7 Surprising Reasons Builders Must Use Professional Photography
- Increase Sales & Conversion
A common problem we find with local Melbourne builders that we speak with on a daily basis is their ability to convert their existing quotes and also attract bigger projects than they currently do.
Supposedly according to recent new reports the building industry is starting to fire up a bit. That means now more than ever you will be quoting on jobs and the chances are that you will be spending a lot of time doing it. Converting this large effort on quoting into new builds for youself and your team is essential to the success and growth of your building company.
Not only should you be wanting to increase your conversion rate on your current quotes you have in the pipeline but you should be looking to take advantage of the increase of available work and attract bigger and much more profitable projects.
So your probably asking yourself, why and how can photography help you to achieve this goal. We all know the old cliché that a picture can tell a thousand words. This is true. The problem you have is explaining to your clients how good you and your services, quality etc are and convey this message effectively to the prospect and making them believe you. This is the million dollar answer. If only they knew what you knew about how happy and lucky they would be to use you.
The problem is you don’t know how to convery this message properly.
- Proof
Famous researcher and author on the topic of influence Robert Cialdini states the power of proof and social proof in order to win the trust and influence of your prospects.
Trying to tell your clients how good you are vs using pictures as proof pales in comparison of the power of using real proof to impress and press upon your client your credibility.
- Social Proof
Combining your pictues with the use of social media to gain access to the power of social proof is a hugely important strategy in your attraction and conversion sales strategies.
For example on Facebook simply by tagging your clients into the images of their newly built house will elicit comments of positive feedback comments about your services which you can document and use in your quote conversion sales process.
- Marketing Yourself On Social Media
There are many social media platforms that you can use to elicit such behaviour and get your services out virally to your clients and their friends and friends of friends. Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, twitter etc are all of great use in this area. You want to be whereever your clients are and where theyre friends are, so make sure to post of all the options you have and do you best to connect to your clients to show their house being built on all the platforms at once to cover all their friends.
- Marketing Yourself With Images On Your Website
Your website is a powerful marketing tool in your sales process and most of the time you have no idea what part it is playing for you. It usually all happens when your not around.
You can be rest assured every prospect you have dealt with is visiting your website and looking around your site. Theyre doing a background check and it is increasingly becoming a big part of what your client thinks of you. While this is a big topic in itself address elsewhere on our site. In short they are going in order to find proof that you can:
- a) do you what you say you do
- b) do what they want you to do
- c) do what they want you to do and do it well
- d) get proof from others that you can do what thy want you to do and do it well
Using professional photographs play a huge part in doing this for you needless to say and so its very important for you to build up a significant portfolio of photographic proof to show your prospects what you have done in the past, showing what your capable of doing, showing the quality of the workmanship on your projects.
It often mentioned to me by builders that they have decided not to photograph some of their projects because they didn’t like the color scheme’s their client chose for their house. For me, I might obviously be biased, but it seems pretty clear to me that this is a crazy decision to make simply for the one fact that your assuming your tastes are the tastes of your prospect. Even though your customer just proved to have a taste very different to yours. Who is to say your next prospect wont also have a taste different to yours an hence be attracted to what your past cliets just chose?
- Brand & 7. Setting Your Standards
The problem for many residential builders out there, they don’t put a lot of weight into the power of creating a stong brand. They see it as getting a logo and that’s about it, but in my opinion setting your brand is not just about getting up your logo onto your website and your cars. It is far more than that.
Your brand is about setting your standards at a level of quality in accordance with the level of quality of clients that you want to attract.
For example if the standard you have set for youself is having a shitty $300 template website that looks like its come from the 90’s with photographs that you have taken yourself then quite simply your setting yourself up for attracting smaller projects and to be constantly competing on price. Because that is the standard your clients are expeciting from you.
Therefore its very important to realise that you need to set your standards much higher than this, to attract prospects that expect quality and are willing to pay for it. One good way to do this is with professionally photographed and re-touched images of all of your projects.
Images that will wow your prospects and sets your standard into the highest bracket you can afford.
Conclusion
Combining the power of professional photographed images of your projects to accompany the strength of your brand is a no brainer. But when you combine this with your sales and conversion process and your quotes to increase your credibility and proof plus also social proof to your clients your on a winning combination to earn the respect of your prospects and separate yourself competing on price with your competitors.
As I’ve said in previous articles, your prospects are often making the decision to build with you or not prior to them even meeting you, and potentially even during the hours you spending to quote on projects. Why waste all your time on quoting projects you were never going to win in the first place because you brand and the images your using has already made the decision up for you prospect that they’ll likely not use you. Simply because the impression you’ve made early on during “the time when you need to prove yourself” has already taken you out of the race.
Don’t make this mistake! Make sure you put a good emphasise on every aspect of your brand, website and the photographs you use to set the standards for yourself and attract the projects you deserve to be building.
