with Brian Evans
TIP #1
Build your banners and posters out to a 4:5 ratio first, regardless of the final cropped size. This will save you a ton of time and set you up for additional sales without having to rebuild. We even sell our travel baseball and softball banners in a 4:5 ratio. Just add or remove the sponsor logos from the bottom of the banner and your 8×10/5×7 print option is ready with no additional work. The same can be said for an individual senior banner for high schools that might be 2:3. Build it to a 4:5, crop it to a 2:3 for the stadium or gym and then you still have that 4:5 ratio you can sell in print format.
TIP #2
Have a sales option (online works for us) for those 4:5 banner/poster images you just built in Tip 1. We make a significant amount of money with schools where we are NOT the official school photographer by putting up senior banners and any team poster images (without the schedule and sponsors). We aren’t the official photographer for team and individual (T&I) for many of these schools, but having a sales plan straight to the parents allows us to generate more income on images we’re already being paid to create for the boosters or school for posters and senior banners. We generate approximately $15,000 in additional sales of prints, digitals, etc. over the course of the year in our schools—above and beyond what we charge for their posters and banners—and it requires very little work.
TIP #3
Know your value. Posters take a significant amount of time to create. Charge accordingly. We took it a step further and will not come out to our schools or teams for “posters only.” We require the team to do senior banners with us as well. We recognized a few years ago that teams were having a parent or even another photographer do their senior banners to save a few dollars, but would call us to create their posters. To combat this, if a team inquires about posters, we now require teams to do both posters and senior banners. We have gained more in adding on banner business than we have lost in teams that just wanted to do posters only.
My wife Beth and I own Game 7 Sports Photography in Columbus, Ohio, and have been in business for eight years photographing youth and high school sports. We built our business going after an untapped market in our area at the time, working with travel teams and high schools for senior banners and team schedule posters. We have many large leagues now with upwards of 1,000+ athletes and photograph 13,000 to 15,000 athletes annually.