This week I had the chance to collaborate with David Hobrath, owner at Clear Choice Photo Booth. His company runs nationally with local teams in over 30 cities. Handling over 2,000 events per year, his company builds and sells photo booth systems to other photo booth companies across the globe including Canada, South America, Europe and Australia.

Branding

A brand is not just a product; it’s the overall experience of interacting with a business. Photo booths bring a brand to life. As the industry advances toward iPad booths, nicknamed by Dave as, “the Swiss army knife of booths,” the arsenal that comes with these photo-marketing tools has never been better. Photo booths offer the opportunity for a company to “wrap” their logo, name, features, etc. all over a booth. This helps engage the users before they even get a chance to play with it. The user then participates in the second layer of branding, the overlays and logos that are pasted onto every photo. These pictures are sent out, shared, liked, all across the globe, constantly being viewed by different faces and people. Do you want a gallery at your event? You got it! Software offers the option to slideshow your pictures all across your event, a constant engagement with your audience. A good brand will only ever be good, but a great brand will speak for itself.

Digital Content

A picture is worth a thousand words; post that picture to social media and suddenly that thousand turns into hundreds of thousands. Digital content is the wave of marketing, a platform that has neither boundaries nor ceilings. The photo booth simplifies that process to the max. With one click an image is sent to a user, then uploaded across multiple platforms. Suddenly, your company’s logo, name, and information are spread across the globe. The image can then be shared, re-tweeted, downloaded, liked, all without a single extra effort on your part. Your name is constantly plastered across multiple screens, the flexibility that arises from that gives you the creativity to separate yourself from other brands. A memorable image carves a much deeper impact than an ad placed at the bottom of a website. The photo booth gives you the parts and the user builds the car and drives your brand.

Audience Diversification

Social media is a web of interactions. Connect with one person and fifty more emerge because of that. With the increase of social interactions comes the increase in size of networks. Written contact books are a thing of the past, now a common user on Facebook will have over a thousand friends. “Posts find a way to get in front of people who have never heard of you, different people share with different networks, new networks lead to new faces,” Dave emphasizes. Think about that for a second. Shelly from Idaho shared a photo from your event, but her mom who lives in California just shared Shelly’s photo with her own friends, that’s a thousand impressions doubled just from one click. Two thousand people viewing a photo with your brand name and logo on it, that’s quite an impression!

Fun Approach

Today’s consumers are filled with more information than ever, after being bombarded with ad after ad the information begins to enter one ear and leave the other, hardly leaving a thought in the person’s mind. Photo booths break through that fog, the Trojan horse of marketing! Users take funny photos, shares them online, and before they know it, it has contributed to a marketing campaign that stretches infinitely across the globe. David says, “You want other people to be a social influencer for you because you are more likely to buy a product from a friend’s referral than from an ad you saw on your television.” The approach leads to a genuine share of your product, not a forced recommendation or a lousy review brought on by an incentive; a consumer who had fun interacting with your brand. “Think of a post as a positive review, the person is comfortable enough with your brand to have their name coincide with it,” Dave points out. A name is a lifetime brand that a person carries, for a brand to promote another brand? Priceless.

Simplicity

One of the hardest things about branding is the number of people it takes to manage the process. It takes work hours to put together articles, run social media pages, and be out promoting. Photo booths cut down on the people needed for that process to happen to virtually none. Based on preference, an owner can choose to have the booth run on a stand or have the iPad used by a freelance photographer, either way, usually one or two people are needed AT MOST. Today’s software allows for the owner to create their event on a website then run their event on a tablet, all they have to do it set up the event and run it! The simplicity gives ease to the owner and the employees, all the while allowing them to interact with their audience. Being able to focus on the consumer rather than the equipment allows for a better representation and better experience for the user and the business.

You are your brand. The saying resonates with the business owner and the consumer. There is no slowing down the information we receive, but there are ways to make it memorable. The photo booth provides the experience along with the information and the business with the pleasure. If a picture is worth a thousand words then let the photo booth be the author by writing a marketing masterpiece for your brand.