The Challenges Of Being A Photo Booth Operator Pt 2

What's the solution?

As an industry it is up to us to start providing more education and bringing it to the public's attention to better equip them to make informed choices about what is a good or suitable photo booth for their event and how to find truly professional operators to service them. There will always be people who only focus on price but most people who are shown or learn for themselves to understand the value behind a level of product or service will pay what it's worth to get that positive outcome especially when it's for something important to them like their Wedding. The trick is to do this right, "people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy", and therein lies the dilemma. It's no good every operator telling them their photo booth is the best and they offer the best service cause people see through this and ignore it as everyone is telling them the same thing. These value propositions need to come from an independent source, whether it be direct referral from past clients or venues etc. However that only addresses such a small percentage of an operators potential target market. My photo booth hire business was pretty successful and we still got less than 20% of our business from direct referrals. What about the remaining 80% of an operators target market? How are you going to successfully and cost effectively reach them?  

Photobooth Finder has been set up to deliver just that message to the masses. As an independent source of information we are the ultimate resource that the public can use to inform themselves about all things photo booth. We do this by giving the public and our member operators loads of useful content like our Photo Booth Guide and Blogs to use and share. We give them a great choice of operators. All operators on our site have had certain checks before being approved to list on our site. We ensure they are legitimate businesses and have provided truthful information about themselves. The platform has been designed to be more beneficial to good operators and weed out or highlight any bad apples in a number of ways. We have a client review system attached to each operators listing. All reviews are checked and approved before they go live. Any operator caught faking reviews or operators with continually poor reviews will be removed from site. We are creating a trusted network of photo booth operators which the public has access to via our free to use search, comparison and enquiry functionality. With this they can define exactly where and what style, price range and service criteria suitable operators should have. They are presented with matching search results and can compare and contact the ones they are most interested in. This is a user generated process ie no match making algorithms like other directories. Basically what this boils down to is the ability to funnel the public's interest into operator targeted qualified leads.

Wouldn't that increase competition?

It may seem counter intuitive but it actually reduces it. The first thing you need to appreciate is that your target market is only a tiny portion of the total number of people out there who are searching for a photo booth. According to google there are approx 20,000 photo booth related searches in Australia every month. When you pay for advertising whether it be SEO, SEM or Wedding and event directories you end up paying to attract people you are never going to book. They either aren't in your service area, aren't interested in your style of booths, your price range etc but you end up attracting them as those forms of advertising don't filter the non target market out. Your non target market are the majority of the ones that waste your time and leave you frustrated cause no matter what you do or say they simply won't book you! 

Photobooth Finder helps counteract this in two ways. Firstly we help the public understand which target market they are by giving them loads of resources and research materials to determine their needs. Secondly our Find a Photo Booth search function is like a google within google which filters and funnel this massive pool of potential into all the individual operator target markets (eg "Enclosed booth, Traditional, Gold Coast, $900" or "Open booth, Kiosk Melbourne, $500" etc). This allows your target market to find and contact you more easily, increasing your chance to get the booking, whilst reducing the number of other operators you have to compete against for the business!

Basically this means less time wasters and a greater return on investment for your advertising spend as you spend less to get more value. It also offers an alternative means to SEO, SEM and paid directories which can all be very expensive and low or slow to return the investment in them. A Photobooth Finder listing is 100% free and we only charge a few dollars for leads of which operators are under no obligation to buy. Photobooth Finder uses profits to further promote the site to reach and educate a wider audience which in turn generates more qualified leads for member operators.

What promises and guarantees do you give?

All our leads are 100% genuine guaranteed. Every lead has been generated by a genuine person using our site in their search for a suitable photo booth for their event. We offer a full refund or credit if any lead is found to be fake, duplicate or sent in error by the user to you.

CLICK HERE to find out more about listing your photo booth hire business on Photobooth Finder.

Who is Photobooth Finder and what's your motivation?

Photobooth Finder is predominantly me, Justin Jowett. I am from Brisbane and for nearly 5 years (2010 - 2014) I ran my own photo booth hire business and struggled with all the same frustrations and issues I am still hearing from operators today. When I started there were only 3 other photo booth hire operators in Brisbane and I always made sure to give awesome customer service at every step and we were the only one offering unattended automated traditional photo booths so it was so easy to get business.

In my first year I did nearly 60 hires and charged good money (average package price was $1100) but quickly the competition grew and I had to start dropping my prices to compete but my costs were going up. So I added 2 more booths and continued to adjust my prices and managed to continue to grow turnover and profit but it took a hell of lot more work to do it. In the meantime the competition had grown to 80! We were no longer the only operator with unattended booths and I was constantly being asked to discount my prices to match some of the inexperienced new competitors. The same competitors who were starting to give the industry a bad name by not looking after their clients and having low quality booths! Talk about frustrating!

It was around 2013 that I started to think how good it would be for those of us who were good operators if there was a proper comparison site to allow the public to truly understand how we were all different not only in prices and styles of booth but more importantly levels of customer service and quality of our booths. I wanted to create something that would not only benefit the public and the good operators but at the same time play a part in passively pushing out the bad eggs.

I believed so completely in the idea and how it would help the industry that in 2014 I sold my photo booth hire business which was quite successful (100+ hires a year, turnover of 90K) and bank rolled my plan. Photobooth Finder was born.

If you are one of the good photo booth operators who want to better reach your target market in a cost effective way whilst seeing positive changes to our industry then join me and help me shape a better industry for all of us who truly care about it.

CLICK HERE to find out more about listing your photo booth hire business on Photobooth Finder.

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(Photo Booth Blogger: Justin Jowett)