As an event business, you want your customers to be pleased and perhaps even more importantly, become return customers who refer their friends and family to your business.
There are plenty of ways to provide great customer service, but it’s not always easy to keep your business at the front of your customer’s minds.
What if you could delight your customers, make it easy for them to share your business with their friends and family, and gain their repeat business over and over again — all with photos?
Waldo is a photo delivery platform that lets you manage, share, and brand your event photos super easily. Waldo utilizes facial recognition technology to match customers and guests to their photos, and then delivers their photos right to their mobile in near real-time. Get started here!
The importance of managing, sharing, and branding your photos
Photos are amazing assets for events to leverage and stay relevant in the minds of customers, prospects, and guests. They are easy to come by and greatly cherished.
If photo management, sharing, and branding are done right, an event business can truly grow and flourish with jaw-dropping ROI. On the other hand, lackluster photo management, sharing, and branding will result in many lost opportunities to grow your business and leave you terabytes of photos that will simply never be seen.
Photo management
Good photo management allows you to keep your photo assets organized and centralized. If your photo storage is a mess, you will simply struggle to accomplish anything with them — after all, how are you going to find the right photo for the right person if your photo storage resembles a mess?
Photo sharing
Photo sharing is crucial, and immensely impactful when done right. Photos taken of customers and guests need to be delivered to their hands as soon as possible to ensure a higher likelihood of them sharing the photos on their social media When that happens, you get free publicity and brand visibility!
Branding
This is where branding your photos come into play. If your photos are branded with your event’s brand filter and hash, your customers’ social media shares become that much more impactful — imagine having every eyeball that connects with your customers’ photo shares on social media land on your brand too. Your social impressions will be through the roof!
Addressing Hurdles
Smartphones: Good or bad?
Thanks to the popularity of smartphones, nearly everyone is walking around with a digital camera in their hands these days.
We’re no strangers to smartphones, that’s for sure — smartphones make it easy to snap some quick photos at just about any location, which are then immediately available to post to social media or text to a friend.
Convenient? Yes. Immersive? Not so much.
Many people enjoy the feeling of being able to unplug from their phone and truly soak in the experience of being present instead of viewing every experience through a screen.
From behind a phone, it’s easy to miss out on the whole picture — the one that engages all the senses.
That being said, most people still face an unsolved dilemma — they need photos, yet if the whole experience is focused on grabbing photos or videos of the event with their phone, then they miss out from engaging in the moment.
As a result, more and more people are looking for ways to authentically engage with a present experience — if your event can provide that for customers without compromising on photos, you’ve found a solid win.
Limitations of photo prints
When photos aren’t shared digitally with your customers in a timely manner, you lose an opportunity to leverage the excitement surrounding a current event and build more visibility for your business through online photo sharing.
In a social media driven world, the value of a photo has never been higher, but the half life is much shorter. If families are only able to buy printed versions of a couple of their photos that aren’t easily shared, the chance to utilize that photo to boost your business becomes a dead end.
What happens to the majority of the photos taken of your customers when they purchase or receive them?
They sit in the cloud somewhere or on hard drives, simply inaccessible to customers. In other words — wasted.
In a social media driven world, digital is king and the relevance of photos on social media is like the news cycle. Customers are very likely to post the day of their experience or even the next day, but they’re a lot less likely to post a week later. Businesses can harness the value of this if they have the tools to deliver photos in near real-time.
Storage and security
The other part of the problem is photo storage, organization, and security. With multiple photographers working together at once, many events have photos scattered around the cloud, hard drives, and SD cards.
Not everyone knows where their photos are, and nobody knows who’s adding what photos to each collection.
Event organizers need a central place to store their photos so that it’s easy to keep photos organized, curate them, and a secure system for maintaining control over publishing.
Social media impediments
Albeit being a very popular choice of social media for businesses, Facebook’s algorithm further impedes your business’ ability to use its photos for marketing.
Facebook has a biased algorithm toward business pages, and ends up blocking 90% of posts from making it to their followers’ feeds. All marketing attempts are falling short if only 10% of followers are seeing your business’ posts. When customers post their own photos directly to social media, it eliminates the ability for your business to implement any branding on these photos, meaning you won’t gain the full brand value possible with such posts. Your business also doesn’t control the quality of these photos.
How photos are currently being used by events — and why it leaves more to be desired
Photo booths
Events have long used photo booth sales to document the customer experience as they are a great keepsake for customers and guests. However, photo booths do not address modern problems:
- With social media at our fingertips in this digital age, customers have come to expect the immediate gratification of having photos on their mobile devices.
- As mentioned before — physical photo prints just don’t offer the same shareability that a digital copy can provide.
- When you rely on a photo booth, you can only provide one-dimensional photos of a specific backdrop, and lose all other opportunities to snap in-the-moment, candid memories that your guests and customers might cherish.
Social media shoutouts
It’s almost a given that any serious business in this modern day would have their own social media page, and they frequently post the photos taken of their customers onto their own page.
It sounds right at first, but businesses need to realize the caveats of social media being their only place where they share photos:
- Social media algorithms usually suppress the visibility of business posts.
- Customers and guests are usually not tagged or notified when their photos are posted.
- You simply cannot afford to post photos of every single customer — and every photo that is missed out is a lost opportunity.
Smart & simple solutions
To take full advantage of social media marketing, businesses must push their photo content out to their customers in a timely manner in order to get the exponential reach that individual sharing creates (versus the limited reach of a business page’s post).
Facial recognition
A photo solution that utilizes face-finding technology (like Waldo) will grant event organizers the ability to find and deliver photos of each customer automatically and individually.
With automated near real-time recognition, neither customers nor businesses have to dig through endless albums to find photos, resulting in huge time-savings and thus much more engagement with the photos — and a much higher likelihood of photos being shared on social.
Mobile photo delivery
As mentioned before, the option to buy a printed photo from a photo booth can limit the ability for that photo to work in a business’ favor beyond that single sale.
Implementing a mobile photo delivery solution via text or app alerts to customers and guests not only will delight them, but it will also increase the likelihood of their sharing it to social media, driving exponential reach and visibility for your event’s brand as well as for building a loyal fan base.
Photo crowdsourcing
The more content available to share, the better.
In this day and age, cameras are everywhere and events have never been better documented. Whether it is your on-site photographers or shutterbug guests, photos are taken by many in attendance at every event.
Creating a platform for all of these contributors to easily compile their content into one place can generate a rich collection of photos. To ensure minimal friction for contributors, the user experience must be designed to be friendly and easy to navigate. However, it is also important the platform allows for photo curation by the business prior to photos being published.
Integrated branding on photos
By leveraging technology, events can include their branding on all photos before they are published and delivered to customers. Branding photos with the event’s logo and using hashtags that point back to the organizer can drive massive engagement on social media.
As guests share their photos on social media, an army of unpaid influencers is created, bringing value and reach through organic sharing and interaction. Most of an event business’ customers are directly connected to future customers, and their positive posting of their experience will prove very influential.
Secure photo storage
Privacy concerns must be addressed through effective security measures. Event organizers must control who is able to view photos through secure access controls.
It is also important to protect any customers whose photos should not be published. Implementing a system which blocks images of customers who don’t wish to be published can help businesses reduce their liability and save countless hours.
Personalized direct mail
Personalization makes direct mail marketing a highly effective mode of getting a response from customers — studies have shown that people are 55% more likely to open and read direct mail that’s been customized for them. They are also 135% more likely to respond and take actions when their name is included on a piece of direct mail with full color.
With Waldograms, you can leverage Waldo’s AI-based photo tagging to create personalized direct mail featuring a photo of each customer, all within a few clicks. Select a photo for your recipient, customize a message, and even personalize the stamp with optional emoji. Stay connected with your customers on every occasion — birthdays, thank yous, holiday greetings, you name it!
As a result, your event business would experience these results:
- Fast, convenient photo sharing
- Delighted customers, increased fan base, and more easily attract new customers
- Turn current customers into unpaid influencers that amplify your brand on social media by 45x
- Centralized photo storage on a user-friendly platform
- Increase in the number of photos you can deliver to customers
- Improved security and control while reducing liability and respecting privacy
- Exponential marketing potential
- Easily personalize and bulk send direct mail that can increase return customers
How Waldo Fits into This Picture
Waldo is a photo-sharing app that makes it easy and fast for your customers and guests to receive photos snapped of them. Waldo uses face-finding technology to match photos taken of your guests, and delivers their photos to them in near real-time right to their mobile.
Using Waldo for your photos is as easy as this:
- You upload photos that you take of your customers and guests to Waldo. You can also invite contributors to add their photos to your Waldo galleries and albums.
- Recipients just have to download Waldo on their phone, upload a selfie, and Waldo will automatically text them any matched photos found — you can sit back and relax!
Waldo offers an array of features that make photo collecting, storing, curating, and sharing simple and secure for your business.
Facial recognition
Waldo provides secure technology that matches user-submitted selfies to photos in an album.
Mobile photo delivery with fun, friendly text alerts
Photos are delivered to each person in the photos, right on their mobile phones.
Boost photo sales
Sell more photo passes with mobile purchasing and near real-time delivery. Increase your print sales via easy in-app purchasing available from the day of, as well as long after their visit — not just at the photo booth on the way out.
Secure mobile photo proof delivery
Waldo’s proprietary FaceBlocker feature brings advanced copyright protection to mobile proofs. Say goodbye to screen captures and hello to mobile proof delivery that drives photos sales.
Waldograms for business
Upload your contacts via CSV and bulk send personalized Waldograms in a few simple clicks. Great for staying connected with customers. On top of that, you can enjoy a discounted commercial rate for your Waldograms. The more you
send, the less you spend!
Sharing & invites
Viewers can share their matched photos stream with up to 6 people viewable via the mobile app, with one tap posting to social.
Overlays & hashtags
Brand amplification with optional logo overlays to customize photos and auto-populated hashtags to increase virality.
Admin dashboard & tools
Enjoy powerful photo curating, analytics, and advanced security.
Available on all platforms
Waldo plays nice across devices and platforms, making it easy to view, download, and share pics from iOS, Android, or the web.
Summary
Photos are integral to visual storytelling — and thanks to the strong influence of social media, they are a powerful way to grow your brand when used strategically.
However, this can be a daunting task for any business.
Enlisting the help of a highly rated AI-powered photo-sharing platform like Waldo allows your business to better leverage your photographers and customers in generating photos.
On top of that, it ensures your photos are properly branded while keeping it easy for customers and guests to share their photos and strengthen your business’ branding in the process. It’s a win-win for both your customers and your marketing efforts!
