CASE STUDY

Kate Apker

Photographer Kate Apker was struggling to hit her monthly membership targets for her business katemaxstock.com. Kate supplies beautiful stock photography for online women entrepreneurs.

Kate hired us on so that she could focus on what she loves doing best – taking incredible photos!

She didn’t want to worry about ensuring she had enough sales every month or the details that go into advertising for photographers – that’s our job!

Since working together, every month she has consistently exceeded her sales goals.

“The instant that I started advertising with you I suddenly had so much more traffic to my website. There were so many more people opting in, so many more people engaging, more people signing up. It was just amazing.”

THE STRATEGY

Our first recommendation to Kate was to raise the price of her individual photos in order to incentivize the value of her membership site.

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One aspect of advertising for photographers is the element of genuine relationship building with your audience. So we also asked Kate to start blogging in order to develop a greater relationship with her potential and current clients.

In our first month together, we also decided to incentivize email subscribers who had been on Kate’s list for a long time but weren’t buying. (Psst. This strategy worked fantastically!)

Once those things were in place our strategy was two-fold:

Attracting new potential customers
Retargeting them to purchase memberships

“Before working with you, I was never quite sure whether my target clients were on Facebook and if they paid attention to ads.

Since working with you guys, you were able to give me the guidance I needed. To create ads that would engage, that would stalk those target clients and also proving those target clients are on there. And when one thing didn’t work quite as well as we thought it might – tweaking it, tweaking things around until it worked.”

ATTRACTING NEW CUSTOMERS

We began running a freebie to new audiences to attract new subscribers.

From there we needed to test a bunch of audiences.

The freebie featured her stunning photos – the kind of photos these women would drool over and desperately want.

At first, the costs were higher than industry average. We knew we had to test multiple targeting approaches to bring this cost down. We tried lookalike audiences and the cost per new customer plummeted.

“It has been amazing to see the increase in memberships. Getting my name out there has been so hard for so long and once I started working with your team it was instant! You knew what audiences to get in front of, you knew how to tweak the ad demographics, you knew how to do everything.”

RETARGETING

Once Kate’s potential customers saw her work and enjoyed a free sample, we knew they would become obsessed with her beautiful flat lays. This is when we followed up with the perfect ad. The ad encouraged them to become members to access her entire gallery and receive new photos every month!

Kate also made sure she was blogging and sending out newsletters. This gave her the opportunity to keep her photos front and centre in her potential customer’s minds. One of the benefits of advertising for photographers is that the visual content of their work is often more quickly and easily processed by our brains. So by adding her photography into newsletters and blogs, it was a great way for Kate to make sure both her work and her words stood out in her audience’s mind.

It’s peace of mind knowing that someone else has your back, is looking at the numbers and has the patience to strategize. Where as sometimes I have no patience to strategize or to try to tweak things around.

Marketing is a never ending to-do list. I feel like it’s a big segment of my business that I’ve been able to hand off to somebody that I trust and I feel like I can rest easy.

– Kate Apker

The Results

Kate effortlessly hits her membership goal every month and sees additional sales of individual photos.

2X + list size growth at roughly $1.22/lead

74% of her sales are generated from Facebook advertising while 26% come from Instagram

89% of her leads come from mobile (another reason to ensure your website works on mobile – if you haven’t already!)

The best part is Kate is able to focus on being a mother and photography! She doesn’t have to worry about ensuring she’s hitting all the details needed in advertising for photographers. She also doesn’t have to worry about generating enough traffic to meet her sales goals. Kate’s hired out her online advertising and it’s left her with peace of mind – and profit!