Referral programs are a great way to spread the news about your company! Word of mouth is one of the most popular forms of advertising and referral programs give your clients a reason to keep talking about your company long after their session is over. A lot of times, you will hear about referral programs for senior photographers, in the form of a senior rep program. But did you know, other photographers can apply this practice to their business, as well?

To set up this program, all you have todo is find some people who you can offer incentives to in exchange for promoting your business. Decide the terms and conditions of your program, find your reps, and that will get the ball rolling.

Portrait Rep Program

This kind of program will work with any type of portrait photographer, but I’m going to pretend like you’re a family photographer for this example. The first thing you need to do is find your reps, but what makes an ideal rep?

Let’s say you have a client named Pat. Pat loves having photos taken by you. I mean, this lady LOVES it. She books every session she can and brags all about you all over Facebook. She pretty much thinks you’re photog-client BFF’s. Everyone has a Pat in their business. Those are the ideal people to use as your reps. Find your Pats and send them an application to fill out.

In your application, you want to make sure to ask what activities the family is involved in. Your goal is to find families that are a part of everything under the sun. They could be involved in many things form baseball to swimming to church to yoga to volunteering within the community. Find out what the kids are involved in, what the husband is involved in. You want to find well-rounded, sociable people. These are the people who know a lot of people and already have a network set up. These are the people who will attract more clients to you.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we found a rep, Pat, who is involved in the PTA and is involved in a “Mommy and Me” class at her local Y. Her husband is a board member of her church and her kids are in just about every sport you can think of. Now imagine you take her family’s photos. You post one on Facebook and tag them. What do you think will happen next?

Well, I’ll tell you…everyone and his or her brother is going to swarm to that picture. They’ll like it, comment on it and probably click through to your page and check to see if there are more photos from the session or to see more of your work.

Then a few weeks later let’s say you offer a deal on mini sessions. Pat posts a quick status that says something like:

“Thank you so much for the feedback on our family pictures! We love them, too. [Your Studio] Photography does excellent work! We couldn’t be more thrilled with our photos! If you want your photos done too, she’s running a great deal right now on mini sessions. Check out her page for more info!” with a link to your page.

Your traffic is going to increase so much just by that one little status from a happy customer. She gives a personal review and lets her friends, family, co-workers and all her other Facebook followers know about your sale. This is a great way to sell without sounding like you’re trying to sell.

You need to find people who are going to get that type of response with their photos and who aren’t afraid to promote you on their page or to their friends and community. While you’re looking for reps, you also need to make sure that your application tells them to attach a recent and up-to-date photo of their whole family with the date it was taken. I would look for fashionable clients with a good sense of style and don’t need a lot of help with that aspect. You’re already going to be giving them so many incentives, you don’t want to have to help them figure out what to wear.

Remember: the type of person you choose for your rep is the type of person you’re going to attract to book with you. If you want more fashion-forward clients, you need to choose a representative who is fashion-forward. Because chances are, if they are into fashion, they will know other families that are also into fashion.

5 Incentives for Reps:

When you have a rep program, incentives are going to be what motivates your reps to promote your studio. Choosing incentives is going to vary from company to company. It all depends on your pricing and how you set up your sessions.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Free Session/Images:

This will be the main incentive because clients love you and want to book with you anyway. They will see this as a great opportunity to save money and still get amazing photos. You can still charge them for the prints and digital negatives if you want, but take the price of the session fee off. If you aren’t giving them negatives or prints for free, let them know this upfront that this only applies to the session fee. Ultimately, this is your preference.

2. Spotlight Blog Feature:

Everyone likes to be featured. It makes them feel special and gives them bragging rights among their friends and family.

Plug Their Business, Too – If their family owns a business, shop or something of the sort, offer to plug their company in an ad at the bottom of their featured blog post. This will give them more incentive because people will click to see their business. This is also another opportunity for you to have more traffic coming to your blog because they’ll send their friends over to your blog knowing the ad is there.

3. Free Products:

You can offer them holiday cards, a calendar, an album or some product for free after they hit so many PAID referrals.

4. Print/Album Credit:

Offer them print credits for each PAID referral. Make sure you notice the emphasis on that word “paid” there. Do not ever give them their incentive for a booking until their referral has paid in full.

5. Frequent Booking Incentive:

You can have a deal where if they book 10 clients with you that they get a free canvas or large print.

Run a contest among the reps:

Spark Their Competitive Side – Start a competition among your reps. Whichever rep books the most people by a certain date gets a Visa gift card or an Amazon gift card or some incentive that isn’t necessarily involved directly with your company. Or you can give them cash. You can say, “Whichever rep books the most people by the end of the month gets $50 cash.” Heck yes! Where do I sign up?!

Additional Incentives:

Provide Incentive For Your Rep’s Referrals – Give the referral client something free. This will be incentive for those people to book through your rep. They only get the incentive if they use your rep’s name or code. Your reps can then say something like…”Thinking about booking with [Your Studio Photography]? Did you know that if you book using my name, that you will not only receive great pictures, great service and a fun time, but you’ll also get a free 8×10, which is not included in a regular booking package? Tell them Pat sent you and they’ll add this on for FREE!”

Make sure you give your rep a code to use to get other people to book. This will help you track their referral credits and also it will help you see if your rep program is working correctly.

Remember, your incentives do not have to be anything big or spectacular. A free 5×7 or sheet of wallets is plenty of incentive for most clients. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something expensive.

Want the entire portrait rep bundle kit? We’ve included that in our 61 Contracts and Forms over on the BP4U store!