Be a part of the exciting and profitable Photo Booth Rental Industry
It would not be an exaggeration to state that the photo booth industry is an industry that is worth being a part of. People who make up this field are passionate about entertainment and dedicate their efforts to spread true joy.
There are different types of service providers in the photo booth industry.
Exclusive Photo Booth Rentals – a host of employees and a bunch of photo booths typically make up a full time photo booth rental.
Photo Booth rental along with other event related products and services – On the other hand, there are event rental companies that provide photo booth services along with other kinds of services and products, including VR games and bounce houses. Then, there are other professionals who also offer photo booth services on the side, such as DJs and wedding photographers.
The Entrepreneurs/Startups – The startups which are often sole proprietorship firms who own 1 or 2 photobooths and offer exclusive photo booths rentals.
The exciting and profitable Photo Booth rental business
Feelings of nostalgia are often elicited by photos, particularly when there is sentimental value attributed to them. We often click pictures to capture important moments in our lives that hold significant value. To make these clicks exciting and fun, photo booths are slowly making their way into the range of services offered by event managers.
There is no better place to click pictures than occasions and events where loved ones gather to celebrate big moments. With photo booths and other props, gadgets, and cameras, event organizers are working on making your best moments perfectly memorable.
Where can Photo Booths be used effectively
Today, photo booths are an integral part of:
- Weddings
- Wedding Receptions
- Bar/Bat Mitzvahs
- Anniversary Parties
- Birthday Parties
- Company Parties
- Holiday Parties
- Corporate Events
- Brand Activations
- Corporate seminars
- Conferences
- Trade shows and conventions
- Fund raisers
- Festivals
- College Fests
- School Balls and Dances
- Nightclub Promotions
- Bachelor | Bachelorette Parties
- Childbirth
- Costume Parties
- Engagements
- Entertainment Premieres
- Firsts
- Graduations
- Housewarmings
- Mardi Gras
- New Job or Promotion
- Retirement
- Sweet 16s
- Thanksgiving
- And more…
Since they make each of these events more fun, creative, and exciting, they are always a hit with the attendees. Photo booths get creative juices flowing and make an event more interactive and fun, so your guests will never forget the experience.
The social media angle to garner maximum benefits from Photo Booths
To make the most of your photo booths, social media must be leveraged. When attendees and guests share the images captured at the photo booth across social media platforms, they function as crucial tools in experiential marketing.
In case you think you are cut out for this fun business, check out this comprehensive guide to get started.
The 7 step Photo Booth business guide
It is interesting to note that each of these professionals and companies imbibed the knowledge that this guide presents in order to include photo booth services under their umbrella of services. This guide addresses a simple yet intricate question – what are the steps that one must undertake to establish a successful photo booth business. Seven elaborate steps are presented based on our interactions with our customers who provided valuable information regarding their own experiences when they started out in this field. Through these interactions, we were privy to a myriad of stories about how they encountered a photo booth in an event and realized they could render the same profitable services.
Many companies who are looking to expand their services and offer something unique to their customers often turn to photo booths, due to the rising demand. In fact, a few people also began their own photo booth services as they were bored of their nine to five jobs and wanted to seek exciting changes.
STEP 1 – Get Professional – Create a Business Plan
Not everyone can be successful in a new business, particularly in niche fields such as the photo booth industry. However, if you possess adequate skills and the mettle to be an entrepreneur, starting a photo booth business is a great idea, since it is a revenue-generating field that is also fun. This article will delve into a few steps that you can undertake to start a successful photo booth business.
The Business Plan – please note that planning is crucial to start any business. Before launching your brand-new business, you must design a flawless business plan to generate the desired level of profits. It is important to verify that the business that you plan on starting is financially lucrative. What is particularly noteworthy is the fact that the range of incomes generated in the photo booth industry is vast, with a few companies making five figures, while other, more successful companies touch seven figures each year. But why is there such a huge gap and what factors contribute to it?
Firstly, you must forecast your potential profits. This can be estimated by comparing your expected income and your potential expenditure. To compute your expected income, multiply the number of expected events with the average rental price per event. This is a good indicator of the expected income.
For instance, let us say you charge $1200 per event and expect to render your services at 6 events a month. Then, you’d make $86,400 each year. Profits can be increased in two ways – either increase your charges or the number of events you service each month. For instance, if you start working 10 events a month while still charging the same amount, you will make $144,000 a year.
However, please note that the amount you charge cannot be random. You must provide more value each time you increase your rates. There are a few companies that charge just $500 per event while others may not be willing to work for anything under $2000. Both the companies have their own way of making profits since there is a huge market for photo booths. In fact, with each year, there is a significant increase in the demand that can be attributed to the rising number of events. Today, photo booths are in demand at new markets such as malls and restaurants that are looking to scale up their services.
In any industry, there are two types of consumers – those who look for the cheapest option and those seeking the best services. There are some consumers who choose the middle-ground as well. Before you launch your photo booth business, you must determine what kind of a company you hope to be.
While you can increase your revenue by charging more per event, we previously discussed increasing the number of events you service.
But how can you accomplish that? There are many factors that can help you increase your number of events each month, such as advertising, sales, pricing, number of photo booths, marketing, value proposition, an organized system to monitor your leads and customers, and so on. With an effective marketing strategy and a reasonable pricing system coupled with one photo booth, your bottom line will heavily rely on supply and demand. In case the demand is greater than your supply, which typically results in either overbooking or lack of availability of your booth, you can increase your rates or buy another booth to cater to the rising demand.
Finally, computing just the income will not paint an accurate picture of your profits. Your business plan must take into account your expenses as well, in order to compute your bottom line. Open a spreadsheet and note down the fixed costs associated with your business, such as average expense incurred for commute, annual LLC registration fee and state tax, storage costs, and so on.
When you begin working towards your new venture, you can cut costs in many ways. For instance, you can avoid costs associated with office space by setting up a home office. You can also store your equipment at your garage or storeroom, which will save warehouse expenses. Instead of recruiting an assistant, you can set up the booths on your own. In this way, you can save a lot of money initially. As you scale up, you can invest in building a team and renting office space.
STEP 2 – Photo Booth Advertising, Marketing and Promotion Strategy
Once you have created your business plan for your photo booth business, you need to develop your marketing strategy, provided you are satisfied with the amount of profit you hope to earn from this endeavour.
It is undoubtedly the most exciting stage of establishing your business. A number of tasks are involved, such as determining the identity of your brand, designing your website, implementing paid marketing strategies, SEO, and finally doing offline marketing.
A Unique Brand Name – The first step, however, is to pick a name for your photo booth business, which will serve as the primary identifier for your business. The name must be capable of evoking feelings of pride within you. In order to gauge how others perceive the name you choose, you should ask your friends and family for their opinion. As a final step, you should check if your chosen business name has a web domain available. Check domain name availability on websites such as www.godaddy.com or www.domain.com using their search engine. When it comes to standing out from your competition, a unique brand name is essential.
Brand Identity – Following that, you need to start creating your brand identity. The visual personality of your business includes various elements, like your business’s logo, colour palette, designs, fonts, and other elements found on your website and marketing materials. Finding a skilled designer is crucial to realising your brand identity vision. Freelance marketplaces such as www.fiverr.com or www.upwork.com are ideal to find skilled designers at affordable rates. Make sure your expenses spreadsheet includes design-related expenses.
Your Website – When you have envisioned your brand identity, it is time to put it into action. You can do this by creating a new website tailored to your business’s needs. To create your new photo booth website, you can turn to some resourceful websites, such as www.wix.com, which are equipped with the tools required to get your site up and running, even without extensive knowledge. If you possess the technical skills and expertise, you can always choose a more advanced site. WordPress is an excellent choice here. To create a professional website, you can also hire a web developer.
Or You could use readymade services from partyrentalwebsites.com who offer a full website along with hosting and search engine optimization. They will handle all of it at very affordable prices.
Search Engine Optimization – You can increase the chances of people finding your website when they search for products, services, or industry in general with the help of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. To rank high in the search results, this is a crucial factor to consider when building a website. If you lack adequate knowledge about SEO, it is best to hire an SEO expert.
Paid Advertising – The next step is to drive traffic to your photo booth business website once your SEO is done. Paid marketing can be done with several dedicated platforms, such as Google Ads. The cost per lead can increase if your website fails to convert prospects effectively or if your photo booth services are misrepresented. Your marketing budget can be determined for each of the platforms you choose for your campaign. After monitoring your results, you can adjust your budget accordingly.
Marketing at Events – Each event you attend can be used as a marketing tool, resulting in more leads and bookings. Make sure you have your business cards ready to provide your contact information to guests during each event. Take advantage of this enormous marketing opportunity.
When you are just starting out in your photo booth business, it is not a bad idea to provide free services to your friends and family. The events are ideal for engaging with potential prospects and spreading the word. Video content from these events can even be used for marketing purposes.
STEP 3 – Build Up Your Photo Booth Sales Skills
To help you get started, we’ve provided several tips in previous steps. The purpose of this step is to discuss sales skills. Being the first sales manager of a newly established business is an exciting and challenging experience. Booking as many events as possible will require communication, negotiation, and client account management.
To be a successful salesperson, it is important to identify your clients’ needs before recommending the package that is most appropriate for them. There may be a difference between the client’s stated needs and their actual needs. Identifying his values and dislikes and asking the right questions can help you find out what he needs.
In addition to providing insight into a client’s needs, these questions can also be used to determine which package is most effective. The following question would be an example: Where do you plan on getting married? According to the response, you will gain a good idea of the prospect’s budget. When their location is expensive, you need to provide them with good value to get them to spend a lot. Consider offering them more luxurious products and packages. Having the right questions at your disposal can increase the conversion rate between potential leads and booked events.
Communicating with prospects was emphasized in our previous article, since it affects the level of service prospects can expect from you. Be as prompt as possible in your response. Always stay professional and courteous. You should not be afraid to display your charm and personality. It is likely that you will hear many no’s, but don’t be discouraged. The first step to getting a yes is to filter through the nos.
Using 5% conversion rate as an example, let’s illustrate this point. It is quite good to have a conversion rate of 5% on average. It still means that only five prospects out of 100 you talk to will become your customers. The best way to improve your chances of success is to push for the yes, despite your willingness to accept the no. You should do everything you can to increase your conversion rate. A solid information system can help you increase conversion rates, as we discuss in the next article.
STEP 4 – Organize your Photo Booth Business Flow
In our previous step, we discussed how sales skills are key to converting leads into bookings. Yet, relying on them is not enough. To improve your conversion rates, you should add other valuable tools. To select the right system, it’s essential to understand your specific needs.
It is imperative to keep in touch with leads and follow up with them. Secondly, we want to make the process of booking events as easy as possible. Lastly, we need tools that can help us measure our results and understand what factors influence our conversion rates. In order for your new photo booth business to succeed, you need these utilities. The purpose of this step is to discuss them.
To put it another way, what are you looking for? You can close more deals by tracking prospects in your pipeline with a Customer Resource Management system. One of the advantages of the photo booth industry is that an event can be scheduled with just one phone call. The booking of some events can even be done automatically online. In light of this, we would not recommend HubSpot or Salesforce. Yet, BoothBook, Check Cherry, and other similar CRM systems allowing bookings from your website are recommended. These are industry-focused CRM systems.
Analyzing your results and determining where you rank on marketing and conversion rates can be achieved by monitoring your performance via your chosen system. Identifying the cause of a lost lead can prevent similar mistakes from happening again. Even so, information systems are not always necessary for photo booth businesses. Investing in an industry focus system is still a good idea, as it can increase your revenue.
Step 5 – Its All About $$$ – Pricing Your Photo Booth Services
You must now decide what price to charge. Getting that done requires going the whole way through. By using your value proposition as a basis, you can calculate your maximum income potential.
The only problem is finding it. Even if it isn’t an easy task, knowing where you want to go is the first step.
Take a look at a few examples. Consider company A and its highly sought-after product. Consider a scenario where they also provide additional value. Aside from their exceptional customer service, they also advertise effectively. The company’s marketing strategy targets corporations with high budgets that have a high net worth. Despite the fact that Company A charges $5,000 for its basic package per event, the company knows that the services it offers are well worth the cost. Because Company B does not understand or has no confidence in its value proposition, it is less confident about its services. This means that the company will set a number that is driven by price, rather than its value proposition. They will take on gigs that pay $500 each.
Companies A and B, in the same timeframe, booked 20 events and 200 events, respectively. When it comes to net profits, which company will be more profitable? You’re spot on. Despite booking only 20 events, company A had higher profits. How do you explain that? You incur expenses whenever you attend an event, such as gas, labor, print costs, maintenance, and even time. A high price point, according to our model, negatively impacts conversion rates, resulting in a 2% conversion rate for Company A, while 10% for Company B. The amount of leads needed to book 20 events for Company A will be 1,000, while the amount needed to book 200 events will be 2,000 for Company B.
For Company B to generate 2000 leads a year, they will have to raise their marketing budget, and they will have to spend significant time converting these leads. So, Company B ends up with a lower profit than Company A. Pricing follows the value proposition precisely for this reason. The lack of that knowledge makes it impossible to know where to set your price when you’re starting a photo booth business.
We’ll discuss two more aspects of pricing before moving on to the next step: creating different packages and if your pricing should be displayed on your website. When you break down your value proposition into different packages, you can make sure you don’t lose any money. By quoting $2,000 for a company that has a $10,000 budget who loves what you have to offer, you’d be wasting your potential.
Make more money by offering packages that include add-ons to elevate your customers’ events to a whole new level instead of charging $10,000.
Are you supposed to include your prices on your website? There is no direct answer to this question. The price on your website can help you to easily filter through non-relevant leads and focus on the ones you can convert if you receive large numbers of leads. By advertising the price, you promote fairness and transparency. If your offering is hard to explain, your value is unclear, and you’re not getting many leads, you might want to leave the price off your website and create a “Contact Us For Pricing” form instead.
STEP 6 – Your proposal – Why Customers will Choose You for their Photo Booth requirement?
When you provide value propositions for your services, prospects can learn how they can benefit from doing business with you and why they should choose you. Our goal in this step is to answer the question: what are the benefits you can provide to potential clients that might compel them to choose you over others?
It is very important to understand that different leads have different motivations or urgency. For some events, photo booths are non-negotiable. Then, you would encounter some prospects who consider a photo booth an optional addition. Some will be willing to pay more for your value propositions, while others may not comprehend the variations in your offerings. This step will explore a few practical tips to help you get started. The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the services you think your customers will be interested in. Curating pricing and packages will be possible once you have a clear understanding of everything you have at hand.
There are a number of things that customers may value. It is imperative to set a price that is fair. When your services are priced too low, they may be perceived as being of low value. A few prospects might walk away, while others might expect a significant return on investment (exemplary services at a low price). If you set your price too high, you may exclude too many prospects. Thus, it is important to maintain a proper balance between your price and the services you provide. If your product delivers an exceptional experience, many customers will be willing to pay more.
The attractiveness of a product is critical to its success. Visual appeal is important, but your product must also have a wow factor to make it attractive to prospects. Next, the importance of establishing personal connections with your clients cannot be overstated. During telephone conversations, your approach, professionalism, and charm may convince clients that you are the right person to hire. Your mission is to make them feel like they are in good hands and that you will provide excellent service to their guests at the event. Nothing beats the feeling of investing in someone whose skills you actually admire, as you can rest assured that the event will run seamlessly.
It is not uncommon for people to pay more for services provided by someone they like. Clients are willing to pay more for services if they trust the vendor to execute a flawless event.
A good example is your willingness to arrive early before the event begins. It is a good idea to arrive 90 minutes before the event, even if you only need 30 minutes to set up your photo booth. This will make your customer feel at ease and relieve him of unnecessary stress. Being ready to arrive earlier than others can also benefit you in negotiations.
You can also take advantage of your insurance volume. When you have a $1 million insurance policy, let corporate clients and venues know. Further, you can pacify your customer’s anxiety by elaborating on the stability, versatility, and features of your software. Thus, they know they are getting the best possible service. As you can see, there are a variety of ways to convince your prospects that you are the best choice.
A software package that delivers high-quality content, unique features, and flexibility in customizing workflows is a great asset to meet the unique needs of your clients. A simple statement such as “You can count on us,” rather than “I’m sorry, we can’t do it,” can make a huge difference. Your ability to offer flexibility in your services can also increase your bookings. When it comes to photo layouts and animations, games and workflows, booth wraps and roll ups, as well as other external products, you can provide branding and customization options to enhance the user experience. If you provide a wide range of customizations and branding options, you will have a better chance of providing more value.
Additionally, you could add fun props, special backdrops, scrapbooks, thumb drives that hold all the photos taken in the booth, green screen background removal, and videos taken of guests using the booth throughout the event, which would be a great tool for marketing purposes.
STEP 7 – Acquiring the Right Photo Booth Equipment
This last step is a great resource to understand how to scale up your business and double your revenue in the face of rising demand. What steps should you undertake? The obvious answer is to purchase more photo booths. It is crucial to select the perfect photo booth when launching your business. In fact, this choice often determines your pricing, value proposition, as well as the overall business plan.
This is a challenging decision to make as different booth families offer different types of photo booths. BoothKing’s range of Photo Booths has been witnessing a rise in demand among event organizers and brands. They offer modern booths of the highest quality, impressing the guests at various events.
Among the most popular and hot selling products are
360 Photo Booths (https://boothking.com/product-category/photo-booths/360-photo-booths/)
360 infinity Booths (https://boothking.com/product-category/photo-booths/360-infinity-booths/)
Mirror Photo Booths (https://boothking.com/product-category/photo-booths/mirror-photo-booths/)
Ipad Photo Booths (https://boothking.com/product-category/photo-booths/ipad-photo-booths/)
We also offer Photo Booth enclosures and Accessories
We hope this article was helpful to understand how to go about launching a successful photo booth business. Contact us if you are looking for more help or clarifications or require assistance while choosing a booth. We, at BoothKing, are always happy to help. You can get in touch with us by filling up the Contact Us form on our website: www.boothking.com. Somebody from our team will get back to you soon. We hope we have helped you in some way. Good luck!!
