent, I thought it had enough relevance to include in this post. I was looking at PDN this morning at the lead article which was also about photographing kids. They listed 8 Tips for Getting Kid Photos That Look Real. In the intro, PDN reported that “The esthetics of kids photography is also evolving.” They went on to say “. . . clients are starting to test those boundaries by staging images less, and showing the physical and emotional messiness of kids’ lives a little more.” Here again is another angle when marketing to parents. It is fine and good for the parents to capture some images at home but if they want the essence of the child they need a professional photographer to create and shoot the moment.
Something that is obvious to us parents — in a good economy or bad, parents (especially those of newborns) spend money on their kids!
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