Last June, I attended Mitch Graf’s Power Marketing Super Conference in Mt Hood, OR. This three day event is geared towards studio photographers who shoot high school seniors, weddings and families. It was 100% marketing in nature and packed with actionable ideas and best practices of some very successful photographers in the industry. The presentations included content such as top 10 promotions for high school seniors and how to build a referral program. There was also a great “Marketing Exchange” session where you had the ability to share and then take away marketing examples from all other conference attendees.

If you attended the PPS presentation during the summer workshops, I shared some of the ideas I heard about at this conference and got great feedback from CCS customers who planned to incorporate them into their studio business.

The dates for this year’s Power Marketing Super Conference are June 10-13, in Mt Hood, OR. Click here to read more about this conference.



Custom Cropping Now Available in the PPS Market

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The ability for online customers to custom crop on events in the PPS market is now available. Whether your PPS event images are from a wedding or other portrait event, this tool provides your online customers with the ability to completely customize their images by bringing the focus in on a particular image or completely shifting the focus by cropping out a subject or two.

Although this cropping ability is at no extra charge from CCS, you do have the ability to set up a retail fee in your event set up for customers utilizing this feature and gain additional revenue from your event.

If you add this ability to current events in PPS, this is a great “excuse” to send an email to those event email addresses giving them a new reason to view the event.

Business-to-Business Marketing: Christmas Style!
by Brian Speers

With Christmas—literally—80 days away, thoughts turn toward the corporate market and how you can best capitalize from all the Holiday parties that will be taking place in a relatively small amount of time. Holiday parties continue to be a staple of the Christmas season, and with Internet purchases growing stronger each year, you have the perfect vehicle to promote your business, reach out to the community, increase your visibility, and make some money along the way.

One of the slickest ways that I’ve heard of to promote your corporate services was accomplished several years ago at Candid Color Photography, the retail arm of CCS.

Their strategy could become a blueprint for your attempt at success in this market. Here’s what they did.

First, they purchased approximately 50 small gift bags from their local Walmart. Into the gift bag they then put the following:

    * Colored tissue paper as a base.
    * A letter introducing the company and explaining the products and services they could offer for
       their upcoming events.
    * Sample Party Pics® and prints with examples of posed corporate couples and fun party        candids with cool titles.
    * A koozie, or some other type of specialty item (perhaps even a company T-shirt), that has
       your company logo, address, website and phone number prominently displayed.
    * An inexpensive Christmas ornament
    * Candy – like Hershey Kisses in their red, green, and silver Christmas wrappings.
    * A business card with all the appropriate information
    * Maybe even a gift certificate to a movie theater; or Party Pics® gift certificates.
    * Then, it was all topped off with multi-colored confetti spread randomly in the bag.

After building these small but comprehensive bundles of Christmas joy, five employees were dispatched with 10 bags each to deliver one bag to each of 10 different businesses in the Oklahoma City area. The targeted companies were chosen based on the size of the company, and the number of employees. This information can be uncovered using your local Chamber of Commerce as a resource. Then, having no knowledge of whether or not the company even had a Christmas party the bags were delivered to the Human Resources head, or the person responsible for planning events.

The year this venture was executed resulted in the most corporate Christmas parties ever booked by CCP. Many of these same companies became annual repeat customers; not only for their Christmas party but also for company picnics in the summer and other company-related events like retirements, ground-breaking ceremonies, etc.

It’s a great opportunity to put YOUR best company image forward and to introduce your products and services to those who may be unaware of what you have to offer.

Give it a try. Really, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, especially for a very small investment!



February 26 and 27: Mark It Down!
We’re just a little more than four months removed from the beginning of the Candid Color Systems Winter Seminar. The 2007 version of this annual event will take place on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in tropical, yet cosmopolitan, Miami Beach. The dates for this year’s excursion are Monday and Tuesday, February 26-27 with optional training sessions scheduled for Sunday, February 25.

The setting for this extravaganza of information, technology, winter warmth, and entertaining evenings is the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach. Perfectly situated on the sugary, white sand beaches of the Sunshine State, the Eden Roc offers all the amenities you would expect from a first-rate beachfront hotel including an oceanfront spa, two oceanfront pools (an oxymoron, perhaps?), and oversized guest rooms and suites with ocean views. Room rates for this Floridian adventure are $169 per night; a reasonable rate considering we’ll be in Miami Beach at the height of the winter season.
Candid Color Systems customers and associates will gather to hear the latest sales and marketing success stories; discover what CCS has rising on the horizon relating to technology and equipment; and absorb the culture that is exclusively Miami Beach. Currently, the agenda for the meetings is under construction which gives you a perfect opportunity to tell us what YOU would like to see included at this upcoming convocation of thoughts and ideas.

If you’d like to participate in a topic, or would just like to make a suggestion for a topic please send those comments to Brian Speers or Dana Hill.

We look forward to a great turnout and a lot of FUN!



LabPrints-A Creative Tool to Manage Your Digital Workflow.

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by Evie Sibert

Candid Color Systems has been partnered with LabPrints in order to provide a tool for ordering, collage building and album design in the PPS market. This innovative software is not only user friendly, but it allows the photographer to have a more streamlined workflow with a creative edge.

LabPrints is a stand alone software package that assists in marketing, ordering, album designing, and is a presentation tool for professional photographers. From this piece of software you can: run slideshows for your customers, crop images, print thumbnails, invoice customers and design albums with seven leading album companies. This program also offers many retouching services such as basic retouching, extensive retouching, hair removal, glass glare removal and sharpening. Mounting and coating can also be added to an order.

Creative, multi-image collages are becoming increasingly popular, and photographers have the ability to command high prices for these. With LabPrints you have the ability to choose from a considerable amount of templates for collage building. Also, with this program you have the ability to add drop shadows, borders, fades, vignettes, change opacity, and add tints to images in your collages and composites. The lab individually color corrects every image that is used in the collage.

Support for LabPrints is provided by the Candid Color System’s Customer Support team. Also, there are many online video tutorials and manuals that provide instruction on ordering, collage building and album design. This is available through LabPrints on www.labprints.com.

A free 30 day trial version can be downloaded from this website. There is a one time fee of $149.00 for the collage/template designer and an additional one time fee of $149.00 for the album designer.

There is no charge for the ordering and workflow tool.
Once an account is opened through LabPrints, orders will be directly uploaded to the lab for processing.


Expand Your Product Offering with Custom Templates
by Danette Reinbold

Service times for the week of October 1-7
by Bo Lewis